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SIMON Now then, let us apply to Parasitic the individual characteristics of an art and see whether it is in harmony with them or whether its theory, like a good-for-nothing pot when you try its ring, sounds cracked.Just so Critolaus had tested rhetoric and found it wanting: see Philodemus, Rhetoric 2; Sextus, Agatnet the Rhetortcrans; and Quintilian 2, 17. Every art, then, must be a complex of knowledges; and of these, in the case of the para site, first of all there is testing and deciding who would be suitable to support him, and whom he could begin to cultivate without being sorry for it later. Or do we care to maintain that assayers possess an art because they know how to distinguish between coins that are counterfeit and those that are not, but parasites discriminate without art between men that are counterfeit and those that are good, even though men are not distinguishable at once, like coins? Wise Euripides criticizes this very point when he Says: In men, no mark whereby to tell the knave Did ever yet upon his body grow. Euripides, Medea518. This makes the parasite’s art even greater, since it is better than divination at distinguishing and recognising things so obscure and hidden.
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As for knowing how to talk appropriately and to act in such a way as to become intimate and show himself extremely devoted to his patron, do not you think that this shows intelligence and highlydeveloped knowledge?
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TYCHIADES Yes, indeed.
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SIMON And at banquets, to go away with more than anybody else, enjoying greater favour than those who do not possess the same art—-do you think that can be managed without some degree of theory and wisdom? TYCHIADES Not by any means.
