now meretricious; to all intents and purposes it had become an empiric method of amusing audiences with sonorous or flippant discussions on art, morals, or literature, which had little or no grasp of reality. The new Cynics and the more serious Stoics derided it, as they derided the sophists or so-called ‘wise men’ who decked out a lecture on ‘What is proof?’; ‘Is it permissible to marry?’; ‘Is it permissible to commit suicide?’ and so forth, with catchy phrases and sounding sentences. Corinthians