SIMON Well, that it excels all put together, I think I have demonstrated. Come now, let us see how it excels each individually. To compare it with the vulgar arts is silly, and, in a way, more appropriate to someone who is trying to belittle its dignity. We must prove that it excels the finest and greatest of them. It is universally admitted that rhetoric and philosophy, which some people even make out to be sciences because of their nobility, are the greatest. Therefore, if I should prove that Parasitic is far superior to these, obviously it will appear preeminent among the other arts, like Nausicaa among her handmaidens.

Odyssey6, 102-109.

It excels both rhetoric and philosophy, in the first place in its objective reality; for it has this, and they have not. We do not hold one and the same view about rhetoric; some of us call it an art, some a want of art, others a depraved art, and others something else. So too with philosophy, which is not uniform and consistent; for Epicurus has on opinion about things, the Stoics another, the Academics another, the Peripatetics another; in brief, everybody claims that philosophy is something different, and up to now, at all events, it cannot be said either that the same men control opinion or that their art is one. By this it is clear what conclusion remains to be drawn. I maintain that there can be no art at all which has not objective reality. For how else can you explain it that arithmetic is one and the same, and twice two is four not only here but in Persia, and all its doctrines are in tune not only in Greece but in strange lands, yet we see many different philosophies, all of them out of tune both in their beginnings and in their ends?

TYCHIADES You are right: they say philosophy is one, but they themselves make it many.

SIMON As far as the other arts are concerned, if there should be some discord in them, one might pass it over, thinking it excusable, since they are subordinate and their knowledges are not exempt from change. But who could endure that philosophy should not be one, and in better tune with itself than a musical instrument? Well now, philosophy is not one, for I see that it is infinitely many; yet it cannot be many, for wisdom is one.

The same can be said, too, of the objective reality of rhetoric. When all do not express the same views about one subject, but there is a battle royal of contradictory declarations, that is the greatest proot that the subject of which there is not a single definite conception does not exist at all; for to enquire whether it is this rather than that, and never to agree that it is one, does away with the very existence of the subject that is questioned.

This is not the case, however, with Parasitic. Both among Greeks and among foreigners it is one and uniform and consistent, and nobody can say that it is practised in one way by this set of men and in another by that set. Nor are there, it seems, among parasites any sects like the Stoics or the Epicureans, holding different doctrines; no, there is concord among them all, and agreement in their works and in their end. So to my thinking Parasitic may well be, in this respect at least, actually wisdom.