He was once bold enough to ask the assembled people, when he heard
the sacred proclamation, why they excluded barbarians from the
Mysteries, seeing that Eumolpus, the founder of them, was a
barbarian from Thrace.

When he once had a winter voyage to make, a friend asked how he
liked the thought of being capsized and becoming food for fishes.
'I should be very unreasonable to mind giving them a meal,
considering how many they have given me.'

To a rhetorician who had given a very poor declamation he
recommended constant practice. 'Why, I am always practising to
myself,' says the man. 'Ah, that accounts for it; you are
accustomed to such a foolish audience.'

Observing a soothsayer one day officiating for pay, he said: 'I
cannot see how you can ask pay. If it is because you can change the
course of Fate, you cannot possibly put the figure high enough: if
everything is settled by Heaven, and not by you, what is the good
of your soothsaying?'

A hale old Roman once gave him a little exhibition of his skill in
fence, taking a clothes-peg for his mark. 'What do you think of my
play, Demonax?' he said. 'Excellent, so long as you have a wooden
man to play with.'

Even for questions meant to be insoluble he generally had a shrewd
answer at command. Some one tried to make a fool of him by asking,
If I burn a hundred pounds of wood, how many pounds of smoke shall
I get? 'Weigh the ashes; the difference is all smoke.'