lived in easy familiarity with the learned men of Alexandria;
and at another of these literary dinners, when Diodorus, the
rhetorician, who was thought to have been the inventor of the Dilemma,
was puzzled by a question put to him by Stilpo, the king in joke said
that his name should be Cronus, a god who had been laughed at in the
comedies. Indeed, he was so teased by Ptolemy for not being able to
answer it, that he got up and left the room. He afterwards wrote a book
upon the subject; but the ridicule was said to have embittered the rest
of his life. This was the person against whom Callimachus, some years
later, wrote a bitter epigram, beginning "Cronus is a wise man."
Diodorus was of the sceptical school of philosophy, which, though not
far removed from the Cyrenaic school, was never popular in Alexandria.
Among other paradoxes he used to deny the existence of motion. He argued
that the motion was not in the place where the body moved from, nor in
the place that the body moved to, and that accordingly it did not exist
at all. Once he met with a violent fall which put his shoulder out of
joint, and he applied to Herophilus, the surgeon, to set it. Herophilus
began by asking him where the fall took place, whether in the place
where the shoulder was, or in the place where it fell to; but the
smarting philosopher begged him to begin by setting his limb, and they
would talk about the existence of motion after the operation.

Stilpo was at this time only on a visit to Ptolemy, for he had refused
his offer of money and a professorship in the Museum, and had chosen
to remain at Megara where he was the ornament of his birthplace. He
had been banished from Athens for speaking against their gods, and for
saying that the colossal Minerva was not the daughter of Jupiter, but of
Phidias, the sculptor. His name as a philosopher stood so high that when
Demetrius, in his late wars with Ptolemy, took the city of Megara by
storm, the conqueror bid spare the house of Stilpo, when temple and
tower went to the ground; and when Demetrius gave orders that Stilpo
should be repaid for what he had lost in the siege, the philosopher
proudly answered that he had lost nothing, and that he had no wealth but
his learning.

The historian Theopompus of Chios then came to Alexandria, and wrote an
account of the wars between the Egyptians and the Persians. It is now
lost, but it contained at least the events from the successful invasion
by Artaxerxes