Vitae philosophorum

When some Academic alleged that he had no certainty of anything, Ariston said, Do you not even see your neighbour sitting by you? and when the other answered No, he rejoined,

Who can have blinded you? who robbed you of luminous eyesight?

The books attributed to him are as follows:

Exhortations, two books.

Of Zeno’s Doctrines.

Dialogues.

Lectures, six books.

Dissertations on Philosophy, seven books.

Dissertations on Love.

Commonplaces on Vainglory.

Notebooks, twenty-five volumes.

Memorabilia, three books.

Anecdotes, eleven books.

Against the Rhetoricians.

An Answer to the Counter-pleas of Alexinus.

Against the Dialecticians, three books.

Letters to Cleanthes, four books.

Panaetius and Sosicrates consider the Letters to be alone genuine; all the other works named they attribute to Ariston the Peripatetic.

The story goes that being bald he had a sunstroke and so came to his end. I have composed a trifling poem upon him in limping iambics as follows[*](Anth. Plan. v. 38.):

Wherefore, Ariston, when old and bald did you let the sun roast your forehead? Thus seeking warmth more than was reasonable, you lit unwillingly upon the chill reality of Death.

There was also another Ariston, a native of Iulis[*](The town in Ceos to which Bacchylides belonged: Ael Var. Hist. iv. 15.); a third, a musician of Athens; a fourth, a tragic poet; a fifth, of Halae, author of treatises on rhetoric; a sixth, a Peripatetic philosopher of Alexandria.