Swarthy Zeno liked to sunbathe, thereby making his dark skin even darker. The Pythia must have notice that when, perhaps fed up with poolside basking, he went to Delhi and asked what he should do to lead the best possible life. She coined a new word for her answer: “Synchromatize with the corpses.” Zeno didn’t miss a beat. He knew right off the solution to her riddle, and went off to read old books. Scholar’s pallor was what he needed. So he started reading the classics.
The story is in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 7.2. But it doesn’t stop there. Back in Athens he sat down in a bookseller’s shop, and of all the old books there, chose the second book of Xenophon’s Memories of Socrates. It changed his life. You can try the experiment yourself, and see if the results replicate.
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