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.
_Tyc_. Oh, certainly, I agree.
_Si_. 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 school? No, the sponger needs
no pressing to get him to table; he is devoted to his profession;
it is the other apprentices who hate theirs, to the point of
running away, sometimes. And it is worth your notice that a
parent’s usual reward for a child who makes progress in the
ordinary arts is just the thing that the sponger gets regularly.
The lad has done his writing well, they say; let him have something
nice: what vile writing! let him go without. Oh, the mouth is very
useful for reward and punishment.
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 are 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.
_Tyc_. No doubt about that.
_Si_. Another point that strikes me is that other arts feel
the need of this one, but not vice versa.
_Tyc_. Well, but is the appropriation of what belongs to
others no offence?
_Si_. Of course it is.
_Tyc_. Well, the sponger does that; why is he privileged to
offend?
_Si_. Ah, I know nothing about that. But now look here: you
know how common and mean are the beginnings of the other arts; that
of sponging, on the contrary, is noble. Friendship, that theme of
the encomiast, is neither more nor less, you will find, than the
beginning of sponging.
_Tyc_. How do you make that out?
_Si_. Well, no one asks an enemy, a stranger, or even a mere
acquaintance, to dinner; the man must be his friend before he will
share bit and sup with him, and admit him to initiation in these
sacred mysteries. I know I have often heard people say, Friend,
indeed! by what right? he has never eaten or drunk with us. You
see; only the man who has done that is a friend to be trusted.
Next take a sound proof, though not the only one, that it is the
most royal of the arts: at the rest of them men have to work (not
to mention toil and sweat) in the sitting or standing posture,
which marks them for the absolute slaves of their art, whereas the
sponger is free to recline like a king.
As to his happy condition, I need no more than allude to the wise
Homer’s words; he it is, and he alone, that ‘planteth not, nor
ploughs’; he ‘reapeth where he hath not ploughed nor sown.’
Again, while knavery and folly are no bar to rhetoric, mathematics,
or copper-working, no knave or fool can get on as a sponger.
_Tyc_. Dear, dear, what an amazing profession! I am almost
tempted to exchange my own for it.
_Si_. I consider I have now established its superiority to art
in general; let us next show how it excels individual arts. And it
would be silly to compare it with the trades; I leave that to its
detractors, and undertake to prove it superior to the greatest and
most honourable professions. Such by universal acknowledgement are
Rhetoric and Philosophy; indeed, some people insist that no name
but science is grand enough for them; so if I prove sponging to be
far above even these, _a fortiori_ it will excel the others as
Nausicaa her maids.
Now, its first superiority it enjoys over Philosophy and Rhetoric
alike, and this is in the matter of real existence; it can claim
that, they cannot. Instead of our having a single consistent notion
of Rhetoric, some of us consider it an art, some the negation of
art, some a mere artfulness, and so on. Similarly there is no unity
in Philosophy’s subject, or in its relation to it; Epicurus takes
one view, the Stoics another, the Academy, the Peripatetics,
others; in fact Philosophy has as many definitions as definers. So
far at least victory wavers between them, and their profession
cannot be called _one._ The conclusion is obvious; I utterly
deny that what has no real existence can be an art. To illustrate:
there is one and only one Arithmetic; twice two is four whether
here or in Persia; Greeks and barbarians have no quarrel over that;
but philosophies are many and various, agreed neither upon their
beginnings nor their ends.
_Tyc_. Perfectly true; they call Philosophy one, but they make
it many.
_Si_. Well, such a want of harmony might be excused in other
arts, they being of a contingent nature, and the perceptions
on which they are based not being immutable. But that _Philosophy_
should lack unity, and even conflict with itself like instruments
out of tune—how can that be tolerated? Philosophy, then, is not
one, for I find its diversity infinite. And it cannot be many, because
it is Philosophy, not philosophies.
The real existence of Rhetoric must incur the same criticism. That
with the same subject-matter all professors should not agree, but
maintain conflicting opinions, amounts to a demonstration: that
which is differently apprehended cannot exist. The inquiry whether
a thing is this or that, in place of agreement that it is one, is
tantamount to a negation of its existence.
How different is the case of Sponging! for Greeks or barbarians,
_one_ in nature and subject and method. No one will tell you
that these sponge this way, and those that; there are no spongers
with peculiar principles, to match those of Stoics and Epicureans,
that I know of; they are all agreed; their conduct and their end
alike harmonious. Sponging, I take it on this showing, is just
Wisdom itself.
_Tyc_. Yes, I think you have dealt with that point sufficiently;
apart from that, how do you show the inferiority of Philosophy to
your art?
_Si_. I must first mention that no sponger was ever in love
with Philosophy; but many philosophers are recorded to have set
their hearts on Sponging, to which they still remain constant.
_Tyc_. Philosophers caring to sponge? Names, please.
_Si_. Names? You know them well enough; you only play at not
knowing because you regard it as a slur on their characters,
instead of as the credit it is.
_Tyc_. Simon, I solemnly assure you I cannot think where you
will find your instances.
_Si_. Honour bright? Then I conclude you never patronize their
biographers, or you could not hesitate about my reference.
_Tyc_. Seriously, I long to hear their names.
_Si_. Oh, I will give you a list; not bad names either; the
_elite_, if I am correctly informed; they will rather surprise
you. Aeschines the Socratic, now, author of dialogues as witty as
they are long, brought them with him to Sicily in the hope that
they would gain him the royal notice of Dionysius; having given a
reading of the _Miltiades_, and found himself famous, he settled
down in Sicily to sponge on Dionysius and forget Socratic
composition.
Again, I suppose you will pass Aristippus of Cyrene as a
distinguished philosopher?
_Tyc_. Assuredly.
_Si_. Well, he was living there too at the same time and on
the same terms. Dionysius reckoned him the best of all spongers; he
had indeed a special gift that way; the prince used to send his
cooks to him daily for instruction. He, I think, was really an
ornament to the profession.
Well then, Plato, the noblest of you all, came to Sicily with the
same view; he did a few days’ sponging, but found himself
incompetent and had to leave. He went back to Athens, took
considerable pains with himself, and then had another try, with
exactly the same result, however. Plato’s Sicilian disaster seems
to me to bear comparison with that of Nicias.
_Tyc_. Your authority for all this, pray?
_Si_. Oh, there are plenty of authorities; but I will specify
Aristoxenus the musician, a weighty one enough, and himself
attached as a sponger to Neleus. Then you of course know that
Euripides held this relation to Archelaus till the day of his
death, and Anaxarchus to Alexander.
As for Aristotle, that tiro in all arts was a tiro here too.
I have shown you, then, and without exaggeration, the philosophic
passion for sponging. On the other hand, no one can point to a
sponger who ever cared to philosophize.
But of course, if never to be hungry, thirsty, or cold, is to be
happy, the sponger is the man who is in that position. Cold hungry
philosophers you may see any day, but never a cold hungry sponger;
the man would not be a sponger, that is all, but a wretched pauper,
no better than a philosopher.
_Tyc_. Well, let that pass. And now what about those many
points in which your art is superior to Rhetoric and Philosophy?
_Si_. Human life, my dear sir, has its times and seasons;
there is peace time and there is war time. These provide unfailing
tests for the character of arts and their professors. Shall we take
war time first, and see who will do best for himself and for his
city under those conditions?
_Tyc_. Ah, now comes the tug of war. It tickles me, this queer
match between sponger and philosopher.
_Si_. Well, to make the thing more natural, and enable you to
take it seriously, let us picture the circumstances. Sudden news
has come of a hostile invasion; it has to be met; we are not going
to sit still while our outlying territory is laid waste; the
commander-in-chief issues orders for a general muster of all liable
to serve; the troops gather, including philosophers, rhetoricians,
and spongers. We had better strip them first, as the proper
preliminary to arming. Now, my dear sir, have a look at them
individually and see how they shape. Some of them you will find
thin and white with underfeeding—all goose-flesh, as if they were
lying wounded already. Now, when you think of a hard day, a stand-
up fight with press and dust and wounds, what is it but a sorry
jest to talk of such starvelings’ being able to stand it?
Now go and inspect the sponger. Full-bodied, flesh a nice colour,
neither white like a woman’s nor tanned like a slave’s; you can see
his spirit; he has a keen look, as a gentleman should, and a high,
full-blooded one to boot; none of your shrinking feminine glances
when you are going to war! A noble pike-man that, and a noble
corpse, for that matter, if a noble death is his fate.
But why deal in conjecture when there are facts to hand? I make the
simple statement that in war, of all the rhetoricians and
philosophers who ever lived, most never ventured outside the city
walls, and the few who did, under compulsion, take their places in
the ranks left their posts and went home.
_Tyc_. A bold extravagant assertion. Well, prove it.
_Si_. Rhetoricians, then. Of these, Isocrates, so far from serving
in war, never even ventured into a law-court; he was afraid,
because his voice was weak, I understand. Well, then Demades,
Aeschines, and Philocrates, directly the Macedonian war broke out,
were frightened into betraying their country and themselves to
Philip. They simply espoused his interests in Athenian politics;
and any other Athenian who took the same side was their friend. As
for Hyperides, Demosthenes, and Lycurgus, supposed to be bolder
spirits, and always raising scenes in the assembly with their abuse
of Philip, how did they ever show their prowess in the war?
Hyperides and Lycurgus never went out, did not so much as dare show
their noses beyond the gates; they sat snug inside in a domestic
state of siege, composing poor little decrees and resolutions. And
their great chieftain, who had no gentler words for Philip in the
assembly than ‘the brute from Macedon, which cannot produce even a
slave worth buying’—well, he did take heart of grace and go to
Boeotia the day before; but battle had not been joined when he
threw away his shield and made off. You must have heard this
before; it was common talk not only at Athens, but in Thrace and
Scythia, whence the creature was derived.
_Tyc_. Yes, I know all that. But then these are orators,
trained to speak, not to fight. But the philosophers; you cannot
say the same of them.
_Si_. Oh, yes; they discuss manliness every day, and do a
great deal more towards wearing out the word Virtue than the
orators; but you will find them still greater cowards and
shirkers.—How do I know?—In the first place, can any one name a
philosopher killed in battle? No, they either do not serve, or else
run away. Antisthenes, Diogenes, Crates, Zeno, Plato, Aeschines,
Aristotle, and all their company, never set eyes on a battle array.
Their wise Socrates was the solitary one who dared to go out; and
in the battle of Delium he ran away from Mount Parnes and got safe
to the gymnasium of Taureas. It was a far more civilized
proceeding, according to his ideas, to sit there talking soft
nonsense to handsome striplings and posing the company with
quibbles, than to cross spears with a grown Spartan.
_Tyc_. Well, I have heard these stories before, and from
people who had no satirical intent. So I acquit you of slandering
them by way of magnifying your own profession.
But come now, if you don’t mind, to the sponger’s military
behaviour; and also tell me whether there is any sponging recorded
of the ancients.
_Si_. My dear fellow, the most uneducated of us has surely
heard enough of Homer to know that he makes the best of his heroes
spongers. The great Nestor, whose tongue distilled honeyed speech,
sponged on the King; Achilles was, and was known for, the most
upright of the Greeks in form and in mind; but neither for him, for
Ajax, nor for Diomede, has Agamemnon such admiring praise as for
Nestor. It is not for ten Ajaxes or Achilleses that he prays; no,
Troy would have been taken long ago, if he had had in his host ten
men like—that old sponger. Idomeneus, of Zeus’s own kindred, is
also represented in the same relation to Agamemnon.
_Tyc_. I know the passages; but I do not feel sure of the
sense in which they were spongers.
_Si_. Well, recall the lines in which Agamemnon addresses
Idomeneus.
_Tyc_. How do they go?
_Si_.
For thee the cup stands ever full,
Even as for me, whene’er it lists thee drink.
When he speaks of the cup ever full, he means not that it is
perpetually ready (when Idomeneus is fighting or sleeping, for
instance), but that he has had the peculiar privilege all through
his life of sharing the King’s table without that special
invitation which is necessary for his other followers. Ajax, after
a glorious single combat with Hector, ‘they brought to lordly
Agamemnon,’ we are told; he, you see, is admitted to the royal
table (and high time too) as an honour; whereas Idomeneus and
Nestor were the King’s regular table companions; at least that is
my idea. Nestor I take to have been an exceedingly good and skilful
sponger on royalty; Agamemnon was not his first patron; he had
served his apprenticeship under Caeneus and Exadius. And but for
Agamemnon’s death I imagine he would never have relinquished the
profession.
_Tyc_. Yes, that was a first-class sponger. Can you give me
any more?
_Si_. Why, Tychiades, what else was Patroclus’s relation to
Achilles? and he was as fine a fellow, all round, as any Greek of
them all. Judging by his actions, I cannot make out that he was
inferior to Achilles himself. When Hector had forced the gates and
was fighting inside by the ships, it was Patroclus who repelled him
and extinguished the flames which had got a hold on Protesilaus’s
ship; yet one would not have said the people aboard her were
inefficient—Ajax and Teucer they were, one as good in the _melee_
as the other with his bow. A great number of the barbarians,
including Sarpedon the son of Zeus, fell to this sponger. His own
death was no common one. It took only one man, Achilles, to slay
Hector; Paris was enough for Achilles himself; but two men and a
God went to the killing of the sponger. And his last words bore no
resemblance to those of the mighty Hector, who prostrated himself
before Achilles and besought him to let his relations have his
body; no, they were such as might be expected from one of his
profession. Here they are:—
But of thy like I would have faced a score,
And all the score my spear had given to death.
_Tyc_. Yes, you have proved him a good man; but can you show
him to have been not Achilles’s friend, but a sponger?
_Si_. I will produce you his own statement to that effect.
_Tyc_. What a miracle-worker you are!
_Si_. Listen to the lines, then:
Achilles, lay my bones not far from thine;
Thou and thine fed me; let me lie by thee.
And a little further on he says:
Peleus me received,
And nurtured gently, and thy henchman named,
that is, gave him the right of sponging; if he had meant to allude
to Patroclus as his son’s friend, he would not have used the word
henchman; for he was a free man. What is a henchman, slaves and
friends being excluded? Why, obviously a sponger. Accordingly Homer
uses the same word of Meriones’s relation to Idomeneus. And by the
way it is not Idomeneus, though he was son of Zeus, that he
describes as ‘peer of Ares’; it is the sponger Meriones.
Again, did not Aristogiton, poor and of mean extraction, as
Thucydides describes him, sponge on Harmodius? He was also, of
course, in love with him—a quite natural relation between the two
classes. This sponger it was, then, who delivered Athens from
tyranny, and now adorns the marketplace in bronze, side by side
with the object of his passion. And now I have given you an example
or two of the profession.
But what sort of a guess do you make at the sponger’s behaviour in
war? In the first place, he will fight on a full belly, as Odysseus
advises. You must feed the man who is to fight, he says, however
early in the morning it may happen to be. The time that others
spend in fitting on helmet or breastplate with nervous care, or in
anticipating the horrors of battle, he will devote to putting away
his food with a cheerful countenance, and as soon as business
begins you will find him in front. His patron will take his place
behind him, sheltering under his shield as Teucer under Ajax’s;
when missiles begin to fly the sponger will expose himself for his
patron, whose safety he values more than his own.
Should he fall in battle, neither officer nor comrade need feel
ashamed of that great body, which now reclines as appropriate an
ornament of the battle-field as it once was of the dining-room. A
pretty sight is a philosopher’s body by its side, withered,
squalid, and bearded; he was dead before the fight began, poor
weakling. Who would not despise the city whose guards are such
miserable creatures? Who would not suppose, seeing these pallid,
hairy manikins scattered on the ground, that it had none to fight
for it, and so had turned out its gaol-birds to fill the ranks?
That is how the spongers differ from the rhetoricians and
philosophers in war.
Then in peace time, sponging seems to me as much better than
philosophy as peace itself than war. Be kind enough to glance first
at the scenes of peace.
_Tyc_. I do not quite know what they are; but let us glance at
them, by all means.
_Si_. Well, you will let me describe as civil scenes the
market, the courts, the wrestling-schools and gymnasia, the hunting
field and the dining-room?
_Tyc_. Certainly.
_Si_. To market and courts the sponger gives a wide berth they
are the haunts of chicanery; there is no satisfaction to be got out
of them. But at wrestling-school and gymnasium he is in his
element; he is their chief glory. Show me a philosopher or orator
who is in the same class with him when he strips in the wrestling-
school; look at them in the gymnasium; they shame instead of
adorning it. And in a lonely place none of them would face the
onset of a wild beast; the sponger will, though, and find no
difficulty in disposing of it; his table familiarity with it has
bred contempt. A stag or a wild boar may put up its bristles; he
will not mind; the boar may whet its tusks against him; he only
returns the compliment. As for hares, he is more deadly to them
than a greyhound. And then in the dining-room, where is his match,
to jest or to eat? Who will contribute most to entertainment, he
with his song and his joke, or a person who has not a laugh in him,
sits in a threadbare cloak, and keeps his eyes on the ground as if
he was at a funeral and not a dinner? If you ask me, I think a
philosopher has about as much business in a dining-room as a bull
in a china-shop.
But enough of this. What impression does one get of the sponger’s
actual life, when one compares it with the other? First it will be
found that he is indifferent to reputation, and does not care a jot
what people think about him, whereas all rhetoricians and
philosophers without exception are the slaves of vanity,
reputation, and what is worse, of money. No one could be more
careless of the pebbles on the shore than the sponger is of money;
he would as soon touch fire as gold. But the rhetoricians and, as
if that were not bad enough, the professed philosophers, are
beneath contempt in this respect. No need to illustrate in the case
of the rhetoricians; but of the philosophers whose repute stands
highest at present, one was lately convicted of taking a bribe for
his verdict in a law-suit, and another expects a salary for giving
a prince his company, and counts it no shame to go into exile in
his old age, and hire himself out for pay like some Indian or
Scythian captive. The very name his conduct has earned him calls no
blush to his cheek.