Leon Kass on the scrounger:

A buffoon in classical Greece is a bomolochos, from bomos, “altar,” and lochos, “one who lies in wait.” The bomolochos was, in its original meaning , a fellow who lurks about the altar, the place of sacrifices to the gods, looking for the scraps of food one can get there–that is, a beggar. Metaphorically the term was  applied also to that fellow who would do any dirty work or say any outrageous thing to get a meal–a lickspittle, a low jester, a clown a buffoon. Though such men live by their wits, they are in their speeches and deeds usually ribald rather than witty, coarse rather than fine, bumptious rather than deft. For these confident demythologizers, a bone is a bone and meal a meal, containing no possibility of anything high–neither mental nor sacred. Indeed for them a meal is not even a meal–an integral unit–but merely an aggregate of scraps, a heap rather than a whole (analogous to the view of the anatomized human body that is often the butt of their coarse humor). (The Hungry Soul, p. 179)