25
He also liked to poke fun at those who use obsolete and unusual. words in conversation. For instance, to a man who had been asked a certain question by him and had answered in far-fetched book-language, he said: “I asked you now, but you answer me as if I had asked in Agamemnon’s day.”
26
When one of his friends said: “Demonax, let’s go to the Aesculapium and pray for my son,” he replied: “You must think Aesculapius very deaf, that he can’t hear our prayers from where we are!”
27
On seeing two philosophers very ignorantly debating a given subject, one asking silly questions and the other giving answers that were not at all to the point, he said: ‘“Doesn’t it seem to you, friends, that one of these fellows is milking a he-goat and the other is holding a sieve for him!”
28
When Agathocles the Peripatetic was boasting that he was first among the logicians—that there was no other, he said: “Come now, Agathocles; if there is no other, you are not first: if you are first, then there are others.”
29
Cethegus the ex-consul, going by way of Greece to Asia to be his father’s lieutenant, did and said many ridiculous things. One of the friends of Demonax, looking on, said that he was a great goodfor-nothing. ‘No, he isn’t, either,” said he—“nota great one!”
