Delphi Complete Works of Lucian

by Lucian Samosata

  Tyc. I like shocks.

  Si. Well, I will tell you some day.

  Tyc. Now, I say; or else I shall know you are ashamed of it.

  Si. Well, then, I sponge.

  Tyc. Why, what sane man would call sponging a profession?

  Si. I, for one. And if you think I am not sane, put down my innocence of other professions to insanity, and let that be my sufficient excuse. My lady Insanity, they say, is unkind to her votaries in most respects; but at least she excuses their offences, which she makes herself responsible for, like a schoolmaster or tutor.

  Tyc. So sponging is an art, eh?

  Si. It is; and I profess it.

  Tyc. So you are a sponger?

  Si. What an awful reproach!

  Tyc. What! you do not blush to call yourself a sponger?

  Si. On the contrary, I should be ashamed of not calling myself so.

  Tyc. And when we want to distinguish you for the benefit of any one who does not know you, but has occasion to find you out, we must say ‘the sponger,’ naturally?

  Si. The name will be more welcome to me than ‘statuary’ to Phidias; I am as proud of my profession as Phidias of his Zeus.

  Tyc. Ha, ha, ha! Excuse me — just a particular that occurred to me.

  Si. Namely ——?

  Tyc. Think of the address of your letters — Simon the Sponger!

  Si. Simon the Sponger, Dion the Philosopher. I shall like mine as well as he his.

  Tyc. Well, well, your taste in titles concerns me very little. Come now to the next absurdity.

  Si. Which is ——?

  Tyc. The getting it entered on the list of arts. When any one asks what the art is, how do we describe it? Letters we know, Medicine we know; Sponging?

  Si. My own opinion is, that it has an exceptionally good right to the name of art. If you care to listen, I will explain, though I have not got this properly into shape, as I remarked before.

  Tyc. Oh, a brief exposition will do, provided it is true.

  Si. I think, if you agree, we had better examine Art generically first; that will enable us to go into the question whether the specific arts really belong under it.

  Tyc. Well, what is Art? Of course you know that?

  Si. Quite well.

  Tyc. Out with it, then, as you know.

  Si. An art, as I once heard a wise man say, is a body of perceptions regularly employed for some useful purpose in human life.

  Tyc. And he was quite right.

  Si. So, if sponging has all these marks, it must be an art?

  Tyc. If, yes.

  Si. Well, now we will bring to bear on sponging each of these essential elements of Art, and see whether its character rings true, or returns a cracked note like bad pottery when it is tapped. It has got to be, like all art, a body of perceptions. Well, we find at once that our artist has to distinguish critically the man who will entertain him satisfactorily and not give him reason to wish that he had sponged elsewhere. Now, in as much as assaying — which is no more than the power of distinguishing between false and true coin — is a recognized profession, you will hardly refuse the same status to that which distinguishes between false and true men; the genuineness of men is more obscure than that of coins; this indeed is the gist of the wise Euripides’s complaint:

  But among men how tell the base apart?

  Virtue and vice stamp not the outward flesh.

  So much the greater the sponger’s art, which beats prophecy in the certainty of its conclusions upon problems so difficult.

  Next, there is the faculty of so directing your words and actions as to effect intimacy and convince your patron of your devotion: is that consistent with weak understanding or perception?

  Tyc. Certainly not.

  Si. Then at table one has to outshine other people, and show the difference between amateur and professional: is that to be done without thought and ingenuity?

  Tyc. No, indeed.

  Si. Or perhaps you fancy that any outsider who will take the trouble can tell a good dinner from a bad one. Well, the mighty Plato says, if the guest is not versed in cookery, the dressing of the banquet will be but unworthily judged.

  The next point to be established is, that sponging depends not merely on perceptions, but on perceptions regularly employed. Nothing simpler. The perceptions on which other arts are based frequently remain unemployed by their owner for days, nights, months, or years, without his art’s perishing; whereas, if those of the sponger were to miss their daily exercise, not merely his art would perish, but he with it.

  There remains the ‘useful purpose in human life’; it would take a madman to question that here. I find nothing that serves a more useful purpose in human life than eating and drinking; without them you cannot live.

  Tyc. That is true.

  Si. Moreover, sponging is not to be classed with beauty and strength, and so called a quality instead of an art?

  Tyc. No.

  Si. And, in the sphere of art, it does not denote the negative condition, of unskilfulness. That never brings its owner prosperity. Take an instance: if a man who did not understand navigation took charge of a ship in a stormy sea, would he be safe?

  Tyc. Not he.

  Si. Why, now? Because he wants the art which would enable him to save his life?

  Tyc. Exactly.

  Si. It follows that, if sponging was the negative of art, the sponger would not save his life by its means?

  Tyc. Yes.

  Si. A man is saved by art, not by the absence of it?

  Tyc. Quite so.

  Si. So sponging is an art?

  Tyc. Apparently.

  Si. Let me add that I have often known even good navigators and skilful drivers come to grief, resulting with the latter in bruises and with the former in death but no one will tell you of a sponger who ever made shipwreck. Very well, then, sponging is neither the negative of art, nor is it a quality; but it is a body of perceptions regularly employed. So it emerges from the present discussion an art.

  Tyc. That seems to be the upshot. But now proceed to give us a good definition of your art.

  Si. Well thought of. And I fancy this will about do: Sponging is the art of eating and drinking, and of the talk by which these may be secured; its end is Pleasure.

  Tyc. A very good definition, I think. But I warn you that your end will bring you into conflict with some of the philosophers.

  St. Ah well, if sponging agrees with Happiness about the end, we may be content.

  And that it does I will soon show you. The wise Homer, admiring the sponger’s life as the only blissful enviable one, has this:

  I say no fairer end may be attained

  Than when the people is attuned to mirth,

  . . . . . and groans the festal board

  With meat and bread, and the cup-bearer’s ladle

  From flowing bowl to cup the sweet wine dips.

  As if this had not made his admiration quite clear enough, he lays a little more emphasis, good man, on his personal opinion:

  This in my heart I count the highest bliss.

  Moreover, the character to whom he entrusts these words is not just any one; it is the wisest of the Greeks. Well now, if Odysseus had cared to say a word for the end approved by the Stoics, he had plenty of chances — when he brought back Philoctetes from Lemnos, when he sacked Troy, when he stopped the Greeks from giving up, or when he made his way into Troy by scourging himself and putting on rags bad enough for any Stoic. But no; he never said theirs was a fairer end. And again, when he was living an Epicurean life with Calypso, when he could spend idle luxurious days, enjoying the daughter of Atlas and giving the rein to every soft emotion, even then he had not his fairer end; that was still the life of the sponger. Banqueter was the word used for sponger in his day; what does he say? I must quote the lines again; nothing like repetition: ‘The banqueters in order set’; and ‘groans the festal board With meat and bread.’

  It was a remarkable piece of impudence on Epicurus�
�s part to appropriate the end that belongs to sponging for his system of Happiness. That it was a bit of larceny — Epicurus having nothing, and the sponger much, to do with Pleasure — I will soon show you. I take it that Pleasure means, first, bodily tranquillity, and secondly, an untroubled soul. Well, the sponger attains both, Epicurus neither. A man who is busy inquiring into the earth’s shape, the infinity of worlds, the sun’s size, astronomic distances, the elements, the existence or non-existence of Gods, and who is engaged in incessant controversies about the end — he is a prey not merely to human, but to cosmic perturbations. Whereas the sponger, convinced that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, living secure and calm with no such perplexities to trouble him, eats and sleeps and lies on his back, letting his hands and feet look after themselves, like Odysseus on his passage home from Scheria.

  But here is an independent refutation of Epicurus’s pretensions to Pleasure. Our Epicurus, whoever his Wisdom may be, either is, or is not, supplied with victuals. If he is not, so far from having a pleasurable life, he will have no life at all. If he is, does he get them out of his own means, or from some one else? If the latter, he is a sponger, and not what he says he is; if the former, he will not have a pleasurable life.

  Tyc. How so?

  Si. Why, if his food is provided out of his own means, that way of life has many consequences; reckon them up. You will admit that, if the principle of your life is to be pleasure, all your appetites have to be satisfied?

  Tyc. I agree.

  Si. Well, a large income may possibly meet that requirement, a scanty one certainly not; consequently, a poor man cannot be a philosopher, or in other words attain the end, which is Pleasure. But neither will the rich, who lavishes his substance on his desires, attain it. And why? Because spending has many worries inseparably attached to it; your cook disappoints you, and you must either have strained relations with him, or else purchase peace and quiet by feeding badly and missing your pleasure. Then similar difficulties attend your steward’s management of the house. You must admit all this.

  Tyc. Oh, certainly, I agree.

  Si. In fact, something or other is sure to happen and cut off Epicurus from his end. Now the sponger has no cook to be angry with, no farm, steward or money to be annoyed at the loss of; at the same time he lives on the fat of the land, and is the one person who can eat and drink without the worries from which others cannot escape.

  That sponging is an art, has now been abundantly proved; it remains to show its superiority; and this I shall take in two divisions: first, it has a general superiority to all the arts; and, secondly, it is superior to each of them separately. The general superiority is this: the arts have to be instilled by dint of toil, threats and blows — regrettable necessities, all of them; my own art, of which the acquisition costs no toil, is perhaps the only exception. Who ever came away from dinner in tears? with the schoolroom it is different; or who ever went out to dinner with the dismal expression characteristic of going to school? No, the sponger needs no pressing to get him to table; he is devoted to his profession; it is the other apprentices who hate theirs, to the point of running away, sometimes. And it is worth your notice that a parent’s usual reward for a child who makes progress in the ordinary arts is just the thing that the sponger gets regularly. The lad has done his writing well, they say; let him have something nice: what vile writing! let him go without. Oh, the mouth is very useful for reward and punishment.

  Again, with the other arts the result comes only after the learning is done; their fruits alone are agreeable; ‘long and steep the road thereto.’ Sponging is once more an exception, in that profit and learning here go hand in hand; you grasp your end as soon as you begin. And whereas all other arts are practised solely for the sustenance they will ultimately bring, the sponger has his sustenance from the day he starts. You realize, of course, that the farmer’s object in farming is something else than farming, the carpenter’s something different from abstract carpentering; but the sponger has no ulterior object; occupation and pre-occupation are for him one and the same.

  Then it is no news to any one that other professions slave habitually, and get just one or two holidays a month; States keep some monthly and some yearly festivals; these are their times of enjoyment. But the sponger has thirty festivals a month; every day is a red-letter day with him.

  Once more, success in the other arts presupposes a diet as abstemious as any invalid’s; eat and drink to your heart’s content, and you make no progress in your studies.

  Other arts, again, are useless to their professor unless he has his plant; you cannot play the flute if you have not one to play; lyrical music requires a lyre, horsemanship a horse. But of ours one of the excellences and conveniences is that no instrument is required for its exercise.

  Other arts we pay, this we are paid, to learn.

  Further, while the rest have their teachers, no one teaches sponging; it is a gift from Heaven, as Socrates said of poetry.

  Then do not forget that, while the others have to be suspended during a journey or a voyage, this may be in full swing under those circumstances too.

  Tyc. No doubt about that.

  Si. Another point that strikes me is that other arts feel the need of this one, but not vice versa.

  Tyc. Well, but is the appropriation of what belongs to others no offence?

  Si. Of course it is.

  Tyc. Well, the sponger does that; why is he privileged to offend?

  Si. Ah, I know nothing about that. But now look here: you know how common and mean are the beginnings of the other arts; that of sponging, on the contrary, is noble. Friendship, that theme of the encomiast, is neither more nor less, you will find, than the beginning of sponging.

  Tyc. How do you make that out?

  Si. Well, no one asks an enemy, a stranger, or even a mere acquaintance, to dinner; the man must be his friend before he will share bit and sup with him, and admit him to initiation in these sacred mysteries. I know I have often heard people say, Friend, indeed! by what right? he has never eaten or drunk with us. You see; only the man who has done that is a friend to be trusted.

  Next take a sound proof, though not the only one, that it is the most royal of the arts: at the rest of them men have to work (not to mention toil and sweat) in the sitting or standing posture, which marks them for the absolute slaves of their art, whereas the sponger is free to recline like a king.

  As to his happy condition, I need no more than allude to the wise Homer’s words; he it is, and he alone, that ‘planteth not, nor ploughs’; he ‘reapeth where he hath not ploughed nor sown.’

  Again, while knavery and folly are no bar to rhetoric, mathematics, or copper-working, no knave or fool can get on as a sponger.

  Tyc. Dear, dear, what an amazing profession! I am almost tempted to exchange my own for it.

  Si. I consider I have now established its superiority to art in general; let us next show how it excels individual arts. And it would be silly to compare it with the trades; I leave that to its detractors, and undertake to prove it superior to the greatest and most honourable professions. Such by universal acknowledgement are Rhetoric and Philosophy; indeed, some people insist that no name but science is grand enough for them; so if I prove sponging to be far above even these, a fortiori it will excel the others as Nausicaa her maids.

  Now, its first superiority it enjoys over Philosophy and Rhetoric alike, and this is in the matter of real existence; it can claim that, they cannot. Instead of our having a single consistent notion of Rhetoric, some of us consider it an art, some the negation of art, some a mere artfulness, and so on. Similarly there is no unity in Philosophy’s subject, or in its relation to it; Epicurus takes one view, the Stoics another, the Academy, the Peripatetics, others; in fact Philosophy has as many definitions as definers. So far at least victory wavers between them, and their profession cannot be called one. The conclusion is obvious; I utterly deny that what has no real existence can be an art. To illustrate:
there is one and only one Arithmetic; twice two is four whether here or in Persia; Greeks and barbarians have no quarrel over that; but philosophies are many and various, agreed neither upon their beginnings nor their ends.

  Tyc. Perfectly true; they call Philosophy one, but they make it many.

  Si. Well, such a want of harmony might be excused in other arts, they being of a contingent nature, and the perceptions on which they are based not being immutable. But that Philosophy should lack unity, and even conflict with itself like instruments out of tune — how can that be tolerated? Philosophy, then, is not one, for I find its diversity infinite. And it cannot be many, because it is Philosophy, not philosophies.

  The real existence of Rhetoric must incur the same criticism. That with the same subject-matter all professors should not agree, but maintain conflicting opinions, amounts to a demonstration: that which is differently apprehended cannot exist. The inquiry whether a thing is this or that, in place of agreement that it is one, is tantamount to a negation of its existence.