Myrtilus, having cited these lines of Alexis, and then looking round on the men who were partisans of the Stoic school, having first recited the following passage out of the Iambics of Hermeas the Curian—
Listen, you Stoiclings, traffickers in nonsensewent on to say,—And in this point alone you are imitators of the master of your school, Zeno the Phœnician, who was always a slave to the most infamous passions (as Antigonus the Carystian relates, in his History of his Life); for you are [p. 902] always saying that “the proper object of love is not the body, but the mind;” you who say at the same time, that you ought to remain faithful to the objects of your love, till they are eight-and-twenty years of age. And Ariston of Ceos, the Peripatetic, appears to me to have said very well (in the second book of his treatise on Likenesses connected with Love), to some Athenian who was very tall for his age, and at the same time was boasting of his beauty, (and his name was Dorus,) "It seems to me that one may very well apply to you the line which Ulysses uttered when he met Dolon—
Punners on words,—gluttons, who by yours
Eat up the whole of what is in the dishes,
And give no single bit to a philosopher.
Besides, you are most clearly proved to do
All that is contrary to those professions
Which you so pompously parade abroad,
Hunting for beauty;—
Great was thy aim, and mighty is the prize.
Iliad, x. 401.
