De parasito sive artem esse parasiticam

SIMON 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.

TYCHIADES He was quite right in what he said, and you in your recollection of it.

SIMON If Parasitic satisfies this definition completely, what other conclusion could there be than that it is an art?

TYCHIADES It would be an art, of course, if it should really be like that.

SIMON 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:

1. In men, no mark whereby to tell the knave
2. Did 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.