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Simon Oh, yes; they discuss manliness every day, and do a great deal more towards wearing out the word Virtue than the orators; but you will find them still greater cowards and shirkers. How do I know? —In the first place, can any one name a philosopher killed in battle? No, they either do not serve, or else run away. Antisthenes, Diogenes, Crates, Zeno, Plato, Aeschines, Aristotle, and all their company, never set eyes on a battle array. Their wise Socrates was the solitary one who dared to go out; and in the battle of Delium he ran away from Mount Parnes and got safe to the gymnasium of Taureas. It was a far more civilized proceeding, according to his ideas, to sit there talking soft nongense to handsome striplings and posing the company with quibbles, than to cross spears with a grown Spartan.
43
Tychiades Well, I have heard these stories before, and from people who had no satirical intent. So I acquit you of slandering them by way of magnifying your own profession.
44
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.
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Simon 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.
45
Tychiades 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.
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Tychiades How do they go?
