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 into a 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 forced to 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.”