14–15
Herakleitos
Because, friend, I deem human life a lamentable thing, worthy of tears, so soon passeth it all away. Therefore, I pity you and bewail your lot. The present does not strike me as important, and what is to come hereafter is unmixed woe-I mean the final conflagration and the catastrophe of the universe. These are the things I lament. Nothing is steadfast, but all things are somehow pressed together into an olla-podrïda and the same thing is a joyless joy, a knowing without knowledge, a great littleness, drifting up and down and changing at the caprice of the playful Aeon.
Buyer
What may the Aeon be?
Herakleitos
A child at play, moving the chessmen, changing them by hazard.
Buyer
What, then, are men?
5
Buyer
And what are the gods?
Herakleitos
Immortal men.
Buyer
Are you talking in riddles, fellow, or setting me conundrums? You make your meaning as dim, actually, as Apollo does.
Herakleitos
Because I am at no pains about you.
10
Buyer
Very well; neither will any but a lunatic buy you.
Herakleitos
I bid each of you go to the devil from his youth up, whether he purchase or purchase not.
Buyer
His affliction is not much removed from melancholia. For my part, I am not going to buy either of them.
Hermes
These two are left on our hands.
Hermes
That Athenian there, the chatterbox?
Hermes
Come here, you! We offer a good, sensible life. Who buys the most holy?
Buyer
Tell me, just what do you happen to know?
Sokrates
I am a lover and wise in the science of love.
5
Buyer
Then how in the world could I buy you? For what I want is a tutor for my pretty boy.
