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 a coup-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 their parvenu masters, 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 authorities had 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 parasites poetæ, 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 improvements wrought 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; but now even 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 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.”
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.