Page:Lucian, Vol 3.djvu/205

But why do I talk to you of Orpheus and Neanthus, when even in our own time there was and still is, I think, a man who paid three thousand drachmas for the earthenware lamp of Epictetus the Stoic? He thought, I suppose, that if he should read by that lamp at night, he would forthwith acquire the wisdom of Epictetus in his dreams and would be just like that marvellous old man. And only a day or two ago another man paid a talent for the staff which Proteus the Cynic laid aside before leaping into the fire;^[1] and he keeps this treasure and displays it just as the Tegeans do the skin of the Calydonian boar, the Thebans the bones of Geryon, and the Memphites the tresses of Isis. Yet the original owner of this marvellous possession surpassed even you yourself in ignorance and indecency. You see what a wretched state the collector is in: in all conscience he needs a staff—on his pate.

They say that Dionysius^[2] used to write tragedy in a very feeble and ridiculous style, so that Philoxenus^[3] was often thrown into the quarries on account of it, not being able to control his laughter. Well, when he discovered that he was being laughed at, he took great pains to procure the wax-tablets on which Aeschylus used to write, thinking that he too would be inspired and possessed with divine frenzy in virtue of the tablets. But for all that, what he wrote on those very tablets was far more ridiculous than what he had written before: for example,