The Parasite Tychiades (46-50)

SIMON What, Tychiades, was not Patroclus parasite to Achilles, and that too although he was quite as fine a young man, both in spirit and in physique, as any of the other Greeks? For my part I think I am right in concluding from his deeds that he was not even inferior to Achilles himself. When Hector broached the gates and was fighting within them beside the ships, it was he that thrust him out and extinguished the ship of Protesilaus, which was already in flames. Yet the fighters who manned that ship were not the most cowardly of all: they were the sons of Telamon, Ajax and Teucer, one of whom was a good spearman, the other a good archer. And he slew many of the barbarians, among them Sarpedon, the son of Zeus, this parasite of Achilles! In his death too, he was not to be compared with the others. Achilles slew Hector, man to man, and Paris slew Achilles himself, but it needed a god and two men to slay the parasite.[*] And in dying, the words that he uttered were not like those of noble Hector, who humbled himself before Achilles and besought that his body be given back to his family; no, they

Even if twenty such men had come in my way in the battle,

All would have met their death, laid low by my spear on the instant.

TYCHIADES Enough said as to that; but try to show that Patroclus was not the friend but ‘the parasite of Achilles.

SIMON I shall cite you Patroclus himself, Tychiades, saying that he was a parasite.

TYCHIADES That is a surprising statement.

SIMON Listen then to the lines themselves:

Let my bones not lie at a distance from thine, O Achilles:

Let them be close to your side, as I lived in the house of our kindred.

Kept me with kindliest care, and gave me the name of thy servant.

Observe also tliat in the same passage it is not Idomeneus, the son of Zeus, whom he thinks fit to call “unyielding in battle,” but Meriones, his parasite.[*]

Again, was not Aristogeiton, who was a man of the people and a pauper, as Thucydides says, parasite to Harmodius?[*] Was he not his lover also? Naturally parasites are lovers of those who support them. Well, this parasite restored the city of Athens to freedom when she was in bondage to a tyrant, and now his statue stands in bronze in the public square along with that of his favourite.

Certainly these men, who were of such distinction, were very doughty parasites.

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.[*] 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

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.