to fly,
walk on water and through fire--they are called Babylonians and
Hyperboreans. A Syrian from Palestine professes to drive devils out of
people (perhaps alluding to the exorcists of the early church.) He makes
Eucrates speak of one Pancrates, who would take a broom or the pestle of
a wooden mortar, and upon saying a couple of magical words, it appeared
to become a man, drew water, and ordered food. When Pancrates had no
further need of him, he spoke a couple of words, and the man was a
pestle again. Eucrates tried this himself, but having made the pestle a
man, and told him to bring water, he forgot how to change him back
again. So he kept on bringing water. Eucrates then split the pestle in
two, and both halves still continued to bring water.

Demonax, the friend of Lucian, was as remarkable for his wit and
repartee as for his kindly nature. A man who over-rated his austerity,
expressed one day his surprise at seeing him eat sweet-cakes. "Do you
think," he replied, "that the bees make their honey only for fools?" He
seems to have had as little respect as Lucian for the idolatry of his
day, for on one of his companions saying to him "Let us go to the Temple
of AEsculapius to pray for my son," he answered, "Is the god then so deaf
that he cannot hear us where we are?"

He lived and died a bachelor, and we are told that on being blamed by
Epictetus, with whom he studied, for not marrying and having a family as
a philosopher should, he replied "Very well, give me one of your
daughters." Epictetus was an old bachelor.

He counselled a bad orator to practise and exercise himself in the art
of speaking, and on his replying, "I am always doing so--to myself," he
added, "It is therefore not surprising you speak as you do--having a
fool for your audience."

When the sophist Sidonius, delivering a long panegyric on himself, said
that he was acquainted with all the tenets of the philosophers: "If
Aristotle calls me to the Lyceum, I obey; if Plato to the Academy, I
come; Zeno to the Stoa, I take up my abode there; if Pythagoras calls, I
am silent:" Demonax jumped up in the middle of the Assembly and cried
out, "Pythagoras calls you."

His humour was purely genial and jocose, as when, on the point of
setting sail in winter, he replied to a friend who asked him whether he
was not afraid he should be ship-wrecked and go to feed the fishes,
"Should I not be ungrateful were I unwilling to be devoured by fishes,
when I have f