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:—