Book 10
1.2
For some time he stayed there and gathered disciples, but returned to Athens in the archonship of Anaxicrates.307-306 b.c. And for a while, it is said, he prosecuted his studies in common with the other philosophers, but afterwards put forward independent views by the foundation of the school called after him. He says himself that he first came into contact with philosophy at the age of fourteen. Apollodorus the Epicurean, in the first book of his Life of Epicurus, says that he turned to philosophy in disgust at the schoolmasters who could not tell him the meaning of chaos in Hesiod.Cf. Sext. Emp. Adv. math. x. 18, where the story is well told. According to Hermippus, however, he started as a schoolmaster, but on coming across the works of Democritus turned eagerly to philosophy.
1.3
Hence the point of Timon’s allusionFr. 51 D. in the lines: Again there is the latest and most shameless of the physicists, the schoolmaster’s sonThe meaning is: a schoolmaster like his father before him. Cf. Dem. De cor.§ 258 ἅμα τῷ πατρὶ πρὸς τῷ διδασκαλεί ῳ προσεδρεύων. From Aristophanes, Acharn. 595-7, it seems that patronymics were used of persons engaged in hereditary occupations. from Samos, himself the most uneducated of mortals.
