THE PARASITE.
——“Pity those whose flanks grow great,Swell’d by the lard of others’ meat.”—Herrick.
——“Pity those whose flanks grow great,Swell’d by the lard of others’ meat.”—Herrick.
——“Pity those whose flanks grow great,Swell’d by the lard of others’ meat.”—Herrick.
——“Pity those whose flanks grow great,
Swell’d by the lard of others’ meat.”—Herrick.
Para, “near,” andsitos, “corn,” pretty well explain what the Greeks understood by the word “parasite.” As the worthless weed among the wheat, so was this classical Skimpole in the field of society. As the weed hung for support to the substance that promised to yield it, so did the parasite cling to the side of those who kept good tables, and lacked wit to enliven them.
The parasite was too delicate a fellow to allow of invidious distinctions. He supped or dined wherever he was invited, and at marriage feasts waited for no invitation at all.Therehe was in his glory. He was the cracker of jokes, and of the heads of those who did not agree with every word that fell from the lips of the Amphitryon of the hour. He usually, however, got his own skull bruised by the watch, when staggering home through the dark, “full of the god,” and without a slave to direct his steps. But it was only with the morning that he became conscious at once of pain from the bruises, and the necessity of providing, at the cost of others, for his own breakfast.
These professional “livers out” were, however, not always unattended. The victims whom they flattered sometimes lent them a slave. Their wardrobe seldom extended beyond two suits, one for the public, and one for wear at home. They looked abroad for dupes, just asour ring-droppers used to do, and for the same purpose. The parasite generally attached himself to the first simple-looking personage he encountered, provided he bore with him proofs of being a man who could afford to live well.Simplexusually swallowed with complacency all the three-piled flattery with which the parasite troubled him; and if he were expecting friends to dinner, the gastronome, who wanted one, was probably invited. But there was always an understanding, that, in return for the invitation, he was to maintain, for the diversion of the company, a continual fire of jokes. If he proved but a sorry jester, he was promptly scourged into the street, down which he ran, nothing abashed, to look for hearers whom indifferent jests could move to ready laughter.
The parasite looked upon the fortune and table of others as a property which was properly to be held in common. Monsieur Prudhon really started a parasitical precept, when he tried to establish, that what belonged to one man belonged to a great many others besides. But if, as regarded his own share in property that wasnothis own, the parasite was so far a Communist, he was the most charitable of fellows, his earnest prayer being, that none of his patrons might ever fall into such distress as to be unable to give good dinners. The dinner-table was his arena. If he got but one meal a day, he consumed enough thereat to satisfy half-a-dozen appetites; and, as he ate, it was matter of perfect indifference to him whether he was called upon to find wit for the guests, or to be the butt of their own. You might buffet him till he were senseless, provided the blows were afterwards paid for in brimming glasses.
He was always first at a feast; and as he was as common an object at a feast as the sauce itself, so “sauce” was the common name for a parasite. There he was not only wit, butt, and bully, but porter also; and his officewas not merely to knock down the drunken, but to carry them out when incapable of performing that office for themselves. The parasites had a dash, too, of the “bravo” in their character, and let themselves out for a dozen other purposes besides dining. The stronger-bodied and the braver-souled let out their strength. “Do you want a wrestler?” says the parasite, in Antiphæus, “here I am, an Antæus. If you want a door forced, I have a head like a ram to do it; and I can scale a wall like Capaneus. Telamon was not stronger than my wrist; and I can wreathe into the ear of beauty like smoke.” Some of these Bobadils are even said to have ventured into battle, and to have especially distinguished themselves in the Commissariat department!
Others boasted of their powers of fasting,—always provided good pay assured them of compensating banquets at the end of their service. “I can live on as little as Tithymallus,” says one; and the individual in question is said to have supported life on eight lupines a day,—a hint to Poor-Law Commissioners. Another makes a merit of being as thin as Philippides, who, like Hood’s friend, wassothin, that, when he stood side-ways, you could not see him! The merits of a third are summed up by him in saying, that he can live on water, like a frog; on vegetables, like a caterpillar; can go without bathing, like Dirtiness herself, if there be such a deity; can live in winter with no roof but the sky, like a bird; can support heat, and sing beneath a noon-day sun, like a grasshopper; do without oil, like the dust; walk bare-footed from break of day, like the crane; and keep wide awake all night, like the owl.
Of such a profession the parasite was proud, and even declared that its origin was divine; and that Jupiter Amicalis (Ζεὺς ὁ φίλιος) was its patron saint! As Jove entered where he chose, ate and drank of what most tookhis fancy, and, after creating an atmosphere of enjoyment, retired without having any thing to pay; just so, it was argued, was it with the parasite. In Attica, parasites were admitted to the commemorative banquets that followed the sacrifices to Hercules; proof enough that they were accounted as being of the same kidney as heroes. In later times came degenerate men and manners; and then, instead of honourable men sitting with gods and heroes, the office of parasite was so degraded, that none but the hungry wits exercised it. Flattery to mortals then took the place of praise to gods. The parasite was ready to laud every act of the master of the feast,—
“——laudare paratusSi bene ructavit, si rectum minxit amicus,”
“——laudare paratusSi bene ructavit, si rectum minxit amicus,”
“——laudare paratusSi bene ructavit, si rectum minxit amicus,”
“——laudare paratus
Si bene ructavit, si rectum minxit amicus,”
and to eulogize a great number of other acts besides, as may be found noted by those who are very curious, and not over-nice, in the fragments of Diodorus of Sinope.
The fellows were witty, too, however degraded. When Chœrephon had, uninvited, slipped into a vacant position at a wedding-dinner, the gynæconomes, as inspectors of the feast, counting the guests, came upon him last, and said, “You are the thirty-first: it is against the law; you must withdraw.” “I do not dispute the law,” said the parasite, “but I object to your manner of counting. Begin the numbering by me, and your conclusions will be indisputable.”
The parasite, Philoxenus, happened to be supping with a host who gave his guests nothing but black bread. “This is not a loaf, but a spectre,” whispered the professional wit: “if we eat any more of it, we shall soon be in the shades.”
There was more wit in Bithys, the parasite of the avaricious King Lysimachus, who one day, at dinner, flung a wooden scorpion at the flatterer. The latteraffected great fright, but afterwards remarked, “I will, in my turn, terrify you, O King; be good enough to give me a talent.”
Clisophus, another of this strange brotherhood, either fooled or flattered King Philip to the very top of his bent. The King having lost an eye, Clisophus always sat down to dinner in his presence with a bandage over one of his own; and when the Monarch limped, from a wound in the leg, Clisophus went “halting at his side;” and if, by chance, an ill odour affected the royal nostrils, Clisophus wore, all day long, a grimace upon his features, as if he were sick with disgust. However absurd this may appear, the parasites of Louis XIV. flattered him as grossly as the original practitioners did the early and heathen Kings. People shaved their heads and wore periwigs, because the Monarch, having little hair of his own, wore long locks cropped from other heads. So, when once at dinner he complained of having lost his teeth, a young flatterer who sat next him swore, with a broad smile which displayed his own incisors, that nobody had teeth now-a-days. And again, when the King, on his seventieth birthday, inquired the age of a person from whom he had received a petition, the reply was, that the person was of everybody’s age,—about threescore and ten. Nay, the Court preachers flattered the Sovereign quite as coarsely as the mere courtiers, and would not have received invitations to dinner, if they had not done so. “My brethren,” said one of these, “all men must die;” and at that very moment he perceived the eye of the King glaring uneasily upon him:—“that is to say, Sire,almost allmen!” and the complaisant preacher was at the royal table that day. The same parasitical spirit prevailed at the English Court, especially when bolster neckcloths were worn, simply because the King was compelled to wear one, in consequence of adisease in the glands of the neck. But, to translate the sentiment of the French poet,—
“From royal example slaves have never shrunk:When Auguste tippled, Poland soon got drunk.When the great Monarch breathed the air of love,Hey, presto, pass! Paris was Venus’ grove!But turn’d a Churchman and devout, alas!The courtiers ran and beat their breasts at mass.”
“From royal example slaves have never shrunk:When Auguste tippled, Poland soon got drunk.When the great Monarch breathed the air of love,Hey, presto, pass! Paris was Venus’ grove!But turn’d a Churchman and devout, alas!The courtiers ran and beat their breasts at mass.”
“From royal example slaves have never shrunk:When Auguste tippled, Poland soon got drunk.When the great Monarch breathed the air of love,Hey, presto, pass! Paris was Venus’ grove!But turn’d a Churchman and devout, alas!The courtiers ran and beat their breasts at mass.”
“From royal example slaves have never shrunk:
When Auguste tippled, Poland soon got drunk.
When the great Monarch breathed the air of love,
Hey, presto, pass! Paris was Venus’ grove!
But turn’d a Churchman and devout, alas!
The courtiers ran and beat their breasts at mass.”
It is said by ancient writers that the species of flattery which Clisophus paid Philip, was obligatory on all the guests and officials in the ancient royal Courts of Arabia. There, if the King suffered in any member, every courtier was bound to be in pain in the same limb. This species of flattery was, in fact, a conclusion logically arrived at; for the Arab lawgivers said that it would be absurd in the courtiers to vie with one another for the honour of being buried alive with the King defunct, if they did not suffer with him in all his bodily pains when living.
The Celtic King of the Sotians maintained a body of men who were called the “Eucholimes,” or the “Death Volunteers.” They amounted to six hundred men; they were lodged, clothed, and tended like the King, with whom they daily sat at meat; but they were also bound to die with their master; and it is alleged that the chance was eagerly incurred, and that no man ever failed, when called upon by the King’s decease, to accompany His Majesty on a visit to his royal cousin, Orcus.
But your regular parasite preferred to live and flatter living Monarchs. “See,” said Niceas, when he saw Alexander troubled by a fly that stung him, “there is one that will be King over all flies; for he has imbibed the blood of him who is King over all men.” The flattery was not more delicate which Chirisophus once paid at dinner to Dionysius the Tyrant. Chirisophus, seeing the King smile at the other end of the table, burst intoa roar of laughter. The King asked, “Wherefore?” seeing that the parasite could not have heard the joke. “True,” said Chirisophus; “but I saw that Your Majesty had heard something worth laughing at, and I laughed in sympathy.” This species of parasite is not uncommon in English houses; but perhaps they do their office more refinedly than Chirisophus.
The flatterers of the younger Dionysius were far more disgusting in their adulation. They were simply absurd, when they pretended to be short-sighted, like him, and to be unable to see a dish, unless they thrust their noses into it. But they were filthy followers when they offered their faces for the King to “void his rheum” upon, and even went to extremes of nastiness at which human nature shudders, but at which Dionysius smiled. And yet Dionysius was hailed by some of them as a god. It was the custom, we are told, in Sicily, for every individual to make sacrifices, in his own house, before the figures of the nymphs, to get devoutly drunk before the altar, and to dance round it as long as the pious devotee could keep upon his legs. It was accounted as an exquisite piece of flattery in Damocles, the parasite, that he refused to perform such service before inanimate deities, while he went through the whole duty before Dionysius as his god. The Athenians, it will be remembered, were horror-stricken at such impious laudation as this. They fined Demades ten talents for having proposed to award divine honours to Alexander; and Timagoras, whom they had sent as Ambassador to the King of Persia, they put to death for compromising the Athenian dignity by prostrating himself before that King. And, indeed, let us do justice to Alexander himself. He had more than misgiving touching his own alleged divinity. He had once—“his custom in the afternoon”—eaten and drunk so enormously, that in the evening he was forcedto a necessity which compels very mortal people,—take physic. He made as many contortions, on swallowing it, as a refractory child; and Philarches, his parasite, remarked, with a rascally hypocritical smile, “Ah! what must be the sufferings of mortal man under such medicine, if you, who are a divinity, feel it so much!” The idea of a deity drawing health out of an apothecary’s phial, was too much even for Alexander, who declined to accept the apotheosis, and called Philarches an ass.
But Philarches was only giving the King a taste of the parasite’s professional craft. The noble Nicostratus of Argos quite as impiously flattered the Sovereign of Persia, when, for the sake of currying favour with that majestic barbarian, he every night, in his own house, prepared a solemn supper, richly provided, and offered to the genius of the King, (τῶ δαίμονι τοῦ Βασιλέως,) for no better reason than that he had learned that such was the custom in Persia. Whether he profited or not by this delicate attention, Theopompus does not inform us.
The Anactes or Princes of the royal family of Salamis maintained two distinct families, in whom, if I understand Athenæus rightly, the office of flatterer (and of spy, I may add) was hereditary. These were the Gerginoi and the Promalangai. The former did the dirty work of circulating among the people, worming themselves into their confidence, getting invited to their tables, and then reporting to the Promalangai all they had heard. The last-named took such portions of the report as were worth communicating to the Anactes, with whom they sat at table, where such a dish of scandal was daily served as would puzzle the social spies of Paris to set before their lord.
But the profession was not accounted vile; and the professors themselves gloried in their vocation. They extolled the easiness of their life, compared, for instance,with that of the painter, or the labourer, or, in fact, with that of any other individual but those of their own guild. “Truly,” says one, in a fragment of Antiphanes, “since the most important business in life is to play, laugh, trifle, and drink, I should like to know where you would find a condition more agreeable than ours.”
Once, and once only, a faction of parasites contrived to get possession of a kingdom; and the dinners they gave, and the government they maintained, are matters to which description can hardly do justice. The faction in question was headed by, and almost solely consisted of, three men in Erythra, who stood, in regard to Cnopus, the King, as “adorers and flatterers” (πρόσκυνες καὶ κόλακες). They murdered their Sovereign, and, by acoup-d’état, possessed themselves of his authority. Their names were Ortyges, Irus, and Echarus; and they ruled with a triple rod of iron, held in very effeminate fingers. They silenced all opponents by slaying them; and, when no one dared utter a breath against them, they vaunted their universal popularity. They administered a ferociously absurd sort of justice at the gates of Erythra, where they sat decked out in purple and gold. They were sandaled like women, wore ornaments only suitable to females, and sat down to dinner in diadems that dazzled the company.
The guests were once free citizens, who were now compelled to bear the litters of theirparvenumasters, to cleanse the streets, and then, by way of contrast, to attend the banquet of the Triumvirs, with their wives and daughters. If they objected to drag these latter to the scene of splendid infamy, the objection was only made at the price of death. The unhappy women were nothing the safer from insult by the decease of their natural protectors; and the scenes at the palace were such as only the uncleanest of demons could rejoice in. If the authoritieshad reason to be grave, the whole city was compelled to affect sorrow; and duly-appointed officers went round, with hard-thonged whips, to scourge a sense of “decent horror” into the countenances of the bewildered inhabitants. Things at last reached such a pitch of extravagant atrocity, that the people took heart of grace, screwed up their courage by Chian wine, and swept their oppressors into Hades;—and, for years afterwards, commemorative banquets celebrated the restoration of the people from the oppression of the parasites.
I would recommend those who would see the parasite in action, to study the comedies of Plautus, wherein he figures as necessarily as the impertinent valet in a Spanish comedy. Plautus calls the parasitespoetæ, as being given to lying; and it is singular that the Gauls called their poets “parasites,” as being fond of good living, and not being always in a condition to procure it. They had their “dull season:” it was when the wealthy were at their villas; at which time the parasites dined upon nothing, in town, with good “Duke Humphrey.” When the city was again resorted to by the rich, then the parasite might sometimes be seen purchasing, by order of his patron, the provisions for the evening feast. We find one of these gentry, in Plautus, boasting that he knows a story that will be worth thirty dinners to him. Before the era of printing, the parasite, with his jests and histories, was a sort of living Circulating Library. Saturion (another of Plautus’s pictures of the parasite) is at peace with himself, because, as he says, he can provide for his daughter by bequeathing to her his rich collection of jokes and dinner-stories. “They are all sparkling Attic,” he says; “and there is not a dull Sicilian anecdote among them.”
If the race were, in some sense of the word, “literary,” they were not at all in love with science, or the improvementswrought by its application. Witness the bitterness with which Plautus makes one denounce the sun-dial, then of recent introduction. Before that tell-tale appeared, dinners used to be served when people were hungry; butnoweven hungry people wait for the appointed hour. In short, throughout life, they worked but for the sake of the banquet and wine-pot; and, even after death, they longed for libations, as appears in the epitaph on the parasite, Sergius of Pola, who is made to say, from the grave,—
“Si urbani perhiberi vultisArenti meo cineri,Cantharo piaculum vinarium festinate.”
“Si urbani perhiberi vultisArenti meo cineri,Cantharo piaculum vinarium festinate.”
“Si urbani perhiberi vultisArenti meo cineri,Cantharo piaculum vinarium festinate.”
“Si urbani perhiberi vultis
Arenti meo cineri,
Cantharo piaculum vinarium festinate.”
“If you’ve any regard for this corpse here of mine,Be so good as to damp it with hogsheads of wine.”
“If you’ve any regard for this corpse here of mine,Be so good as to damp it with hogsheads of wine.”
“If you’ve any regard for this corpse here of mine,Be so good as to damp it with hogsheads of wine.”
“If you’ve any regard for this corpse here of mine,
Be so good as to damp it with hogsheads of wine.”
Finally, these diners-out by profession were essentially selfish; and the fire of their attachment blazed up, or died away, according to that in the kitchen of the Amphitryon by whom they were maintained.
A good specimen of the parasite of the last century may be found in the Captain Cormorant of Anstey’s “Bath Guide;” but the race is by no means extinct, though the individual be more rarely met with; and, be it said as their due, they execute their office with something more of decency than did their ancient predecessors. Modern flattery, like modern oils, is “double refined.” Let us see if we can trace the course of this refinement through the Table Traits of Utopia and the Golden Age.