 Timon is indebted for his style and tone in the Silloi to a tradition of moralizing diatribe prevalent among the Cynics. The word tuphos, ‘vanity,’ was a favorite Cynic term of invective, and it occurs in several fragments from the Silloi, as do a number of related terms. The Cynic Crates also wrote satirical verses; one of the few surviving fragments of Crates begins “And I saw Stilpo enduring severe pains in Megara,” which is a parody of a line from Odyssey XI and again seems to assimilate a philosophical encounter to Odysseus’ underworld encounters. Crates’ writings may well, then, have been an important influence on the Silloi (on this see Long 1978). A more distant inspiration was Xenophanes, who can plausibly be seen as the originator of the genre of philosophical satire in which Timon was writing. (Later sources even give Silloi as the title of a poem by Xenophanes; but it is not clear whether this title was attached to the poem before or only after Timon’s day.) This is surely part of the reason for Timon’s choice of Xenophanes as the main character in the second and third books.