that he turned to philosophy in disgust at the schoolmasters who could not tell him the meaning of " chaos " in Hesiod/ 1 According to Hermippus, however, he started as a schoolmaster, but on coming across the works of Democritus turned eagerly to philosophy. Hence the point of Timon's allusion b in the lines : Again there is the latest and most shameless of the physicists, the schoolmaster's son c from Samos, himself the most uneducated of mortals. At his instigation his three brothers, Neocles, Chaeredemus, and Aristobulus, joined in his studies, according to Philodemus the Epicurean in the tenth book of his comprehensive work On Philosophers ; furthermore his slave named Mys, as stated by Myronianus in his Historical Parallels. Diotimus d the Stoic, who is hostile to him, has assailed him with bitter slanders, adducing fifty scandalous letters as written by Epicurus ; and so too did the author who ascribed to Epicurus the epistles commonly attributed to Chrysippus. They are followed by Posidonius the Stoic and his school, and Nicolaus and Sotion in the twelfth book of his work entitled Dioclean Refutations, consisting of twenty -four books ; also by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. They allege that he used to go round with his mother to cottages and read charms, and assist his father in his school for a pitiful fee e ; further, that one of his brothers was a pander and <jKa\eiu) irpoceopevuv. From Aristophanes, Acharn. 595-7, it seems that patronymics were used of persons engaged in hereditary occupations. d One Diotimus who calumniated Epicurus and was answered by the Epicurean Zeno is mentioned by Athenaeus, xiii. 611 b, as having been put to death. • Compare again Dem. I)e cor. § 258.