5
“This self-styled sophist” (Prologue is now speaking) “once came to Olympia, purposing to deliver to those who should attend the festival a speech which he had written long before. The subject of his composition was the exclusion of Pythagoras (by one of the Athenians, I suppose) from participation in the Eleusinian mysteries as a barbarian, because Pythagoras himself was in the habit of saying that before being Pythagoras he had once been Euphorbus.Euphorbus was one of Homer’s Trojans. See Lucian’s Cock, 13, 17, and 20 (II, pp. 204-214). In truth, his speech was after the pattern of Aesop’s jackdaw, cobbled up out of motley feathers from others. Wanting, of course, to have it thought that he was not repeating a stale composition but making up offhand what really came from his book, he requested one of his familiars (it was the one from Patras, who has so much business in the courts) to select Pythagoras for him when he asked for subjects to talk about. The man did so, and prevailed upon the audience to hear that speech about Pythagoras.
