De parasito sive artem esse parasiticam

If a parasite should actually fall in battle, certainly neither captain nor private soldier would be ashamed of his huge body, elegantly reclining as at an elegant banquet. Indeed it would be worth one’s while to look at a philosopher’s body lying beside it, lean, squalid, with a long beard, a sickly creature dead before the battle! Who would not despise this city if he saw that her targeteers were such wretches? Who, when he saw pale, long-haired varlets lying on the field, would not suppose that the city for lack of reserves had freed for service the malefactors in her prison? That is how parasites compare with rhetoricians and philosophers in war.