De parasito sive artem esse parasiticam

Tychiades I am curious about you, Simon. Ordinary people, free and slaves alike, have some trade or profession that enables them to benefit themselves and others; you seem to be an exception.

Simon I do not quite see what you mean, Tychiades; put it a little clearer.

Tychiades I want to know whether you have a profession of any sort; for instance, are you a musician?

Simon Certainly not.

Tychiades A doctor?

Simon No.

Tychiades A mathematician?

Simon No.

Tychiades Do you teach rhetoric, then? I need not ask about philosophy; you have about as much to do with that as sin has.

Simon Less, if possible. Do not imagine that you are enlightening me upon my failings. I acknowledge myself a sinner— worse than you take me for.

Tychiades Very well. But possibly you have abstained from these professions because nothing great is easy. Perhaps a trade is

Simon Quite true. Well, I have no skill in any of these.

Tychiades But in——?

Simon An excellent one, in my opinion; if you were acquainted with it you would agree, I am sure. I can claim to be a practical master in the art by this time; whether I can give an account of my faith is another question.

Tychiades What is it?

Simon No, I do not think I have got up the theory of it sufficiently. For the present, rest assured that I have a profession, and cease your strictures on that head. Its nature you shall know another time.

Tychiades No, no; I will not be put off like that.

Simon Well, I am afraid my profession would be rather a shock to you.

Tychiades I like shocks.

Simon Well, I will tell you some day.

Tychiades Now, I say; or else I shall know you are ashamed of it.

Simon Well, then, I sponge.

Tychiades Why, what sane man would call sponging a profession?

Simon I, for one. And if you think I am not sane, put down my innocence of other professions to insanity, and let that be my sufficient excuse. My lady Insanity, they say, is unkind to her votaries in most respects; but at least she excuses their offences, which she makes herself responsible for, like a schoolmaster or tutor.

Tychiades So sponging is an art, eh?

Simon It is; and I profess it.

Tychiades So you are a sponger?

Simon What an awful reproach!

Simon On the contrary, I should be ashamed of not calling myself so.

Tychiades And when we want to distinguish you for the benefit of any one who does not know you, but has occasion to find you out, we must say ‘the sponger,’ naturally?

Simon The name will be more welcome to me than ‘statuary ” to Phidias; I am as proud of my profession as Phidias of his Zeus.

Tychiades Ha, ha, ha! Excuse me—just a particular that occurred to me.

Simon Namely-——?

Tychiades Think of the address of your letters—Simon the Sponger!

Simon Simon the Sponger, Dion the Philosopher. I shall like mine as well as he his.

Tychiades Well, well, your taste in titles concerns me very little. Come now to the next absurdity.

Simon Which is?

Tychiades The getting it entered on the list of arts, When any one asks what the art is, how do we describe it? Letters we know, Medicine we know; Sponging?

Simon My own opinion is, that it has an exceptionally good right to the name of art. If you care to listen, I will explain, though I have not got this properly into shape, as I remarked before.

Tychiades Oh, a brief exposition will do, provided it is true.

Simon I think, if you agree, we had better examine Art generically first; that will enable us to go into the question whether the specific arts really belong under it.

Tychiades Well, what is Art? Of course you know that?

Simon Quite well.

Tychiades Out with it, then, as you know.

Simon An art, as I once heard a wise man say, is a body of perceptions regularly employed for some useful purpose in human life.

Tychiades And he was quite right.

Simon So, if sponging has all these marks, it must be an art?

Tychiades If, yes.

Simon Well, now we will bring to bear on sponging each of these essential elements of Art, and see whether its character rings true, or returns a cracked note like bad pottery when it is tapped. It has got to be, like all art, a body of perceptions. Well, we find at once that our artist has to distinguish critically the man who will entertain him satisfactorily and not give him reason to wish that he had sponged elsewhere. Now, in as much as assaying—which is no more than the power of distinguishing between false and true coin—is a recognized profession, you will hardly refuse the same status to that which distinguishes between false and true men; the genuineness of men is more obscure than that of coins; this indeed is the gist of the wise Euripides’s complaint: But among men how tell the base apart? Virtue and vice stamp not the outward flesh.

So much the greater the sponger’s art, which beats prophecy in the certainty of its conclusions upon problems so difficult.

Next, there is the faculty of so directing your words and actions as to effect intimacy and convince your patron of your devotion: is that consistent with weak understanding or perception?

Tychiades Certainly not.

Simon Then at table one has to outshine other people, and show the difference between amateur and professional: is that to be done without thought and ingenuity?

Tychiades No, indeed.

Simon Or perhaps you fancy that any outsider who will take the trouble can tell a good dinner from a bad one. Well, the mighty Plato says, if the guest is not versed in cookery, the dressing of the banquet will be but unworthily judged.

The next point to be established is, that sponging depends not merely on perceptions, but on perceptions regularly employed. Nothing simpler. The perceptions on which other arts are based frequently remain unemployed by their owner for days, nights, months, or years, without his art’s perishing; whereas, if those of the sponger were to miss their daily exercise, not merely his art would perish, but he with it.

There remains the ‘useful purpose in human life’; it would take a madman to question that here. I find nothing that serves a more useful purpose in human life than eating and drinking; without them you cannot live.

Tychiades That is true.

Simon Moreover, sponging is not to be classed with beauty and strength, and so called a quality instead of an art?

Tychiades No.

Simon And, in the sphere of art, it does not denote the negative condition, of unskilfulness. ‘That never brings its owner prosperity. Take an instance: if a man who did not understand navigation took charge of a ship in a stormy sea, would he be safe?

Tychiades Not he.

Simon Why, now? Because he wants the art which would enable him to save his life?

Tychiades Exactly.

Simon It follows that, if sponging was the negative of art, the sponger would not save his life by its means?

Tychiades Yes.

Simon A man is saved by art, not by the absence of it?

Tychiades Quite so.

Simon So sponging is an art?

Tychiades Apparently.

Simon Let me add that I have often known even good navigators and skilful drivers come to grief, resulting with the latter in

Tychiades That seems to be the upshot. But now proceed tog give us a good definition of your art.

Simon Well thought of. And I fancy this will about do: Sponging is the art of eating and drinking, and of the talk by which these may be secured; its end is Pleasure.

Tychiades A very good definition, I think. But I warn you that your end will bring you into conflict with some of the philosophers.

Simon Ah well, if sponging agrees with Happiness about the end, we may be content.

And that it does I will soon show you. The wise Homer, admiring the sponger’s life as the only blissful enviable one, has this: I say no fairer end may be attained

It was a remarkable piece of impudence on Epicurus’s part to appropriate the end that belongs to sponging for his system of Happiness. That it was a bit of larceny—Epicurus having nothing, and the sponger much, to do with Pleasure—I will soon show you, I take it that Pleasure means, first, bodily tranquillity, and secondly, an untroubled soul. Well, the sponger attains both, Epicurus neither. A man who is busy inquiring into the earth’s shape, the infinity of worlds, the sun’s size, astronomic distances, the elements, the existence or non-existenée of Gods, and who is engaged in incessant controversies about the end—he is a prey not merely to human, but to cosmic perturbations, Whereas the sponger, convinced that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, living secure and calm with no such perplexities to trouble him, eats and sleeps and lies on his back, letting his hands and feet look after themselves, like Odysseus on his passage home from Scheria.

But here is anindependent refutation of Epicurus’s pretensions to Pleasure. Our Epicurus, whoever his Wisdom may be, either is, or is not, supplied with victuals. If he is not, so far from having a pleasurable life, he will have no life at all. If he is, does he get them out of his own means, or from some one else? If the latter, he is a sponger, and not what he says he is; if the former, he will not have a pleasurable life.

Tychiades How so?

Simon Why, if his food is provided out of his own means, that way of life has many consequences; reckon them up. You will admit that, if the principle of your life is to be pleasure, all your appetites have to be satisfied?

Tychiades I agree.

Simon Well, a large income may possibly meet that requirement, a scanty one certainly not; consequently, a poor man cannot be a philosopher, or in other words attain the end, which is Pleasure. But neither will the rich, who lavishes his substance on his desires, attain it. And why? Because spending has many worries inseparably attached to it; your cook disappoints you, and you must either have strained relations with him, or else purchase peace and quiet by feeding badly and missing your pleasure. Then similar difficulties attend your steward’s management of the house. You must admit all this.

Tychiades Oh, certainly, I agree.

Simon In fact, something or other is sure to happen and cut off Epicurus from his end. Now the sponger has no cook to be angry with, no farm, steward or money to be annoyed at the loss of; at the same time he lives on the fat of the land, and is the one person who can eat and drink without the worries from which others cannot escape.

That sponging is an art, has now been abundantly proved; it remains to show its superiority; and this I shall take in two divisions: first, it has a general superiority to all the arts; and, secondly, it is superior to each of them separately. ‘The general superiority is this: the arts have to be instilled by dint of toil, threats and blows—regrettable necessities, all of them; my own art, of which the acquisition costs no toil, is perhaps the only exception, Who ever came away from dinner in tears? with the schoolroom it is different; or who ever went out to dinner with the dismal expression characteristic of going: to

Again, with the other arts the result comes only after the learning is done; their fruits alone are agreeable; ‘long and steep the road thereto.’ Sponging is once more an exception, in that profit and learning here go hand in hand; you grasp your end as soon as you begin. And whereas all other arts aré practised solely for the sustenance they will ultimately bring, the sponger has his sustenance from the day he starts. You realize, of course, that the farmer’s object in farming is something else than farming, the carpenter’s something different from abstract carpentering; but the sponger has no ulterior object; occupation and pre-occupation are for him one and the same.

Then it is no news to any one that other professions slave habitually, and get just one or two holidays a month; States keep some monthly and some yearly festivals; these are their times of enjoyment. But the sponger has thirty festivals a month; every day is a red-letter day with him.

Once more, success in the other arts presupposes a diet as abstemious as any invalid’s; eat and drink to your heart’s content, and you make no progress in your studies.

Other arts, again, are useless to their professor unless he has his plant; you cannot play the flute if you have not one to play; lyrical music requires a lyre, horsemanship a horse. But of ours one of the excellences and conveniences is that no instrument is required for its exercise.

Other arts we pay, this we are paid, to learn.

Further, while the rest have their teachers, no one teaches sponging; it is a gift from Heaven, as Socrates said of poetry.

Then do not forget that, while the others have to be suspended during a journey or a voyage, this may be in full swing under those circumstances too.