His constitution was so vigorous, that he could easily go without his dinner. And they say, that once when he saw Arcesilaus passing through the forum of the Cercopes, he said, “What are you doing here, where we freemen are?” And he used constantly to quote to those who invoked the testimony of their intellects to judge of the senses:—
Attagas and Numenius are met.[137]
And this jesting manner was habitual with him. Accordingly he once said to a man, who was surprised at everything, “Why do you not wonder that we three men have only four eyes between us?” for he himself had only one eye, no more had Dioscorides, his pupil; but the man to whom he was speaking had his sight unimpaired. On another occasion, he was asked by Arcesilaus, why he had come from Thebes, and he said, “To laugh at you all when I see you face to face.” But though he attacked Arcesilaus in his Silli, he has praised him in the book entitled the Funeral Banquet of Arcesilaus.
VII. He had no successor, as Menodotus tells us; but his school ceased, till Ptolemy the Cyrenean re-established it. According to the account given to us by Hippobotus and Sotion, he had as pupils, Dioscorides of Cyprus, and Nicolochus of Rhodes, and Euphranor of Seleucia, and Praylus of the Troas, who was a man of such constancy of mind that, as Phylarchus relates in his History, he allowed himself to be punished as a traitor wholly undeservedly, not uttering one word of complaint against his fellow citizens; and Euphranor had for his pupil, Eubulus, of Alexandria, who was the master of Ptolemy, who was the master of Sarpedon and Heraclides. And Heraclides was the master of Ænesidemus, of Cnossus, who wrote eight books of Pyrrhonean discourses; he was also the master of Zeuxippus Polites, who was the master of Zeuxis Goniopus, who was the master of Antiochus, of Laodicea, in Lycia. Antiochus again, was the master of Menodotus, of Nicomedia, a skilful physician, and of Theodas, of Laodicea; and Menodotus was the master of Herodotus, of Tarsus, the son of Arieus; Herodotus was the master of Sextus Empiricus, who left ten books of Sceptic Maxims, and other excellent works; and Sextus was the master of Saturninus Cythenas, who was also an empiric.
BOOK X.
LIFE OF EPICURUS.
I. Epicurus was an Athenian, and the son of Neocles and Chærestrate, of the burgh of Gargettus, and of the family of the Philaidæ, as Metrodorus tells us in his treatise on Nobility of Birth. Some writers, and among them Heraclides, in his Abridgment of Sotion, say, that as the Athenians had colonised Samos, he was brought up there, and came to Athens in his eighteenth year, while Xenocrates was president of the Academy, and Aristotle at Chalcis. But after the death of Alexander, the Macedonian, when the Athenians were driven out of Samos by Perdiccas, Epicurus went to Colophon to his father.
II. And when he had spent some time there, and collected some disciples, he again returned to Athens, in the time of Anaxicrates, and for some time studied philosophy, mingling with the rest of the philosophers; but subsequently, he some how or other established the school which was called after his name; and he used to say, that he began to study philosophy, when he was fourteen years of age; but Apollodorus, the Epicurean, in the first book of his account of the life of Epicurus, says, that he came to the study of philosophy, having conceived a great contempt for the grammarians, because they could not explain to him the statements in Hesiod respecting Chaos.