An art, I remember to have heard a learned man
say,
The particular learned man who said it first is not known to us. It is the orthodox Stoic definition, quoted repeatedly by Sextus Empiricus. Cf. Quint. 2,17, 41: ille ab omnibus fere probatus finis ... artem constare ex perceptionibus consentientibus et coexercitatis ad finem utilem vitae.
is a complex of knowledges exercised in combination to some end useful to the world.
He was quite right in what he said, and you in
your recollection of it.
If Parasitic satisfies this definition completely, what
other conclusion could there be than that it is an art?
It would be an art, of course, if it should really be
like that.
Now then, let us apply to Parasitic the individual
characteristics of an art and see whether it is in
harmony with them or whether its theory, like a
good-for-nothing pot when you try its ring, sounds
cracked.
Just so Critolaus had tested rhetoric and found it wanting : see Philodemus, Rhetoric 2; Sextus, Agatnet the Rhetortcrans; and Quintilian 2, 17.
Every art, then, must be a complex of
knowledges ; and of these, in the case of the para
site, first of all there is testing and deciding who
would be suitable to support him, and whom he could
begin to cultivate without being sorry for it later.
Or do we care to maintain that assayers possess an
art because they know how to distinguish between
coins that are counterfeit and those that are not, but
parasites discriminate without art between men that
are counterfeit and those that are good, even though
men are not distinguishable at once, like coins?
Wise Euripides criticizes this very point when he
Says:
In men, no mark whereby to tell the knaveDid ever yet upon his body grow.Euripides, Medea518.
This makes the parasite’s art even greater, since it is
better than divination at distinguishing and recognising things so obscure and hidden.