29.13
A young man, one of the pupils of Anaximenes the orator, pronounced before him a very carefully prepared oration, and he, wishing to gain some further information, asked a question. But when the young man relapsed into silence, he remarked, What is your answer ? Or Is this the content of the written page ? Euripides, Iphigeneia among the Taurians, 787.
29.14
Hearing another orator say that the season had been snowy This could hardly refer (as some think) to the unseasonably cold weather in the spring (of 307 B.C.?) recorded in Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius, chap. xii. (894 C). and so had caused a lack of herbage in the land, he said, Please stop treating me as you treat a common crowd.
29.15
When Thrasyllus the Cynic asked him for a shilling, he said That is not a fit gift for a king to give. And when Thrasyllus said, Then give me two hundred pounds, he retorted, But that is not a fit gift for a Cynic to receive. The story ist old more fully in Moralia, 551 E, and by Seneca, De beneficiis, ii. 17. 1.
29.16
When he sent Demetrius his son, with many ships and forces, to make the Greeks a free people, he said that his repute, kindled in Greece as on a lofty height, would spread like beacon-fires through out the inhabited world. Cf. Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius, chap. viii. (892 B), where the phraseology is slightly different.