3
Well, the first thing I did when I got to Elis was to take a turn in the gymnasium, listening the while to the discordant yells of some Cynic or other;—the usual platitudes, you know; —ringing commendations of Virtue—indiscriminate slaughter of characters—finally, a peroration on the subject of Proteus. I must try and give you the exact words, as far as I can remember them; you will recognize the true Cynic yell, I’ll be bound; you have heard it before.
4
‘Proteus,’ he cried, ‘Proteus vain-glorious? Who dares name the word? Earth! Sun! Seas! Rivers! God of our fathers, Heracles! Was it for this that he suffered bondage in Syria? that he forgave his country a debt of a million odd? that he was cast out of Rome,—he whose brilliance exceeds the Sun, fit rival of the Lord of Olympus? ”Tis his good will to depart from life by fire, and they call it vain-glory!_ What other end had Heracles? Twas the thunderbolt, methinks, that slew Asclepius, DionysusThe allusion to Dionysus is unexplained. The Greek requires a fiery death, not the fiery birth, for which see Dionysus and Semele in Notes.? 'Twas in the crater that Empedocles sought death?’
5
Theagenes (our friend with the lungs) had got thus far, when I asked one of the bystanders what all this meant about ‘fire,’ and what Heracles and Empedocles had got to do with Proteus?—‘Proteus,’ he replied, ‘will shortly cremate himself, at the Olympic games.’—'But how,’ I asked, ‘and why?’ He did his best to explain, but the Cynic went on .awling, and it was quite out of the question to attend to anything else. I waited on to the end. It was one torrent of wild fanegyric on Proteus. The sage of Sinope, Antisthenes his master,—nay, Socrates himself—none of them were so much as to be compared with him. Zeus was invited to contend for the preeminence. Subsequently however it seemed advisable to leave the two on some sort of equality.
