“——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 latter affected 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 all men!” 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 a disease 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,