8. The Pedant Who Died of Hunger as He Tried to Correct Others
All in all, Philitas of Cos was a genius, but he had a rather annoying downside. While a brilliant man by all accounts, the poet and intellectual seems to have rubbed many the wrong way with an overbearing perfectionism and a need to point out every mistake that he came across. All it took was for him to hear somebody utter a logical fallacy or use a wrong word, and Philitas would be off to the races, and go into a pedantic frenzy.
He would proceed to write page after page in which he detailed the error, why it was erroneous and copious examples of what the correct usage should have been. According to ancient sources, he got so caught up in correcting others’ mistakes, investigating false arguments and poor word choices, that he starved to death while researching and writing an essay about somebody’s erroneous word usage. An inscription in front of his tomb read: “Stranger, Philitas is my name, I lie – Slain by fallacious arguments, and cares – Protracted from evening through the night“.