himself to Polemo because of his freedom from arrogance, so that it is reported that he said to him, “I am not ignorant, O Zeno, that you slip into the garden-door and steal my doctrines, and then clothe them in a Phœnician dress.” When a dialectician once showed him seven species of dialectic argument in the mowing argument,1 he asked him how much he charged for them, and when he said “A hundred drachmas,” he gave him two hundred, so exceedingly devoted was he to learning.
XXI. They say too, that he was the first who ever employed the word duty (καθῆκον), and who wrote a treatise on the subject. And that he altered the lines of Hesiod thus:—
For he said that that man who had the capacity to give a proper hearing to what was said, and to avail himself of it, was superior to him who comprehended everything by his own intellect; for that the one had only comprehension, but the one who took good advice had action also.
XXII. When he was asked why he, who was generally austere, relaxed at a dinner party, he said, “Lupins too are bitter, but when they are soaked they become sweet.” And Hecaton, in the second book of his Apophthegms, says, that in entertainments of that kind, he used to indulge himself freely. And he used to say that it was better to trip with the feet, than with the tongue. And that goodness was attained by little and little, but was not itself a small thing. Some authors, however, attribute this saying to Socrates.
XXIII. He was a person of great powers of abstinence and endurance; and of very simple habits, living on food which required no fire to dress it, and wearing a thin cloak, so that it was said of him:—
XXIV. And the comic poets, without intending it, praise him in their very attempts to turn him into ridicule. Philemon speaks thus of him in his