I am curious about you, Simon. Ordinary people, free and slaves alike, have some trade or profession that enables them to benefit themselves and others; you seem to be an exception.

I do not quite see what you mean, Tychiades; put it a little clearer.

I want to know whether you have a profession of any sort; for instance, are you a musician?

Certainly not.

A doctor?

No.

A mathematician?

No.

Do you teach rhetoric, then? I need not ask about philosophy; you have about as much to do with that as sin has.

Less, if possible. Do not imagine that you are enlightening me upon my failings. I acknowledge myself a sinner— worse than you take me for.

Very well. But possibly you have abstained from these professions because nothing great is easy. Perhaps a trade is more in your way; are you a carpenter or cobbler? Your circumstances are hardly such as to make a trade superfluous.

Quite true. Well, I have no skill in any of these.

But in——?

An excellent one, in my opinion; if you were acquainted with it you would agree, I am sure. I can claim to be a practical master in the art by this time; whether I can give an account of my faith is another question.

What is it?

No, I do not think I have got up the theory of it sufficiently. For the present, rest assured that I have a profession, and cease your strictures on that head. Its nature you shall know another time.

No, no; I will not be put off like that.

Well, I am afraid my profession would be rather a shock to you.

I like shocks.

Well, I will tell you some day.

Now, I say; or else I shall know you are ashamed of it.

Well, then, I sponge.

Why, what sane man would call sponging a profession?

I, for one. And if you think I am not sane, put down my innocence of other professions to insanity, and let that be my sufficient excuse. My lady Insanity, they say, is unkind to her votaries in most respects; but at least she excuses their offences, which she makes herself responsible for, like a schoolmaster or tutor.

So sponging is an art, eh?

It is; and I profess it.

So you are a sponger?

What an awful reproach! Tyé, What! you do not blush to call yourself a sponger?

On the contrary, I should be ashamed of not calling myself so.

And when we want to distinguish you for the benefit of any one who does not know you, but has occasion to find you out, we must say ‘the sponger,’ naturally?

The name will be more welcome to me than ‘statuary ” to Phidias; I am as proud of my profession as Phidias of his Zeus.

Ha, ha, ha! Excuse me—just a particular that occurred to me.

Namely-——?

Think of the address of your letters—Simon the Sponger!

Simon the Sponger, Dion the Philosopher. I shall like mine as well as he his.

Well, well, your taste in titles concerns me very little. Come now to the next absurdity.

Which is?

The getting it entered on the list of arts, When any one asks what the art is, how do we describe it? Letters we know, Medicine we know; Sponging?

My own opinion is, that it has an exceptionally good right to the name of art. If you care to listen, I will explain, though I have not got this properly into shape, as I remarked before.

Oh, a brief exposition will do, provided it is true.

I think, if you agree, we had better examine Art generically first; that will enable us to go into the question whether the specific arts really belong under it.

Well, what is Art? Of course you know that?

Quite well.

Out with it, then, as you know.

An art, as I once heard a wise man say, is a body of perceptions regularly employed for some useful purpose in human life.

And he was quite right.

So, if sponging has all these marks, it must be an art?

If, yes.

Well, now we will bring to bear on sponging each of these essential elements of Art, and see whether its character rings true, or returns a cracked note like bad pottery when it is tapped. It has got to be, like all art, a body of perceptions. Well, we find at once that our artist has to distinguish critically the man who will entertain him satisfactorily and not give him reason to wish that he had sponged elsewhere. Now, in as much as assaying—which is no more than the power of distinguishing between false and true coin—is a recognized profession, you will hardly refuse the same status to that which distinguishes between false and true men; the genuineness of men is more obscure than that of coins; this indeed is the gist of the wise Euripides’s complaint: But among men how tell the base apart? Virtue and vice stamp not the outward flesh.

So much the greater the sponger’s art, which beats prophecy in the certainty of its conclusions upon problems so difficult.

Next, there is the faculty of so directing your words and actions as to effect intimacy and convince your patron of your devotion: is that consistent with weak understanding or perception?

Certainly not.

Then at table one has to outshine other people, and show the difference between amateur and professional: is that to be done without thought and ingenuity?

No, indeed.

Or perhaps you fancy that any outsider who will take the trouble can tell a good dinner from a bad one. Well, the mighty Plato says, if the guest is not versed in cookery, the dressing of the banquet will be but unworthily judged.