And Aristippus every year used to spend whole days with her in Aegina, at the festival of Neptune. And once, being reproached by his servant, who said to him—“You give her such large sums of money, but she admits Diogenes the Cynic for nothing;” he answered, “I give Lais a great deal, that I myself may enjoy her, and not that no one else may.” And when Diogenes said, "Since you, O Aristippus, cohabit with a common prostitute, either, therefore, become a Cynic yourself, as I am, or else abandon her;" Aristippus answered him—“Does it appear to you, O Diogenes, an absurd thing to live in a house where other men have lived before you.?” “Not at all,” said he. “Well, then, does it appear to you absurd to sail in a ship in which other men have sailed before you” “By no means,” said he. “Well, then,” replied Aristippus, “it is not a bit more absurd to be in love with a woman with whom many men have been in love already.” And Nymphodorus the Syracusan, in his treatise o the People who have been admired and eminent in Sicily, says that Lais was a native of Hyccara, which he describe as a strong fortress in Sicily. But Strattis, in his play entitled The Macedonians or Pausanias, says that she was a Corinthian, in the following lines— [p. 940]
A. Where do these damsels come from, and who are theyAnd Timæus, in the thirteenth book of his History, says she came from Hyccara, (using the word in the plural number;) as Polemo has stated, where he says that she was murdered by some women in Thessaly, because she was beloved by a Thessalian of the name of Pausanias; and that she was beaten to death, out of envy and jealousy, by wooden footstools in the temple of Venus; and that from this circumstance that temple is called the temple of the impious Venus; and that her tomb is shown on the banks of the Peneus, having on it an emblem of a stone water-ewer, and this inscription—
B. At present they are come from Megara,
But they by birth are all Corinthians:
This one is Lais, Who is so well known.
This is the tomb of Lais, to whose beauty,so that those men talk nonsense who say that she was buried in Corinth, near the Craneum.
Equal to that of heavenly goddesses,
The glorious and unconquer'd Greece did bow;
Love was her father, Corinth was her home,
Now in the rich Thessalian plain she lies;—
