  Being a pagan philosopher on the municipal payroll of the City of Alexandria—or worse, being dependent on voluntary student fees—must have been no enviable position. One can imagine that the act of playing the token philosopher in Alexandria and lecturing for decades on important matters which no-one in the audience any more really cared about took its toll. The Greek Anthology attributes to Olympiodorus an at the same time artful and depressing epigram (Anth. Gr., Appendix 177):