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Updated: July 23, 2025
He, therefore, sent for him, and begged to know whether anything belonging to him had been taken. "No," replied Stilpo, "I have not met with anyone to take away knowledge."
We have already mentioned such thinkers as Strato, Theodorus, and Stilpo; chronologically they belong to the Hellenistic Age, but in virtue of their connexion with the Socratic philosophy they were dealt with in the last chapter.
For observe what he has written about the Megarian reason, in his book concerning the Use of Speech, thus: "Some such things fell out in the discourse of Stilpo and Menedemus; for, whereas they were renowned for wisdom, their disputing has turned to their reproach, their arguments being part clumsy, and the rest plainly sophistical."
'Tis said that the philosopher Stilpo, when oppressed with age, purposely hastened his end by drinking pure wine. The same thing, but not designed by him, despatched also the philosopher Arcesilaus. But 'tis an old and pleasant question, whether the soul of a wise man can be overcome by the strength of wine? "Si munitae adhibet vim sapientiae."
Socrates confessed to some who had discovered a certain inclination to vice in his physiognomy, that it was, in truth, his natural propension, but that he had by discipline corrected it. And such as were familiar with the philosopher Stilpo said, that being born with addiction to wine and women, he had by study rendered himself very abstinent both from the one and the other.
Stilpo having escaped from the burning of his town, where he lost wife, children, and goods, Demetrius Poliorcetes seeing him, in so great a ruin of his country, appear with an undisturbed countenance, asked him if he had received no loss? Augustin, De Civit.
About the relations of the Megarians to the popular faith we know next to nothing. One of them, Stilpo, was charged with impiety on account of a bad joke about Athene, and convicted, although he tried to save himself by another bad joke.
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.
Such word-splitters were Stilpo and Diodorus, the slayer and the slain. They were of the Megaran school, and were named Dialectics; and also, with more truth, Eristics, or quarrellers. Their clique had professed to follow Zeno and Socrates in declaring the instability of sensible presumptions and conclusions, in preaching an absolute and eternal Being.
Ptolemy 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.
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