Page:Lucian (IA lucianlucas00collrich).pdf/149

Rh in examining the comedies of Plautus and Terence. Lucian has not omitted to handle, in his own style, a character so well known, and which presented such fair game to the writer who set himself to hunt down the follies of the times. Yet the little dialogue called "," in which he introduces one of these mendicants of society arguing stoutly in defence of his vocation, is one of the most good-humoured of all. Perhaps there was an amount of bonhomie about a man who could not afford to he disagreeable which disarmed the satirist, together with a serio-comic "poor-devil" misery inevitable to his position which excited pity as well as contempt. Few readers can lay down the "Phormio" of Terence without a kindly feeling towards its unabashed and ingenious hero.

Simo, the Parasite of Lucian's Dialogue, makes open profession of his vocation, like Phormio. The friend with whom the conversation is carried on, knowing that Simo's private means are small, is curious to know by what trade or employment he gains his living, since he cannot make out that he follows any. Simo assures him that there is a school of art in which he is a perfect master, and which never allows him to be in want. It is the art of Parasitism. And he proceeds to prove, by an argument in the catechetical style of Socrates and Plato, that it is an art of the highest and most perfect kind. It falls quite within the definition of art as given by the philosophers—"a system of approved rules co-operating to a certain end, useful to society." As to the usefulness of the end, nothing is so useful—nay, so absolutely needful—as eating and