CHAPTER V.
SATIRES ON SOCIETY:
THE PARASITE—UPON HIRED COMPANIONS.
It needs but a slight acquaintance with Greek and Roman literature, and with social life at Athens in its later days, and at Rome in the times of the emperors, to know that the men of rank and wealth filled their tables not only with their private friends, but also with guests who stood lower in the social scale, and were invited because they contributed in some way either to the amusement of the company or to the glorification of the host. A rich man, if he had any pretence to a good position in society, kept almost open house: and there was a class of men who, by means of sponging and toadying, and all those kindred arts which are practised, only under somewhat finer disguises, in modern society, contrived seldom either to go without a dinner or to dine at home. This disreputable fraternity of diners-out—"Parasites," as the Greek term was—supplied an inexhaustible subject for the satirist and the play-writer, as has been already noticed in these volumes,
