Besides, all his standards of ethical righteousness were outraged by the round of life which he was compelled daily to witness.

The worthy man would long before have ceased from a vassalage so disgraceful, had he possessed any other means of support.

Once he meditated suicide, but was scared out of it by the thought that his bones would moulder in those huge pits on the Esquiline--far from friend or native land--where artisans, slaves, and cattle, creatures alike without means of decent burial, were left under circumstances unspeakably revolting to moulder away to dust.
[66] See Plato's "Theaetetus," 174.
The day of Agias's misfortune, Pisander sat in his corner of the boudoir, after Valeria had left it, in a very unphilosophical rage, gnawing his beard and cursing inwardly his mistress, Pratinas, and the world in general.
Arsinoe with a pale, strained face was moving about, replacing the bottles of cosmetics and perfumery in cabinets and caskets.

Pisander had been kind to Arsinoe, and had taught her to read; and there was a fairly firm friendship between the slave and the luckless man, who felt himself degraded by an equal bondage.
"Poor Agias," muttered Pisander.
"Poor Agias," repeated Arsinoe, mournfully; then in some scorn, "Come, Master Pisander, now is the time to console yourself with your philosophy.

Call out everything,--your Zeno, or Parmenides, or Heraclitus, or others of the thousand nobodies I've heard you praise to Valeria,--and make thereby my heart a jot the less sore, or Agias's death the less bitter! Don't sit there and snap at your beard, if your philosophy is good for anything! People used to pray to the gods in trouble, but you philosophers turn the gods into mists or thin air.
You are a man! You are free! Do something! Say something!" "But what can I do ?" groaned Pisander, bursting into tears, and wishing for the instant Epicureans, Stoics, Eclectics, Peripatetics, and every other school of learning in the nethermost Hades.
"_Phui!_ Fudge!" cried Arsinoe.