Book 5
2.40
To some one who never opened his lips at a banquet he remarked: Yours is a wise course for an ignoramus, but in an educated man it is sheer folly. He used constantly to say that in our expenditure the item that costs most is time.
2.40
He died at the age of eighty-five, not long after he had relinquished his labours. My verses upon him are theseAnth. Pal vii. 110.: Not in vain was the word spoken to one of human kind, Slacken the bow of wisdom and it breaks. Of a truth, so long as Theophrastus laboured he was sound of limb, but when released from toil his limbs failed him and he died.
2.40
It is said that his disciples asked him if he had any last message for them, to which he replied: Nothing else but this, that many of the pleasures which life boasts are but in the seeming.
