Vitae philosophorum

Plato also cites him in the Protagoras[*](345d.): Even the gods do not fight against necessity. Again, Office shows the man. Once, when asked what is the best thing, he replied, To do well the work in hand. And, when Croesus inquired what is the best rule, he answered, The rule of the shifting wood, by which he meant the law. He also urged men to win bloodless victories. When the Phocaean said that we must search for a good man, Pittacus rejoined, If you seek too carefully, you will never find him. He answered various inquiries thus: What is agreeable? Time. Obscure? The future. Trustworthy? The earth. Untrustworthy? The sea. It is the part of prudent men, he said, before difficulties arise, to provide against their arising;

and of courageous men to deal with them when they have arisen. Do not announce your plans beforehand; for, if they fail, you will be laughed at. Never reproach any one with a misfortune, for fear of Nemesis. Duly restore what has been entrusted to you. Speak no ill of a friend, nor even of an enemy. Practise piety. Love temperance. Cherish truth, fidelity, skill, cleverness, sociability, carefulness.

Of his songs the most popular is this:

With bow and well-stored quiver
1. We must march against our foe,
2. Words of his tongue can no man trust,
3. For in his heart there is a deceitful thought.

He also wrote poems in elegiac metre, some 600 lines, and a prose work On Laws for the use of the citizens.

He was flourishing about the 42nd Olympiad. He died in the archonship of Aristomenes, in the third year of the 52nd Olympiad,[*](570b.c.) having lived more than seventy years, to a good old age. The inscription on his monument runs thus[*](Anth. Plan. ii. 3.):

Here holy Lesbos, with a mother’s woe,
1. Bewails her Pittacus whom death laid low.

There was another Pittacus, a legislator, as is stated by Favorinus in the first book of his Memorabilia, and by Demetrius in his work on Men of the Same Name. He was called the Less.

To return to the Sage: the story goes that a young man took counsel with him about marriage, and received this answer, as given by Callimachus in his Epigrams[*](Anth. Pal. vii. 89.):