298 ///-23 to ///-24
and lewd pieces. 111. Moreover, there are prose works of his extant
containing up to 20,000 lines, of which Antigonus of Carystus, who also
wrote his biography, makes mention. There are three books of Satires in
which, as befits a sceptic, he pours scorn on everyone and satirizes the
dogmatists in the form of a parody. The first of these is narrated in the
first person; the second and third are in dialogue form. At least, they
seem to be so, for he appears to be questioning Xenophanes of Colophon
about each philosopher and Xenophanes is answering him. In the second,
he questions him about the older ones, and in the third, about the more
modern ones. For this reason, some have titled it Epilogue. 112. The first
is concerned with the same matters, except that the work is in the form
of a monologue. It begins, "Hurry to me, you busybody sophists."
Antigonus says he died when he was nearly ninety, which is confirmed
by Sotion in his eleventh book. I have also heard that he had one eye,
which is why he used to call himself "Cyclops." There was another
Timon, the misanthrope.
This lover of wisdom was also a great lover of gardens, and minded
his own business, as Antigonus also says. At any rate, there is a story
that Hieronymus the Peripatetic said of him, "Just as among the Scythians
both those fleeing and those attacking shoot arrows, so among philoso-
phers, some catch pupils by pursuing them and some by fleeing them,
like Timon."
- He was quick to grasp a point and sneer at others. He loved
writing and was always ready to sketch plots for poets and to collaborate
on dramas. He used to work on tragedies with Alexander and Homer.^23
When disturbed by servants or dogs he used to do nothing, eager for
his own peace and quiet. They say that Aratus^24 asked him how one
could obtain a sound text of Homer, to whom he replied, "You could
get it if you happened upon the oldest copies, but not the corrected ones
of today." 114. He customarily used to leave his own works lying around,
sometimes half eaten-away, so that when he was reading something to
Zopyrus the rhetorician, he would flip through the pages reading whatever
turned up, and halfway down the page he would discover the scrap he
had been missing all along. That is how indifferent he was. Moreover,
he was so easygoing that he would allow a meal to be missed. They say
that when he saw Arcesilaus going through the black market district he
said, "What are you doing here, where we free men come?" To those
who would accept [the evidence of] the senses when testified for by the
intellect, he was accustomed continually to quote the line "Birds of a - Two tragic poets, Alexander the Aetolian and Homer of Byzantium.
- The astronomical poet.