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What is your own inference as to the character of the parasite in war? In the first place, does he not get his breakfast before he leaves his quarters to fall in, just as Odysseus thinks it right to do? Under no other circumstances, he says, is it possible to continue fighting in battle even if one should be obliged to begin fighting at the very break of day.Iliad 19, 160-163. While the other soldiers in affright are adjusting their helmets with great pains, or putting on their breastplates, or quaking in sheer anticipation of the horrors of war, the parasite eats with a very cheerful visage; and directly after marching out he begins to fight in the first line. The man who supports him is posted in the second line, behind the parasite, who covers him with his shield as Ajax covered Teucer, and when missiles are flying exposes himself to protect his patron; for he prefers to save his patron rather than himself.
50
If a parasite should actually fall in battle, certainly neither captain nor private soldier would be ashamed of his huge body, elegantly reclining as at an elegant banquet. Indeed it would be worth one’s while to look at a philosopher’s body lying beside it, lean, squalid, with a long beard, a sickly creature dead before the battle! Who would not despise this city if he saw that her targeteers were such wretches? Who, when he saw pale, long-haired varlets lying on the field, would not suppose that the city for lack of reserves had freed for service the malefactors in her prison? That is how parasites compare with rhetoricians and philosophers in war.
51
In peace, it seems to me, Parasitic excels philosophy as greatly as peace itself excels war. First, if you please, let us consider the strongholds of peace.
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TYCHIADES I do not understand what that means, but let us consider it all the same.
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SIMON Well, I should say that market-places, law-courts, athletic fields, gymnasia, hunting-parties and dinners were a city’s strongholds. TYCHIADES To be sure.
