“Let your friends spring to their feet constantly and pay you for their dinners by lending you a hand whenever they perceive that you are about to fall down, and giving you a chance to find what to say next in the intervals afforded by their applause. Of course you must make it your business to have a well-attuned chorus of your own.

The word chorus here approaches the sense that it has in Libanius, where it designates the different bands of scholars attached to the various professors at Athens. So Aelian (Var. Hist. 3, 19) says of Aristotle that he gathered about him a chorus of pupils, and set upon Plato. Cf. Plato, Prot. 315 B.

“There you have what concerns the speaking. Afterwards let them

Not simply the friends, but the spectators also. See Lucian’s Zeus.

dance attendance upon you as you go away with your head swathed in your mantle, reviewing what you have said. And if any one accosts you, make marvellous assertions about yourself, be extravagant in your self-praise, and make yourself a nuisance to him.

This is not the orator, but Lucian himself, breaking through the veil of irony and saying what he really thinks. See below.

‘What was Demosthenes beside me?’ ‘Perhaps one of the ancients is in the running with me!’ and that sort of thing.