Page:The Deipnosophists (Volume 3).djvu/167

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FAULTS OF PHILOSOPHERS. against the judges who were given him by lot, discoursing of justice to them when they were a pack of most corrupt men. And it is owing to this, too, that Theodorus the Atheist was put to death, and that Diagoras was banished; and this latter, sailing away when he was banished, was wrecked. But Theotimus, who wrote the books against Epicurus, was accused by Zeno the Epicurean, and put to death; as is related by Demetrius the Magnesian, in his treatise on People and Things which go by the same Name.

93. And, in short, according to Clearchus the Solensian, you do not adopt a manly system of life, but you do really aim at a system which might become a dog; but although this animal has four excellent qualities, you select none but the worst of his qualities for your imitation. For a dog is a wonderful animal as to his power of smelling and of distinguishing what belongs to his own family and what does not; and the way in which he associates with man, and the manner in which he watches over and protects the houses of all those who are kind to him, is extraordinary. But you who imitate the dogs, do neither of these things. For you do not associate with men, nor do you distinguish between those with whom you are acquainted; and being very deficient in sensibility, you live in an indolent and indifferent manner. But while the dog is also a snarling and greedy animal, and also hard in his way of living, and naked; these habits of his you practise, being abusive and gluttonous, and, besides all this, living without a home or a hearth. The result of all which circumstances is, that you are destitute of virtue, and quite unserviceable for any useful purpose in life. For there is nothing less philosophical than those persons who are called philosophers. For whoever supposed that Æschines, the pupil of Socrates, would have been such a man in his manners as Lysias the orator, in his speeches on the Contracts, represents him to have been; when, out of the dialogues which are extant, and generally represented to be his work, we are inclined to admire him as an equitable and moderate man? unless, indeed, those writings are in reality the work of the wise Socrates, and were given to Æschines by Xanthippe, the wife of Socrates, after his death, which Idomeneus asserts to be the case.

94. But Lysias, in the oration which bears this title—*