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.