Kitap 6
2.57
On coming to Myndus and finding the gates large, though the city itself was very small, he cried, Men of Myndus, bar your gates, lest the city should run away. Seeing a man who had been caught stealing purple, he said: Fast gripped by purple death and forceful fate.Il. v. 83. When Craterus wanted him to come and visit him, No, he replied, I would rather live on a few grains of salt at Athens than enjoy sumptuous fare at Craterus’s table. He went up to Anaximenes the rhetorician, who was fat, and said, Let us beggars have something of your paunch; it will be a relief to you, and we shall get advantage. And when the same man was discoursing, Diogenes distracted his audience by producing some salt fish. This annoyed the lecturer, and Diogenes said, An obol’s worth of salt fish has broken up Anaximenes’ lecture-class.
2.58
Being reproached for eating in the market-place, Well, it was in the market-place, he said, that I felt hungry. Some authors affirm that the following also belongs to him: that Plato saw him washing lettuces, came up to him and quietly said to him, Had you paid court to Dionysius, you wouldn’t now be washing lettuces, and that he with equal calmness made answer, If you had washed lettuces, you wouldn’t have paid court to Dionysius. When some one said, Most people laugh at you, his reply was, And so very likely do the asses at them; but as they don’t care for the asses, so neither do I care for them. One day observing a youth studying philosophy, he said, Well done, Philosophy, that thou divertest admirers of bodily charms to the real beauty of the soul.
