32
“Come now,” said Arignotus, “if you put no trust either in me or in Deinomachus or Cleodemus here or in Eucrates himself, tell whom you consider more trustworthy in such matters that maintains the opposite view to ours.” A very wonderful man,” said I, “that Democritus who came from Abdera, who surely was thoroughly convinced that nothing of this kind can exist. He shut himself up in a tomb outside the gates, and constantly wrote and composed there by night and by day. Some of the young fellows, wishing to annoy and alarm him, dressed themselves up like dead men in black robes and masks patterned after skulls, encircled him and danced round and round, in quick time, leaping into the air. Yet he neither feared their travesty nor looked up at them at all, but as he wrote said: ‘Stop your foolery!’ So firmly did he believe that souls are nothing after they have gone out of their bodies.”
32
“That,” said Eucrates, “amounts to your saying that Democritus, too, was a foolish man, if he really thought so.
33
But I will tell you another incident derived from my own experience, not from hearsay. Perhaps even you, Tychiades, when you have heard it, may be convinced of the truth of the story.
33
“When I was living in Egypt during my youth (my father had sent me travelling for the purpose of completing my education), I took it into my head to sail up to Koptos and go from there to the statue of Memnon in order to hear it sound that marvellous salutation to the rising sun. Well, what I heard from it was not a meaningless voice, as in the general experience of common people; Memnon himself actually opened his mouth and delivered me an oracle in seven verses, and if it were not too much of a digression, I would have repeated the very verses for you.
