FAWNER AND FRIEND (WITH AN EXCURSUS ON CANDOUR)

My dear Antiochus Philopappus, |48 E|

‘Every one,’ says Plato, ‘will pardon a man for admitting that he has a strong affection for himself,’ but—not to mention |F| numerous other defects to which he is subject—there is one chief weakness which precludes him from giving a just and incorruptible verdict in his own case. ‘The lover is blind where the beloved object is concerned,’ unless he has learned the habit of prizing things, not because they are his own or related to himself, but because they are beautiful. Hence, there is ample opportunity for the flatterer to obtain a place among our friends. He delivers his attack from an excellent point of vantage in the shape of that self-love which makes every man his own |49| first and greatest flatterer, ready and willing to welcome such external testimony as will endorse his own conceits and desires. For the man who is reprobated as a lover of toadies is an ardent lover of himself. Out of fondness for himself he not only entertains the wish to possess, but also the conceit that he possesses, all manner of qualities; and though the desire may be natural enough, the conceit is fallacious and calls for the greatest watchfulness.

And if truth is divine, and—as Plato asserts—the first principle |B| of ‘all good things both with Gods and men’, the toady must be an enemy of the Gods, and especially of the Pythian. For, in perpetual antagonism to the doctrine of Know Thyself, he produces self-deception in a man, self-ignorance, and error as to his 188virtues and vices. The virtues he renders defective and abortive; the vices he renders incorrigible.

Now if the flatterer had been like most other mischievous things, and had solely or chiefly attacked mean and petty victims, the harm would have been neither so great nor so difficult to prevent. But it is into soft and sweet kinds of wood that worms prefer to bore, and it is estimable and capable characters—characters with a love of approbation—that give access and supply nourishment to the flatterer who fastens upon |C| them. ‘The breeding of the steed,’ says Simonides, ‘sorts not with Zacynthus,^[48] but with wheat-bearing plains.’ Similarly we do not find toadyism in attendance upon the poor, the insignificant, or the uninfluential, but sapping and debilitating great houses and great fortunes, and frequently subverting rulers and thrones. Consequently no slight effort or common precaution is required in considering how it can be most readily detected and so prevented from doing injury and discredit to friendship.

|D| Vermin quit a dying man and desert the body when the blood which feeds them becomes exhausted. So with the time-server. You will never find him approaching a person whose fortune is destitute of sap and warmth. It is the famous and influential whom he attacks; it is out of them that he makes capital; and when their circumstances change he promptly beats a retreat. We should not, however, wait for that test; it is then not merely useless but fraught with injury and danger. It is a grievous thing to find out who is not your friend only at the moment when a friend is needed, since the discovery does not enable you to exchange the uncertain and counterfeit for the genuine and certain. You should possess friends as you possess coin—tested |E| before the occasion, not waiting to be proved by the occasion. Discovery should not come through injury, but injury should be prevented by our acquiring a scientific insight into the 189nature of the toady. Otherwise we shall be in the position of those who distinguish a deadly poison by tasting it; we shall meet our death in the effort of judging.

One can neither approve of such a course, nor yet of those who, because they regard a ‘friend’ as implying a high and wholesome influence, imagine that an agreeable associate is immediately and manifestly proved to be a time-server. For there is nothing disagreeable or uncompromisingly severe about a friend, nor does the high respect we pay to friendship depend upon harshness or austerity. Nay, its high influence and claim to respect are actually an agreeable and desirable thing in themselves, |F|

And close at its side do the Graces and Longing Desire set their dwellings.

Not only may the unfortunate man say, with Euripides,

’Tis sweet to look into a friend’s fond eyes,

but friendship is a comrade who adds as much pleasure and gratification to our blessings as it brings relief to the pains and perplexities of our mishaps. According to Euenus ‘the best of |50| seasonings is fire‘. So, by making friendship an ingredient of life, God has rendered all things bright and sweet and enjoyable through its presence and participation. How, indeed, could the fawner have wormed himself into our pleasures, if he had seen that friendship refuses all admittance to what is pleasant? The thing is absurd. No; the toady is like the mock-gilt and tinsel which merely mimic the sheen and lustre of gold. It is in order to imitate the attractiveness and charm of a friend that he makes a constant show of agreeableness and amiability, and never opposes or contradicts you. It is therefore wrong, |B| when a person praises you, to suspect at once that he is simply a flatterer. Friendship is quite as much called upon to praise in season as it is to blame. In fact, perpetual peevishness and fault-finding is the negation of friendship and sociability; 190whereas, when affection bestows zealous and ungrudging praise upon our good deeds, we also submit readily and cheerfully to its candid remonstrances, being satisfied with the belief that the man who is glad to praise will only blame because he must.

|C| ‘It is a hard matter then,’ we may be told, ‘to distinguish between flatterer and friend, if they are equally pleasant and equally laudatory, especially when we find that toadyism is often more than a match for friendship in the tendering of services.’ Naturally so, we reply, if the object of our search is the genuine toady, with a past-master’s skill at the business; if, that is, we do not adopt the common view and mean by ‘toady’ your poverty-stricken trencherman, who ‘begins’—as some one has said—‘to declare himself with the first course,’ and whose lickspittle character betrays itself by gross and vulgar |D| buffoonery at the first dish and the first glass. It needed no test to expose Melanthius, the parasite of Pherae. It was enough that, when asked ‘how Alexander was stabbed,’ he replied, ‘Through the ribs, into my belly.’ Nor is there any such need with those who besiege ‘an opulent table’, and whom

Not fire, nor steel, nor bronze can keep

from making their way to a dinner. Nor yet with those female toadies of Cyprus, who, after their transference to Syria, were |E| called ‘pair o’ steps’ from the fact that they used to allow the king’s wife to mount her carriage over their bent backs.

Against whom, then, are we to be on our guard? Against the man who is not confessedly or apparently a toady; one who is not to be found hanging about the kitchen, nor to be caught watching the dial with a dinner in prospect; one who is not to be made tipsy and then pitched into any corner; but one who for the most part keeps sober and bustling, thinking it his business to take part in all your doings, and to be privy to your confidential talk—the man, in short, who acts the rôle of 191friend, not in the satyric^[49] or comic style, but in the high tragic. According to Plato, ‘the extreme of dishonesty is to appear honest when you are not.’ So with time-serving. It is |F| to be regarded as dangerous, not when confessed, but when undetected; when it wears a serious, not an amusing, air. In this form, unless we are careful, it casts a slur of discredit even upon genuine friendship, the points of coincidence being numerous. When the Mage was trying to escape and Gobryes had plunged with him into a dark room and was grappling with him, Darius stood at a loss what to do. ‘Stab,’ said Gobryes, ‘though you stab both.’ With us it is not so easy, inasmuch as we can by no means give any sanction to the maxim: ‘Perish friend, if so perish foe.’ There are so many points of similarity to complicate the fawner with the friend that we must find it a most parlous business to tear the one from the other. We may either be casting out the good thing along with the bad, |51| or, in trying to spare the right thing, we may let the wrong one bring us to grief. There are wild plants of which the seeds are similar in shape and size to those of wheat. When the two are mixed it is difficult to sift these out; they will not fall through smaller holes, and, if the holes are wider, one falls through as much as the other. No less difficult is it to separate time-serving from friendship, when it blends itself with every feeling, every movement, need, and habit.

Friendship being the most pleasant and delightful thing in the world, it follows that the toady also uses pleasure for his |B| bait. To give pleasure is his main concern. And since agreeableness and usefulness are concomitants of friendship—whence the saying that ‘a friend is more indispensable than fire and water‘—it follows that the toady insists on rendering services, and is all eagerness to show unfaltering promptitude and zeal. But the surest foundation of friendship is similarity of pursuits and 192character. The foremost agent in mutual attraction is similarity of temperament—the liking and disliking of the same things. This the time-server perceives, and therefore he adapts himself |C| like wax to the proper shape and form, endeavouring by imitation to mould himself so as exactly to fit his victim. His supple versatility, his genius for mimicry, is so great that it is a case of

Thou art

Achilles’ self, and not Achilles’ son.

And note his craftiest device. He observes that candour is called (what it appears to be) ‘the characteristic note of friendship’, while lack of candour is the negation of friendship and spirit. He does not fail, therefore, to imitate this quality also. As a skilful chef will use some bitter or piquant juice for a sauce in order to prevent sweets from cloying, so with the candour |D| of the toady. It is not genuine, nor is it useful; it is given, as it were, with a wink, and serves simply as an excitant. The result is that he is as hard to detect as one of those creatures which possess the natural power of altering their colour so as to match the spot on which they happen to lie. Since, therefore, it is under cover of resemblances that he deceives us, our proper course is to find in the non-resemblances a means of stripping off his disguise and showing that—as Plato puts it—he is ‘beautifying himself with borrowed forms and colours through lack of any of his own’.

Let us begin at the very beginning. In most instances, we remarked, friendship commences with similarity of temperament |E| and disposition, a taste for very much the same habits and principles, and a delight in the same pursuits, occupations, and pastimes. Such a similarity is implied in the lines:

Most welcome to the old is old men’s speech;

Child pleaseth child, and woman pleaseth woman,

Sick men the sick, and one who meets disaste

Brings solace to another suffering it.

193The toady knows that it is natural to find pleasure in one’s like and to be fond of his society. This, therefore, is his first device |F| for approaching you and getting neighbours with you. He acts like herdsmen on a pasture. He works gently up to you and rubs shoulders with you in the same pursuits, amusements, tastes, and way of life, until you give him his chance and let yourself grow tame and accustomed to his touch. He condemns such circumstances, such conduct, and such persons as he notices you dislike; while of those that please you he cannot say too much in praise, exhibiting boundless delight and admiration |52| for them. He thus confirms you in your loves and hatreds, as being the results, not of feelings, but of judgement.

How, then, is he to be exposed? By what points of difference are we to prove that he is not, nor is on the way to be, our like, but only a pretender thereto? In the first place we must look for consistency and permanence in his principles. We must see whether he takes pleasure in, and gives praise to, the same things at all times; whether he directs and establishes his own life after one pattern, as a frank and free lover of single-minded friendship and fellowship ought to do. A friend does act in this manner. On the other hand, the time-server possesses no one fixed hearthstone to his character. He does not live a life |B| chosen for himself, but a life chosen for another. Moulding and adapting himself to suit others, he possesses no singleness or unity, but adopts all manner of varying shapes. Like water poured from one vessel into another, he is perpetually flowing hither and thither and accommodating himself to the form of the receptacle.

The ape, we are told, is captured through endeavouring to imitate man by copying his motions in dancing. The time-server, on the contrary, is one who allures and decoys others. Nor does his mimicry take the same form in all cases. One person he will help to dance and sing: with another he will share a taste 194for wrestling and athletics. If he gets hold of a sportsman devoted to hunting, he follows his lead, and all but shouts, in the words of Phaedra, |C|

I long, ye Gods, to cheer the hounds

Close-pressing on the dappled deer,

whereas he feels no interest whatever in the animal, but is setting his toils to catch the huntsman himself. If his next quarry is a young man with a taste for study and intellectual improvement, he is all for books, and grows a beard down to his feet; it is a case of wearing the philosopher’s cloak and his air of ‘indifference’,^[50] and of prating about Plato’s ‘numbers’ and ‘right-angled triangles’. If, next, there happens along some easy-going bibulous person with plenty of money,

Then forthwith are his rags cast off by the wily Odysseus.

|D| Away goes the cloak; shorn off is the beard—’tis a crop that bears no corn: to the fore are wine-coolers and wine-cups, laughter in the streets and mockery of the philosophic student.

We are told, for instance, that at Syracuse, when Plato visited the place and Dionysius was seized with a mania for philosophy, the host of geometricians turned the palace into a perfect whirl of dust.^[51] But when Dionysius came to logger-heads with Plato, had had enough of philosophy, and abandoned himself to drink and women and to silly talk and wanton |E| behaviour, in a moment it was as if Circe had transformed them every one, and there came a reign of vulgarity, oblivion, and folly. Examples are also to be found in the conduct of time-servers on a large scale, such as demagogues. Greatest was 195Alcibiades. At Athens he joked, kept horses, and lived like a wit and a man of the world. At Lacedaemon he cropped his hair close, wore a short cloak, and bathed in cold water. In Thrace he fought and drank. But when he attached himself to Tissaphernes, he indulged in luxury, effeminacy, and ostentation, and sought to win the good graces of his company by adapting himself in all cases to their likeness and becoming one of them. Not so Epaminondas or Agesilaus. Despite |F| all their intercourse with so many persons, communities, and standards of conduct, they everywhere maintained—in dress, way of life, speech, and behaviour—their own proper character. So with Plato. He was the same at Syracuse as at Athens, the same to Dionysius as to Dion.

Our easiest method of exposing the polypus-like changes of the time-server is to make a show of frequent changes on our own part, finding fault with conduct of which we formerly approved, and all of a sudden countenancing actions, conduct, |53| or talk which used to fill us with disgust. We shall then perceive that he has no sort of settled and specific character; that his loves, hatreds, pleasures, and pains are not matters of his own feeling; that he is merely a mirror reflecting extraneous moods, principles, and emotions. For observe the man’s ways. Should you speak disparagingly to him of one of your friends, he will remark: ‘You have been slow in finding the fellow out; I never did like him.’ If, on the contrary, you change your tone and speak in his praise, he will declare that he is ‘right glad and thankful on the man’s behalf’, because he ‘believes in him’. If you propose to adopt a different mode of life—if, for example, |B| you are converted from a political career to a life of quiet inactivity—he will say, ‘We ought to have got quit of brawlings and jealousies long before this.’ If, on the other hand, you appear eager for office and the platform, he seconds you with, ‘A very proper spirit! A quiet life is pleasant, no doubt, but 196it lacks honour and distinction.’ We ought immediately to answer that kind of man with the words:

‘Different, sir, dost thou show thyself now from the man thou wert erstwhile.

I do not want a friend who shifts his ground when I do and who nods when I nod—my shadow can do that better—but one who helps me to truth and sound judgement.’

|C| Such is one way of applying a test. There is a second point of difference to be watched, as against the points of resemblance. It is not in all matters that a genuine friend is prompt to copy or commend us, but only in the best.

Not his to share our hates, but share our loves,

as Sophocles has it. Yes, and to share our right conduct and high principles, not our wrong and wanton deeds, unless perhaps—as a result of familiar association—some contaminating effluence, like that of ophthalmia, affects him to some extent with a blemish or a fault against his will. For instance, it is said that |D| Plato’s stoop, Aristotle’s lisp, King Alexander’s crook of the neck and harshness of voice in conversation, were tricks borrowed by their respective intimates. There are persons who, without knowing it, pick up from both the temperament and conduct of their friends most of what is characteristic of them. The time-server, however, is exactly like the chameleon. As the latter assimilates himself to every colour but white, so the time-server, though utterly unable to arrive at a likeness to your valuable qualities, leaves no discreditable one uncopied. He is like a bad painter, who, because beauty lies beyond the reach of his weak capacity, makes the strikingness of his portraiture |E| a matter of wrinkles, moles, and scars. So the toady becomes an imitator of dissoluteness, superstition, irascibility, harshness to servants, and distrust of friends and relatives. Not only is 197he by nature and of his own accord prone to the lower course; it is by imitating a baseness that he appears to be farthest from blaming it. A man who takes the higher line, and shows distress and vexation at his friends’ misdeeds, is dubiously regarded—a fact which accounts for the ruin of Dion with Dionysius, of Samius with Philip, and of Cleomenes with Ptolemy. But when a man desires to be, and to be thought, agreeable and to be depended upon, the worse the thing is, the more display he makes of liking it, as if the strength of his affection will not permit him to dislike even your vices, but makes him your |F| natural sympathizer in all circumstances. Such persons therefore insist upon sharing even involuntary and accidental shortcomings. When toadying an invalid, they pretend to suffer with the same complaint. In company with a person who is somewhat blind or deaf, they pretend to be dim-sighted and hard of hearing, like the flatterers of Dionysius, whose sight was so dull that they stumbled against each other and knocked over the dishes at dinner.

Sometimes they work themselves into closer and more intimate touch with a trouble or a malady, till they come to participate in afflictions of the most secret kind. If they see |54| that the patron is unhappy in his marriage or on bad terms with his sons or his relatives, they do not spare themselves, but make lamentations about their own children, or wife, or relatives, or friends, on certain alleged grounds which they divulge as a miserable secret. Such similarity creates a closer understanding with their patron. He has received a sort of hostage, thereupon betrays to them some secret or other, and, because of that betrayal, keeps friends with them and is afraid to leave his confidence to its fate. I know of one time-server who, when the patron divorced his wife, turned his own wife also out of doors. It was, however, found out—through a discovery |B| of the patron’s wife—that he was visiting and sending 198messages to her in secret. The toady must have been but little known to the man who thought that the lines:

Body all belly, and an eye that looks

All round; a thing that crawls upon its teeth,

were as apt a description for a crab as they are for the flatterer. The picture is that of the parasite:

The friend of saucepan-time and dinner-hour,

as Eupolis expresses it.

This point, however, we will reserve till its proper place. Meanwhile we must not omit to mention another shrewd trick played by the time-server when he imitates you. If he goes so far as to copy some good quality in the person whom he |C| toadies, he is careful to leave the advantage with him. Friends in the true sense are neither jealous nor envious of each other, and, whether they reach or fail to reach the same degree of excellence, they accept the situation fairly and without a grudge. But the toady—who never forgets to play second rôle—lets his resemblance fall short of equality, and owns to being distanced at everything but vices. In vices, however, he insists on first prize. If the patron is irritable, he says, ‘I am all bile;’ if superstitious, ‘I am a mass of fears;’ if love-sick, ‘I am frantic.’ |D| ‘It was wrong of you to laugh,’ he will say, ‘but I was absolutely dying with laughter.’ But where virtues are concerned it is the other way about. ‘I am a fast runner, but you positively fly.’ ‘I am a tolerable horseman, but nothing to a centaur like our friend here.’ ‘I have a neat turn for poetry, and can write a line better than some, but

Thunder is not for me, ’tis work for Zeus.’

He thus appears to do two things at once—to give an air of merit to his patron’s tastes by imitating them, and of unapproachableness to his ability by failing to match it.

199So much for the differences between fawner and friend in the midst of their resemblances.

Since, as we have observed, pleasure is another point in common—a good type of man taking as much delight in his friends as a weak man does in his flatterers—we may proceed to make a distinction here also. The distinction lies in the relation between the pleasure and its end. Thus, not only unguents |E| have an agreeable smell; a medicine may have it also. But there is the difference that the object of the former is pleasure and nothing else, while in the other case the purgative, warming, or flesh-making quality happens to be combined with fragrance. Again, a painter mixes engaging colours and dyes, and there are also certain medical preparations with a taking appearance and an attractive colour. Where is the difference? Clearly our distinction will lie in the end for which they are used. Just so with the case before us. In the agreeable relations of |F| friend with friend the pleasant-giving element is a kind of gloss upon a substance of high value and utility. Sometimes sportiveness, the table, wine, and even mockery and nonsense are used by them as a seasoning to high and serious purposes. Hence such expressions as:

Then had they joyance in talk and in speaking the one to the other;

or:

Nor should aught else have parted us twain in our love and our joyance.

But, with the time-server, it is his function and end to be |55| perpetually dishing up in a spicy form something amusing, something done or something said which pleases and is meant to please.

To put it briefly, the toady thinks the purpose of his every action should be to make himself agreeable, whereas the friend 200will only do what is right, and therefore, though often agreeable, he is often the contrary, not because he wishes it, but because, when it is the proper course, he does not avoid it. It is as with the physician. When it helps matters he will throw in a pinch of saffron or spikenard, and will frequently order a pleasant bath and an inviting diet. But there are times when he will have none of these, but will shake in a dash of castor

Or polium foul of odor, that men e’en shudder to smell it.

|B| Or he will pound a dose of hellebore and make you drink it off. Neither the unpleasantness in the one case nor the pleasantness in the other is the end in his mind, but in both cases he has only one object in view for the patient, and that object is his good. In the same way there are times when a friend will lead you in the path of duty by inspiriting you with praise or gratifying you with courtesies, as the speaker does in

Teucer, Telamon’s son, dear prince of a warrior people,

Shoot as now thou dost,

or in:

How then should I, if ’tis so, be forgetful of godlike Odysseus?

But when, on the contrary, you need calling to attention, he will upbraid you in biting terms and with the plain-speaking of a guardian: |C|

Foolish art thou, Menelaus Zeus-foster’d: no time is this present

For folly like thine.

There are also times when he makes the deed accompany the word, like Menedemus, when he taught the prodigal and dissolute son of his friend Asclepiades a wholesome lesson by shutting the door in his face and refusing to speak to him. Similarly Arcesilaus forbade Bato the lecture-room for having attacked Cleanthes in a verse of a comedy. He was reconciled to him, however, when he repented and made his peace with 201Cleanthes. For though one must give a friend pain when it does him good, one must not, while giving the pain, make an end of the friendship. The sting should be used only as a medicine, for the care and salvation of the patient. A friend is therefore |D| like a musician. In converting us to right and salutary courses he will sometimes loosen and sometimes tighten the strings. Pleasure you will get from him often, profit always. On the other hand, the time-server, who harps in a single key and is accustomed to strike no note but that of your pleasure and gratification, has no notion of any action to check you or word to pain you. He merely plays the accompaniment to your wishes, with which both his time and his words are invariably in accord. Xenophon says of Agesilaus that he welcomed praise from those who were no less ready to blame. So we should regard that which gives pleasure and gratification as in the category of ‘friend’, if it can also on occasion oppose us and give us pain. But a companionship which is uniformly pleasurable and maintains |E| a perpetual graciousness unqualified by any sting, calls for suspicion. We ought, in fact, to be ready to ask, like the Laconian on hearing praise of King Charillus, ‘How can a man be honest, when he cannot be angry even with a rascal?’

It is close to the ear, we are told, that the gadfly gets into a bull and the tick into a dog. In the case of a man of ambition, the time-server with his flatteries takes hold of his ears and sticks so fast that it is hard to rub him off. Particularly, therefore, in such circumstances must we keep our judgement vigilant. It must be on the alert to see whether the praise is given to the |F| thing or to the man. It is given to the thing when men praise us in our absence more than in our presence; when they wish and strive for the same objects themselves, and praise not only us but every one else who does the like; when we do not find them doing and saying first one thing and then the opposite; and—most important of all—when our sense does not tell us 202that we are repenting or ashamed of the things for which we are praised, or wishing that we had rather done and said the |56| contrary. This inward judgement, which testifies against a flattery and refuses to accept it, is immune from contamination, and proof against the time-server.

It is a strange thing that most men, when they meet with a misfortune, cannot bear to be consoled, but are better pleased with those who will join in the lamentations; but when they are guilty of a blunder or a fault, if you make them feel the sting of repentance by means of a reproof or a reprimand, they think you an enemy and an accuser; whereas, if you eulogize their conduct, they regard you as a loyal friend and receive you with open arms.

Now when people give you praise and applause for something |B| you do or say, whether in sober earnest or in careless jest, the harm they do is only for the moment, and only affects the matter in hand. But when their praises go so far as to influence your moral being, and their flatteries to affect your character, they are as bad as servants who pilfer ‘not from the stack, but from the seed‘. For the moral disposition and the moral character—first principle and fountain-head of conduct—are the seed of actions, and these they corrupt by clothing vice in the titles of virtue. Thucydides tells us that in the midst of war and faction ‘the customary acceptation of words was arbitrarily changed to suit an end. Reckless daring came to be thought devoted courage; |C| cautious hesitation, an excuse for cowardice; moderation, weakness in disguise; complete insight, complete inertia‘. So, when flattery is at work, we should warily note how prodigality is called ‘generosity’; cowardice, ‘caution’; light-headed caprice, ‘life and vigour’; meanness, ‘moderation’; the amorous man, ‘amiable and affectionate’; the arrogant and irascible person, ‘a man of spirit’; a poor meek creature, ‘civil and obliging’. |D| Remember, how Plato tells us that the lover—the flatterer of 203the beloved—calls a snub nose ‘piquant’, a hook-nose ‘regal’, a swarthy face ‘virile’, a white face ‘saint-like’, while ‘honey-colour’ is simply the coinage of a lover who indulgently invents a pretty name for pallor. Yet when an ugly man is persuaded that he is beautiful, or a little man that he is tall, his deception is short-lived, and the harm which he sustains is slight and easily repaired. But flattery may teach him to treat vices as if they |E| were virtues, and to rejoice in them instead of sorrowing. It may remove all sense of shame at misconduct. Such flattery spelled destruction to the Siceliots, when it called the cruelty of Dionysius and Phalaris a ‘hatred of wickedness’. It spelled ruin to Egypt, when it gave to Ptolemy’s effeminacy, to his hysterical superstition, to his shriekings and bangings of tambourines, the name of piety and worship. It came once within an ace of utterly subverting Roman morals, when it glossed over Antony’s dissolute and ostentatious self-indulgence with pretty terms as a ‘festive and genial appreciation of the boons of unstinted |F| power and fortune’. What made Ptolemy tie on the mouth-strap and its pair of flutes? What made Nero cultivate the tragic stage and don the mask and buskin? What else but praise from flatterers? Is not a king regularly called an Apollo if he warbles, a Dionysius if he gets drunk, a Hercules if he wrestles? And is he not so pleased with it, that there is no way of disgracing himself to which flattery will not lead him? It is therefore in the matter of praise that we should chiefly beware of the time-server. He is himself alive to the fact, and |57| is deft at avoiding suspicion. If therefore he gets hold of some dull-witted and thick-skinned grandee, he fools him to the top of his bent. Remember how Strouthias makes a hobby-horse of Bias and dances his fling upon the man’s stupidity by praising him with:

You have drunk more than royal Alexander,

or:

I laugh to think o’ the quip you gave the Cyprian.

204But with persons of more discernment he perceives that in this direction they are particularly on the alert, that in this quarter they keep a special watch. He does not therefore adopt a direct line of attack with his flattery, but fetches a circuitous course from a distance, and

Advances noiselessly, as when a beast

|B| is tentatively approached and fingered. At one moment he will describe how you have been praised by some one else, using the public speaker’s device of putting the words in another person’s mouth. He will say, for instance, that he had the great pleasure of being present in the market-place when some ‘visitors’—or some ‘elderly people’—were relating a good many admiring and complimentary stories about you. At another time he will concoct a number of trivial and fictitious charges against you, which he purports to have heard from others, and he will say that he has hastened to find you and desires to know where you said such-and-such a thing or did so-and-so. If you deny them—as you naturally will—he at |C| once has you in the trap for his compliments: ‘It did surprise me that you should speak ill of a friend, seeing that it is not your nature to do so even of an enemy;’ or ‘that you should have designs on other people’s property, when you are so liberal with your own’.

Others, again, are like a painter who brings the light and bright parts into relief by the juxtaposition of dark and shaded portions. By blaming, abusing, belittling, and ridiculing the opposite qualities, they give a concealed praise and encouragement to the defects of the person flattered. To a spendthrift they disparage economy and call it stinginess. To a grasping knave |D| who makes money by mean and shabby practices they depreciate honest self-support and call it want of enterprise and business capacity. When they associate with some careless idler who shuns 205the busy centres of affairs, they are not ashamed to style public life a ‘meddling with other people’s business’, and public spirit a ‘sterile vanity’. Sometimes, in order to flatter a public speaker, a philosopher is belittled, or the favour of profligate women is won by miscalling faithful and loving wives ‘provincial and unattractive’. Most pitiful in its baseness is the fact that the toady does not even spare himself. As a wrestler crouches his body in order to throw another, so he insidiously contrives to compliment his neighbour by disparaging himself. |E| ‘I am a nervous wretch at sea,’ says he. ‘I cannot face trouble. Hard words make me frantically angry. But our friend here has no nerves; nothing troubles him. He is a peculiar person, always good-tempered, never ruffled.’ But if a man thinks himself particularly sensible, and is so desirous of being severely matter-of-fact that—out of what he calls straightforwardness—he is always on the defensive with

Tydeus’ son, bepraise me not much, nor, prithee, upbraid me,

the artist in flattery will not adopt this manner of approaching |F| him. Such cases are met by another device. He will come and consult him, as a person of superior wisdom, about affairs of his own. ‘Though,’ he will say, ‘there are others with whom I am more intimate, I am compelled to trouble you. For where are we to take refuge when we need advice? In whom are we to put confidence?’ Then, after listening to what he has to say, he will take his leave with the remark that what he has received is ‘not an opinion; it is an oracle’. And if he sees that you make pretensions to being a judge of literature, he gives you something he has |58| written himself, and asks you to read and correct it. When King Mithridates had a fancy for doctoring, some of his courtiers actually put themselves in his hands to be lanced and cauterized. This was flattery by deeds in place of words, 206since he accepted their confidence as a sufficient voucher for his skill.

Of many shapes are means divine,

and this negative class of praise requires to be countered with some craftiness. The way to confute it is by deliberately offering counsel and suggestion which are nonsensical, and making corrections |B| which are absurd. If your man objects to nothing, says ‘Yes’ to everything, and exclaims ‘Good!’ ‘Capital!’ at every item, he exposes himself as one who

The watchword asks, while other are his aims,

—those aims being to encourage your self-conceit with his laudations.

Take another case. Painting has been styled ‘silent poetry’. So there is a way of praising by silent flattery. The sportsman’s purpose is better concealed from the game when he pretends to be upon other business—walking, tending cattle, or tilling the soil. In the same way a toady drives home his eulogies most effectively when the eulogy is disguised under some different form of action. It may be by giving up his seat, or his place |C| at table, when you appear upon the scene. Or if he is addressing the Assembly or Council, and notices that some wealthy man desires to speak, he may stop his speech and yield him the platform. His silence indicates more clearly than the loudest acclamation that he regards the person in question as a better man and his intellectual superior. Such persons may therefore be seen taking possession of the front seats at an entertainment or in the meeting-hall, not because they claim any right to them, but in order that they may play the toady by giving up their places to rich people. Or you may see them begin the discussion at a congress or a board-meeting, and subsequently give way to ‘superior argument’ and shift round with the |D| greatest readiness to the opposite view, if their opponent is 207a person of influence, wealth, or note. The clearest exposure of such complaisances and concessions is to be sought in the fact that it is not to knowledge or high abilities or age that the deference is paid, but to riches and reputations. When Megabyzus took a seat at Apelles’ side and wanted to prate to him about ‘line’ and ‘shading’, the painter remarked, ‘Do you see those boys yonder grinding my mixing-earth? When you were silent, they were all eyes of admiration for your purple and your jewels. But now that you have begun to talk about things |E| you do not understand, they are laughing at you.’ Similarly Solon, when Croesus questioned him about ‘happiness’, declared that Tellus, an Athenian of humble rank, as well as Cleobis and Biton, were more favoured by fortune. A flatterer, on the contrary, not only avers that a king, a rich man, or a man in power, is prosperous and fortunate; he also declares that he is pre-eminent in wisdom, art, and every form of excellence. Hence while there are persons who have no patience to listen when the Stoics describe the sage as at the same time ‘rich, beautiful, noble, and king’, a toady will make out that the rich man is at the same time an orator, a poet, and—if he so wishes—a painter and a musician. He makes him out swift of foot and |F| strong of thew by letting himself be thrown in wrestling and outstripped in running, as Criso of Himera did in a race against Alexander—much to Alexander’s disgust when he detected it. Carneades used to say that the only thing that kings’ and rich men’s sons understand is how to ride; they receive no proper instruction in anything else. For their teacher flatters them in school with his praises, and their antagonists in the wrestling-ring by courting defeat; whereas a horse, who neither knows nor cares whether you are in or out of office, poor or rich, pitches you head first if you cannot keep your seat. It was therefore a silly and stupid thing for Bion to say: ‘If by |59| eulogizing a field we could make it bear a prolific crop, would 208it not be a mistake for a man to go digging and moiling instead? Neither, then, is it irrational for you to praise a human being, if your praise is productive of good fruit.’ A field suffers no injury from being praised, whereas insincere and undeserved compliment puffs a man up and ruins him.

On this point we have said enough. The next consideration is that of candour.

|B| When Patroclus, on going out to fight, dressed himself in Achilles’ armour and drove his team, the one thing he let alone and did not venture to touch was the Pelian spear. So it might have been expected of the flatterer that, when dressing himself up carefully for the part of ‘friend’, with its proper tokens and badges, the one thing he would leave untouched and uncopied would be plain-speaking—a special attribute,

Heavy and huge and stubborn,

to be wielded only by friendship. But in his fear that laughter, strong drink, jest, and fun may mean his betrayal, we find him |C| putting a solemn face on the business, flattering with a frown and administering dashes of blame and admonition. Here again, therefore, we must apply our tests. In a comedy of Menander, the Mock-Hercules comes in carrying a club which has no strength or solidity, but is merely a hollow sham. So, I take it, with the flatterer’s plain-speaking. On trial you will find that it is soft and without weight or vigour; that it behaves like a woman’s cushion, which, while seeming to offer a firm support to the head, actually yields it more of its own way. |D| This spurious candour, with its hollow fullness, its false and superficial puffiness, is merely meant to shrink and collapse, so as to induce the person who leans upon it to make himself more comfortable. The genuine candour of a friend attacks only our misdeeds; it hurts only out of care and protection; like honey, it merely stings our sores in cleansing them, its general uses 209being grateful and sweet. This, however, is a theme for special discussion.

With the flatterer it is different. In the first place, when he displays sharpness or heat or inflexibility, it is in dealing with others than yourself. He is severe upon his own servants; he is terribly hard upon the misdeeds of his own relations; he shows no admiration or respect for a stranger, but treats |E| him with contempt; his scandalizing is merciless when exacerbating other people. His object is to make it appear that he detests low practices, and that he would not consent to abate a jot of his candour in your behalf, or to do or say anything to curry favour. In the next place, when there is something really and seriously wrong, he pretends to be completely ignorant and unconscious of it, while he will pounce upon some little immaterial shortcoming and take it rigorously and vehemently to task—if, for instance, he sees an implement carelessly placed, or a fault of domestic management, or negligence in the cut of your hair or the wearing of your clothes, or lack of |F| proper attention to a dog or a horse. But should you slight your parents, neglect your children, humiliate your wife, despise your relatives, and waste your money, it becomes no business of his. In such circumstances not a word does he venture to utter, but he is like a trainer who permits an athlete to get drunk and dissipated, while he is severe upon him in the matter of an oil-flask or a scraping-iron; or like a grammar-master who scolds a boy for the state of his slate and pencil, but pretends not to hear his slips of grammar and expression. The toady is the kind of man who, in dealing with a ridiculously incompetent public speaker, has nothing to say about his matter, but finds fault with his voice-production, and blames him severely for spoiling |60| his larynx by drinking cold drinks; or who, when requested to peruse some miserable composition, finds fault with the roughness of the paper and calls the copyist a slovenly wretch. It 210was so in the case of Ptolemy, when he made pretence to literary tastes. They would fight with him about some out-of-the-way word or bit of a verse or point of information, and would keep it up till midnight. But to his indulgence in cruelty and outrage, to his tambourine-playing and initiating, not one of |B| all their number offered any opposition. Imagine a man suffering with tumours and abscesses, and some one taking a surgeon’s knife and cutting—his hair or his nails! That is what the flatterer does. He employs his candour upon those parts which feel no pain or soreness.

There is a still craftier species, who make their plain-speaking and fault-finding an actual means of pleasing. When Alexander was once making large gifts to a jester, envy and vexation drove Agis, the Argive, to bawl out, ‘How utterly absurd!’ The king turned upon him angrily and asked, ‘What is that you say?’ ‘I confess,’ was the reply, ‘to being annoyed and |C| indignant when I see how much alike all you sons of Zeus are in your fondness for flatterers and ridiculous persons. Heracles found pleasure in his Cercopes, Dionysus in Sileni, and we can see what a high regard you have yourself for people of the kind.’ One day when the emperor Tiberius entered the Senate, one of his flatterers got up and said that, as free men, they were bound to speak frankly and to treat important interests without reticence or reservation. When he had thus aroused every one’s interest and had secured silence and the attention of Tiberius, he said, ‘Listen, Caesar, to the charge which we all make against you, but which no one dares to utter openly. You are neglecting yourself, sacrificing your health and wearing it out by perpetually working and thinking for us, and giving yourself |D| no rest day or night.’ As he continued with a good deal more in the same strain, the orator Cassius Severus is said to have exclaimed, ‘Such plain-speaking will be the man’s death!’

These devices, however, are of minor moment. The matter 211becomes grave—as meaning ruin to foolish people—when a man is accused of the opposite disorders to those with which he is afflicted; as when the parasite Himerius used to scold the meanest and most avaricious plutocrat in Athens by calling him a reckless prodigal, bent on bringing himself and his children to starvation; or when, on the contrary, a toady reproaches |E| a prodigal spendthrift with sordid parsimony, as Titus Petronius did Nero; or when he urges a ruler who behaves with savage cruelty towards his subjects to divests himself of ‘all that gentleness and ill-timed and mistaken clemency’.

To the same class belongs the man who pretends to look upon some silly nincompoop as a clever rogue of whom he is afraid and wary. Or if an ill-conditioned person who delights in perpetual fault-finding and scandalizing does happen to be led into praising some distinguished man, he may take him to task and raise objections, for ‘it is a weakness of yours, this praising |F| of even quite insignificant people. What remarkable thing has he ever said or done?’

Love-affairs are favourite ground for the flatterer to play upon his victim by further inflaming his passion. If he sees you at variance with your brothers, or neglecting your parents, or contemptuous towards your wife, he offers neither remonstrance nor reproach, but actually intensifies the bad feeling. ‘No: you don’t appreciate yourself,’ or, ‘It is you that are to blame, for always playing the humble servant.’ But if anger |61| and jealousy provoke a tiff with a mistress of whom you are enamoured, in comes flattery at once with a fine blaze of frankness, and adds fuel to the fire by pleading cause and accusing the lover of all sorts of unloverlike, unfeeling, and unforgivable conduct:

O ingrate! after all that rain of kisses!

Thus, when Antony was becoming passionately enamoured of the Egyptian queen, his friends did their best to persuade him 212that the love was on her side, and they upbraided him with being ‘cold and supercilious’. ‘The lady has forsaken all that royal state and that life of delightful enjoyments to go wandering |B| about on the march with you, like any concubine.

But, for thee, the heart in thy breast is past all moving or charming,

and you leave her to suffer as she will.’ It gratified Antony to be thus put in the wrong; no praise could please him like these accusations; and unconsciously he became perverted to the standard of the man who pretended to be reproving him. For candour of this kind is like the bite of a lascivious woman; while pretending to give pain, it arouses a provoking sensation of pleasure.

Though unmixed wine is, generally speaking, a corrective of hemlock, yet, if you add it to that drug in the form of a mixture, |C| you make it impossible to counteract the power of the poison, the heat driving it rapidly to the heart. So, while aware that candour is a potent corrective of flattery, your rogue actually uses ‘candour’ as his instrument for flattering you. Bias was therefore wrong in his answer to the question: ‘What animal is the most dangerous?’ when he replied, ‘Among wild animals, the despot, among tame animals, the toady.’ It would have been truer to say that, among toadies, those who merely frequent your bath and your table are tame, while those who thrust the |D| tentacles of their slanderous and malicious meddling into bedchamber and boudoir are savage and unmanageable beasts.

The one method of protecting ourselves appears to lie in recognizing and never forgetting that our mental being is made up of two parts—one high-principled and rational, the other irrational, mendacious and passionate—and that a friend is the unfailing supporter and champion of the better part—a physician who promotes and watches over good health—while a flatterer acts as prompter to the passionate and irrational part, exciting, 213titillating, coaxing, and divorcing it from reason by inventing |E| low forms of self-indulgence on its behalf. There are some kinds of food which yield no benefit to blood or breath, and put no vigour into muscle or marrow, but simply excite the sensual appetites and make the flesh flabby and unsound. So with the advice of a fawner. If does nothing to help sane thought and judgement; but watch it, and you will find it cosseting an amorous pleasure, aggravating a foolish fit of anger or provoking an attack of envy, puffing you up with vulgar and empty pride, encouraging your doleful dumps, or, where there is a tendency to be ill-natured or mean-spirited or mistrustful, making the |F| feeling more bitter or shy or suspicious by constantly suggesting and anticipating evil. For he is perpetually in wait for some passion or other, which he proceeds to feed up; and whenever there is a festering or inflammation of your mental state, you will always find him a kind of bubo, bringing it to a head. Are you angry? ‘Then punish.’ Do you crave a thing? ‘Then buy it.’ Are you afraid? ‘Then let us run away.’ Are you suspicious? ‘Then trust the feeling.’

If it is hard to catch him in connexion with such affections as these—their strength being so overpowering as to baffle the reason—he will give you a better opening in smaller matters; for he will be just the same with them. If you are apprehensive |62| of a headache or a surfeit, and are doubtful as to bathing or taking food, a friend will try to check you and will urge you to be cautious, whereas the toady will drag you to the bath, or ask them to put some novel dish on the table, begging you not ‘to keep so tight a hand upon your body as to be cruel to it’. If he sees you inclined to shirk a journey, a voyage, or a piece of work, he will say that there is no immediate hurry, and that it will do just as well if you postpone the matter or send someone else. If, after promising a friend to make him a loan or a present of a sum of money, you repent, but have your scruples, the toady |B| 214throws his weight into the less honourable scale; he corroborates ‘the argument of the purse’, and makes short work of your sense of shame by urging you to be economical, ‘seeing that you have so many expenses and so many persons to support.’

If, therefore, we are able to perceive our own covetousness, shamelessness, or cowardice, we shall also be able to see when a man is a toady. Such he is when he is always playing the advocate to those passions and ‘speaking his mind’ when we deviate from them.

Enough having been said upon this topic, we may next proceed to the question of the practical services rendered. In this |C| respect the flatterer makes his distinction from the friend a very obscure and perplexing matter; he always appears so prompt and indefatigable in his zeal. While a friend’s way, like the ‘speech of truth’ as described by Euripides, is ‘single’, open, and unaffected, that of the flatterer

Sick in itself, needs antidotes full shrewd

—uncommonly so, indeed, and plenty of them. When you meet a friend, he sometimes passes on without uttering or receiving a word, and with no more than a glance or a smile; he simply manifests by his expression, and gathers from yours, the kindly |D| understanding within. But the toady is on the run to overtake you, greets you from a long way off, and, if you catch sight of him and speak to him first, he excuses himself over and over again, calling his witnesses and taking his oath. So in the matter of actions. A friend will neglect many a trifle; he is no precisian and makes no fuss; he does not insist upon serving you at every turn. But the other is persistent, unremitting, unwearied; he leaves no opportunity or room for any one else to serve you; he is eager to receive your orders, and, if he does not get them, he is piqued, nay, absolutely heart-broken with disappointment. A sensible man, then, may take these as some 215indications that a friendship is not sincere and single-minded, |E| but is like a harlot who forces her embraces upon you before they are asked for.

The first place, however, in which to look for the difference is in promises. It has already been well said by previous writers that a friend will put his promise in the form familiar in

If I have power to achieve it, and if ’tis a thing for achievement,

while a time-server will put it in this:

Voice me the thought in thy mind.

The comedians present us with such characters:

Nicomachus, pit me against the soldier.

I’ll make ripe pulp of him; I’ll make his face

Softer than sponge: if not, then flog me soundly.

In the next place no friend will be a party to your actions |F| unless he has first been a party to planning them. He must first have looked into the business and helped to put it on a right and proper footing. Not so the flatterer. Even if you do grant him a share in weighing the matter and expressing an opinion about it, he is not only so anxious to gratify you with his complaisance, but is in such dread of leading you to suspect him of unreadiness to face the action, that he leaves you to take your course, or only lends spurs to your desire. It is not easy to find a rich man or a grandee who is ready to say: |63|

Give me a man, a beggar—nay, no matter,

Lower than beggar, if he means me well—

To put fear by, and speak his heart to me.

Like the tragedian, he must have the support of a chorus of friends who keep his tune, or of an audience who give applause. Merope in the tragedy advises:

Get thee for friends such men as, when they speak,

Yield not; but when a man will for thy pleasure

Make himself knave, lock thou thy door against him.

216|B| But such persons do the opposite. If, ‘when you speak’ you ‘yield not’, but oppose them for their good, they abominate you; but if ‘for their pleasure’ you are a ‘knave’ and a servile charlatan, they receive you not merely inside their locked doors but inside their most secret passions and concerns. The simple kind of flatterer, it is true, does not aim at so much. What he asks in such important matters is not to be your adviser, but your minister and servant. But the more crafty person will stand still—puzzling over the question with puckered brow and appropriate changes of countenance—but will say nothing. And if you give your own idea, he will exclaim, ‘How strange! You just managed to anticipate me. I was about to make exactly your suggestion.’

|C| Mathematicians tell us that lines and surfaces, being mental perceptions and incorporeal, have in themselves no such thing as bending, stretching, or motion, but that they are bent, stretched, and changed in position along with the bodies of which they are the boundaries. So you will discover that, with the time-server, his assent, his opinion, even his pleasure and anger, are always dependent. Here, therefore, it is perfectly easy to detect the difference. It is still more apparent in the manner in which a service is rendered. With the good feeling of a friend, as with a living creature, its most vital functions lie |D| deep. It is marked by no ostentatious display; but very often, like a physician who conceals the fact that he is doctoring you, a friend does you a good turn by a word of intercession or by bringing about an understanding, and so consults your interests without your knowing it. Arcesilaus was a man of this type. Not to mention other instances, when Apelles the Chian was ill and Arcesilaus had discovered how poor he was, he came back later with twenty drachmae. Taking a seat close to him, he exclaimed, ‘There is nothing here beyond Empedocles’ four elements:

Fire and water and earth and the gentle air of the heavens.

217Why, even your bed is made all askew.’ With that he moved his pillow and meanwhile slipped the coins under it. When the |E| old woman in attendance found them and told Apelles in amazement, he laughed and said, ‘It is that thief Arcesilaus.’^[52]

And here we may note how philosophy produces ‘children like unto their sires‘. Cephisocrates, who had been impeached, was on his trial, and beside him, with the rest of his friends, stood Lacudes, one of the coterie of Arcesilaus. The accuser having asked for his ring, Cephisocrates quietly dropped it at his side, and Lacudes, who noticed the action, put his foot upon it and hid it. On that ring depended the proof of the charge. When Cephisocrates, after his acquittal, went shaking hands with members of the jury, one of them, who had apparently |F| seen what occurred, bade him thank Lacudes, and gave an account of the affair, which Lacudes had mentioned to no one. We may believe that it is the same with the Gods, and that for the most part they confer their benefits unperceived, it being their nature to find pleasure in the mere act of bestowing favours and doing good. But in a deed done by a flatterer there is nothing honest, sincere, single-minded, or generous. It is a case of sweating, bawling, bustling, and of a tense look upon the face, intended to convey the impression of arduous and urgent business. The thing resembles, in fact, an overdone painting, |64| which strives to secure realistic effect by the use of blatant colours and affected folds, wrinkles, and angles.

He is also offensive enough to relate how the business has meant running about and anxiety, and he goes on to describe how he has got into trouble with other people and had no end of worry and some terrible experiences, until you declare that the thing was not worth it all. Any obligation thrown in your teeth will cause an unbearable and distressing sense of annoyance, 218but with an obligation from a time-server your sense of reproach and shame is felt at once, from the very moment that the service |B| is being rendered. A friend, on the other hand, if he has occasion to speak of the matter, qualifies his account of it, and about himself he says nothing. For example, the Lacedaemonians once sent the people of Smyrna some corn at a time of need, and, to their expressions of admiration of the kindness, they replied, ‘Not at all! To scrape this together we had only to vote the forgoing of one day’s dinner for ourselves and our beasts.’ A favour so rendered is not only a generous one; it is made the more welcome to the recipients by the thought that no great harm is done to the benefactor.

It is not, however, by the flatterer’s offensive way of rendering his services nor by the recklessness of his promises that one |C| can best recognize the breed; an easier criterion consists in the creditable or discreditable nature of the service, and in the different character of the pleasure or benefit. A friend will not, as Gorgias asserted, expect his friend to render him honest services and yet himself oblige that friend in many ways which are not honest:

’Tis his to share the wisdom, not the folly.

Rather, therefore, he will dissuade him also from improper courses. And, if he fails, there is virtue in Phocion’s answer to Antipater, ‘You cannot use me both as friend and toady’—that is to say, both as friend and not friend. We must help a friend in his need, not in his knavery; in his planning, not in his plotting; with testimony, not conspiracy. Yes, and we must share in his misfortunes, though not in his misdeeds. We |D| should not choose even to be privy to the baseness of our friends; how then to be a party to their misbehaviour? When the Lacedaemonians, after their defeat by Antipater, were making terms, they stipulated that, though he might impose any penalty 219he liked, he should impose no disgrace. It is the same with a friend. Should occasion call for expense or danger or hard work, he is foremost in his claim to be summoned and take a prompt and zealous part; but when disgrace attaches to it, he will as promptly beg to be spared and left alone. But with the fawner it is the reverse. In services of difficulty and danger he cries off, and, if you give him a tap to sound him, his excuse—whatever |E| it may be—rings false and mean. But in vile and degrading little jobs, do as you like with him; trample on him; nothing shocks or insults him.

Look at the ape. He cannot watch the house like a dog, nor carry like a horse, nor plough the ground like an ox. He is therefore the bearer of scurrilous insult and buffoonery and the butt of sport, his function being to serve as a tool for laughter. Precisely so with the toady. He is unequal to any form of labour and serious effort, and incapable of helping you by a speech, with a contribution, or in a fight; but in business which shuns the light he is promptitude itself—a most competent |F| agent in an amour, an adept at ransoming a strumpet, alert at checking the bill for a drinking-bout, no sloven in the ordering of your dinner, deft at attentions to your mistress, and, if you bid him show insolence to your wife’s relations or bundle her out of doors, he is beyond all pity or shame.

This, therefore, is another easy means of finding him out. Order him to do any disreputable and discreditable thing you |65| choose, and he is ready to spare no pains in gratifying you accordingly.

A very good indication of the wide difference between our fawner and a friend may be found in his attitude towards your other friends. The one is delighted to have many others giving and receiving affection with him, and his constant aim is to make his friend widely loved and honoured. He holds that ‘friends have all things in common‘, and their friends, he thinks, 220|B| should be more ‘in common’ than anything else. But the other—the false, bastard, and spurious article—realizes, better than any one, how he is himself sinning against friendship by—so to speak—debasing its coinage. While, therefore, he is jealous by nature, it is only against his like that he gives his jealousy play, by striving to surpass them in grovelling and lickspittle tricks. Of his betters he stands in fear and dread, we cannot say because he is

Plodding on foot against a Lydian car,

but because, as Simonides has it, he

Hath not e’en lead

To match the pure refinèd gold.

If, therefore, light in weight, surface-gilt and counterfeit, he finds himself put in close comparison with genuine friendship, |C| full-carat and mint-made, he cannot bear the test, and must be detected. Consequently he acts like the painter whose cocks in a picture were wretchedly done, and who therefore ordered his slave to drive any real cocks as far from his canvas as possible. In the same way the flatterer drives away real friends and prevents them coming near. If he fails, while openly he will fawn upon them and pay them court and deference as being his betters, in secret he will throw out calumnious hints and suggestions. And if the word in secret has given a scratch without at once absolutely producing a wound, he never forgets Medius’s maxim. This Medius was what may be called the |D| fugleman or expert conductor of the chorus of toadies who surrounded Alexander, and was at daggers drawn with the highest characters. His maxim was, ‘Be bold in laying on and biting with your slanders, for even if the man who is bitten salves the wound, the slander will leave its scar.’ It was through these scars, or rather because he was eaten up with gangrenes and ulcers, that Alexander put Callisthenes, Parmenio, and Philotas 221to death. Meanwhile he surrendered himself unreservedly to a Hagnon, a Bagoas, an Agesias, or a Demetrius, and allowed them to give him a fall by salaaming to him and dressing him up after the fashion of an oriental idol. So powerful an effect |E| has complaisance, and apparently most of all with those who think most of themselves. Their wish for the finest qualities goes with the belief that they possess them, and so the flatterer acquires both credit and confidence. For while lofty places are difficult of approach or assault for all who have designs upon them, the lofty conceit produced in a foolish mind by the gifts of fortune or talent offers the readiest footing to those who are small and petty.

As therefore we urged at the beginning of this treatise, so we urge again here; ‘Let us make a clearance of self-love and self-conceit.’ These, by flattering us in advance, render us more |F| amenable to flattery from outside: we come prepared. But if, in obedience to the God, we recognize how all-important the maxim Know Thyself is to each of us; if we therefore examine our own nature, training, and education, and observe how all alike fall short of excellence in countless ways, and how they all contain a large admixture of weakness in the things we do or say or feel, we shall be very slow in allowing the flatterer to abuse us at his pleasure. Alexander remarked that what made him give least credence to those who called him a God was his sleep and his sexualities, his excesses in those things falling below his own standard. On our own part we shall |66| always discover that at many a point and in many a way our qualities are ugly or a source of pain, defective or misdirected. We shall see ourselves in our true light, and find that what we need is not a friend who will pay us compliments and eulogies, but one who will bring us to book when we are really doing wrong. But only then. There are in any case very few with the courage to treat a friend with candour rather than 222complaisance; yet among these few it will be hard to find such as understand their business. It will be easier to find persons who imagine that they are using candour because they abuse and scold. Yet it is with plain-speaking as with any other medicine. |B| When it is given at the wrong time the effect is to upset and pain you to no purpose. In a certain sense it does painfully what flattery does pleasantly, inasmuch as unseasonable blame works as much harm as unseasonable praise. More than anything else it is a thing which drives a man headlong into the arms of the flatterer. Like water, he turns from the steep unyielding surface and glides away into the receptive shallows. Candour, therefore, must be tempered by rational courtesy, which will divest it of excess and over-severity. The light must not be so strong that in our pain and distress at the invariable reproving and fault-finding we turn away to escape discomfort and fly to find shade with the flatterer.

|C| In shunning a vice, Philopappus, our object should always be virtue, not the contrary vice. Some people think they escape being shamefaced by being shameless; that they escape being rustic by being ribald; that their behaviour becomes furthest from timidity and cowardice when they appear nearest to impudence and insolence. Some plead to themselves that they would rather be irreligious than superstitious, rather |D| knaves than simpletons. Their character may be likened to a piece of wood, which, through lack of the skill to straighten it, they crook to the opposite side. The ugliest way of refusing to flatter is to give useless pain. Our social intercourse must be boorishly ignorant of all the rules of good feeling when it is by being harsh and disagreeable that we avoid any creeping humbleness in our friendship, just as if we were the freedman in the comedy, who thinks that, to be properly enjoyed, ‘speech on equal terms’ means abusive speech.

223Since, therefore, it as an ugly thing when our striving to be agreeable lands us in flattery, and an ugly thing when, in the avoidance of flattery, all the spirit of friendly sympathy is ruined by immoderate plain-speaking; and since we ought to commit neither mistake, but—in candour as in other things—draw ‘success from moderation’, mere logical sequence seems to |E| dictate the conclusion to our treatise.

Plain-speaking, we find, is liable to be, as it were, tainted in various ways. The first thing is to divest it of its selfish aspect, by taking the greatest care not to let it appear as if your reproaches were due to a kind of injury or grievance of your own. When the speaker is concerned about himself, we regard his words as the outcome of anger, not of goodwill; as grumbling, not as reproof. For whereas candour is a mark of friendliness which compels respect, grumbling is petty and selfish. We therefore respect and admire the person who is frank, while a fault-finder provokes recrimination and contempt. Though Achilles |F| imagined he was speaking with but reasonable frankness, Agamemnon lost his temper; but when Odysseus attacked him bitterly in the words

Madman, thou shouldst have commanded some other, some pitiful army,

he patiently gave way, the friendly purpose and good sense of the speech causing him to draw in his horns. The reason was that, while the plain-speaking of Odysseus, who had no private |67| grounds for anger, was only for the sake of Greece, the vexation of Achilles was thought to be chiefly on his own account. Nay, Achilles himself, though possessed of no sweet or gentle temper, but

A terrible man, who must blame, e’en though it be blaming the blameless,

224silently permitted Patroclus to give him many such hard blows:

Man of no pity, no father of thine was Peleus the horseman,

Thetis no mother of thine; from the green-grey sea wert thou gotten

By beetling crags; so comes it thy heart is void of all mercy.

|B| The orator Hypereides used to urge the Athenians to consider not merely whether he was angry, but whether his anger was gratuitous. So with the admonition of a friend. When pure from any private feeling, it is a thing of awe, which we cannot face unabashed. And if, when a man is speaking his mind, it is manifest that he is casting aside any wrongs his friend may have done to himself; that it is other misdemeanours on his part which he is bringing home—other reasons for which he does not shrink from giving him pain—such candour produces an irresistible effect, the sharpness and severity of the admonition being intensified by the kindliness of the admonisher. Doubtless, |C| as has been well said, ‘it is most of all when we are angry or at variance with our friends that we should do or devise something to their advantage or credit’; but we show no less true a friendliness if, when we think ourselves slighted or neglected, it is on behalf of other victims of neglect that we give them a plain-spoken reminder. Plato, at a time when his relations with Dionysius were strained and dubious, asked for an interview. Dionysius granted it, in the belief that Plato was coming with a tale of grievance of his own. The conversation, however, took the following shape. ‘Suppose, Dionysius, you discovered |D| that some ill-disposed person had made a voyage to Sicily with the intention of doing you an injury, but that he could find no opportunity. Would you allow him to leave the country and get away scot-free?’ ‘Certainly not, Plato,’ said Dionysius: ‘enemies must be hated and punished not only for what they do, but for what they propose to do.’ ‘Then suppose,’ said Plato, ‘some one comes here in a friendly spirit, with the 225intention of rendering you a service, but that you afford him no chance. Is it a proper thing to cast him aside with ingratitude and contempt?’ Upon Dionysius asking who it was, he answered, ‘Aeschines, a man who, in rightness of character, will compare with any of Socrates’ associates, and whose teaching cannot fail to set any hearer firmly on his feet. Though he has |E| made a long voyage for the sake of philosophic intercourse with you, he has been left in neglect.’ These words stirred Dionysius so deeply that, in admiration of his kindliness and magnanimity, he promptly embraced Plato with effusion and proceeded to pay to Aeschines the most distinguished attentions.

In the second place, our candour must be cleared of all excrescences, so to speak. We must allow it no coarse flavourings in the shape of insulting ridicule or buffoonish mockery. When a surgeon is performing an operation, a certain ease and neatness |F| should be incidentally apparent in his work, but there should be no supple juggleries of the hand in the way of fantastic and risky fioriture. In the same way candour admits of a dexterous touch of wit, so long as it is so prettily put as to maintain our respect; but impertinent and insolent buffoonery utterly destroys that feeling. Hence the harpist chose a polite as well as a forcible way of stopping Philip’s mouth, when that monarch attempted to argue with him on a question of musical note. ‘Sire,’ said he, ‘Heaven forbid you should ever become so badly off as to know more about these things than I do!’ |68| Epicharmus, on the other hand, chose the wrong way, when Hiero, a few days after putting some of his familiars to death, invited him to dinner. ‘Nay, but,’ said he, ‘the other day there was no invitation to your sacrifice of your friends.’^[53] It was also a mistake for Antiphon, when the question: ‘What 226sort of bronze is the best?’ was under discussion in the presence of Dionysius, to say, ‘That kind out of which they made the statues of Harmodius and Aristogeiton at Athens.’ No good is done by the stinging bitterness of such speeches, nor is any pleasure given by their scurrilous pleasantry. Language of the |B| kind comes only from a want of self-command—which is partly insolent ill-nature—combined with enmity. Those who use it are courting their own destruction as well; they are veritably dancing a ‘dance at the well’s edge’. Antiphon was put to death by Dionysius; Timagenes was banished from Caesar’s friendship, not because of any free word he ever uttered, but because, at dinner-parties or when walking, he would perpetually and with no serious purpose whatever, but

For whatsoever him thought might move the Argives to laughter,

advance some charge against his conduct as a friend, merely by way of pretext for upbraiding him.

It is the same with the comic poets. Their work contained many serious and statesmanlike appeals to the audience; but |C| these were so much mixed up with farce and ribaldry—like good food in a hotch-potch of greenstuff—that their plain-speaking lost all nutritive power and use, with the result that the speaker was looked upon as an ill-natured buffoon, and the hearer derived no benefit from the speech.

In other cases by all means have your fun and laugh with your friends, but when you give them a piece of your mind, let it be done with earnestness and with courtesy. And if the matter is one of importance, impart a cogent and moving effect to your words by your emotions, gestures, and tone of voice.

There is also the question of the right moment. To disregard it is in all cases a serious mistake, but is particularly ruinous to good results when you are ‘speaking your mind’. That we should beware of doing anything of the kind when wine and 227inebriation are to the fore, is obvious. It is to bring a cloud |D| over the bright sky, if, in the midst of fun and gaiety, you moot a topic which puckers the brow and stiffens the face, as if to defeat the ‘Relaxing God’, who—to quote Pindar—

Unbends the harassed brow of care.

Nay, there is actually great danger in such unseasonableness. Wine renders the mind perilously testy, and tipsiness often takes command of candour and converts it into enmity. Moreover, instead of showing spirit and courage, it shows a want of manliness for a person who dare not speak his mind when sober to become bold at table, like a cowardly dog.

There is, however, no need to dwell further upon this theme. Let us proceed.

There are many who, when affairs are going well with their |E| friends, neither make any claim nor possess the courage to put restraint upon them. Prosperity, they think, lies quite beyond the reach of admonition. But should one stumble and come to grief, they set upon him. He is tame and humbled, and they trample upon him. The stream of their candour has been unnaturally dammed up, and now they let the whole flood loose upon him. He was once so disdainful, and they so feeble, that they thoroughly enjoy his change of fortune and make the most of it. It is as well, therefore, to discuss this class also.

If Euripides asks:

When fortune blesses, what the need of friends?

the answer must be that it is the prosperous man who has most |F| need of friends to speak their minds and take down any excess of pride. There are few who can be both prosperous and wise at the same time. Most men require to import wisdom from abroad; they require that reasoning from outside should put compression upon them when fortune puffs them up and sets them swaying in the wind. But when fortune reduces their 228inflated bulk, the situation itself carries its own lesson and brings repentance home. There is consequently no occasion for friendly candour or for language which bites and distresses. When such reverses happen, verily |69|

’Tis sweet to look into a friend’s fond eyes,

while he gives us solace and encouragement. Xenophon says of Clearchus that in battle and danger there appeared upon his face a look of geniality which put greater heart into those who were in peril. But to employ your mordant candour upon a man who is in trouble, is like administering ‘sharp-sight drops’ to an eye suffering with inflammation. It does nothing to cure or relieve the pain, but only adds anger to it by exasperating |B| the sufferer. For instance, when a man is in health he is not in the least angry or furious with a friend for blaming his looseness with the other sex, his drinking, his shirking of work and exercise, his continual bathings and ill-timed gorgings. But when he is sick, the thing is intolerable. It is more sickening than the disease to be told, ‘This is the result of your reckless self-indulgence, your laziness, your rich dishes, and your women.’ ‘What an unseasonable man you are! I am writing my will; the doctors are getting castor and scammony ready for me; and you come preaching and philosophizing!’ So, when a man is in trouble, the situation is not one for speaking your mind and moralizing. What it requires is sweet reasonableness |C| and help. When a little child has a fall, the nurse does not rush up in order to scold it. She picks it up, washes off the dirt, and straightens its dress. It is afterwards that she proceeds to reprimand and punish.

An apposite story is told of Demetrius Phalereus, when he was in banishment and was living at Thebes in mean and obscure circumstances. It was with no pleasure that he saw Crates coming towards him, inasmuch as he expected to hear some 229plain-spoken cynic abuse. Crates, however, accosted him gently, and then spoke upon the subject of exile—how there was no calamity in it, and how little need there was to be distressed, |D| since it meant getting rid of cares, with their dangers and uncertainties. At the same time he urged him to have confidence in himself and his inner man. Cheered and heartened by such language, Demetrius exclaimed to his friends: ‘Alas, for all that engrossing business which prevented me from getting to know a man like this!’

To one in grief a friend should speak kind words,

But to great folly words of admonition.

Such is the way of a noble friend. But the mean and ignoble flatterer of the prosperous man is like those ‘ruptures and |E| sprains’ of which Demosthenes tells us that ‘when the body meets with an injury, then you begin to feel them’. He seizes upon your change of fortune with every appearance of delight and enjoyment. If you do require any reminder when your own ill-advised conduct has brought you to the ground, it should suffice to say:

’Twas not with approval of mine: full oft did I seek to dissuade thee.

In what cases, then, ought a friend to be uncompromising? When should he exert his candour to the full? It is when the proper moment calls for him to stem the vehement course of pleasure, anger, or insolence; to put the curb on avarice; to |F| restrain a reckless folly. It was in this way that, when the precarious favours of fortune had corrupted Croesus with the pride of luxury, Solon spoke his mind to him, bidding him wait and see the end. It was in this way that Socrates was wont to put control on Alcibiades, to wrench his heart and draw genuine tears from him by bringing his errors home. Such was the method of Cyrus with Cyaxares. Such too, when Dion’s 230splendour was at its height and he was drawing all men’s eyes upon him by the brilliance and greatness of his exploits, was |70| the method of Plato, who bade him keep anxious watch against

Self-will, house-mate of Solitude.

Speusippus also urged Dion in his letters not to be proud because he had a great name among children and women-folk, but to take care and ‘make glorious’ the Academy by adorning Sicily with piety and justice and the best of laws. But not so Euctus and Eulaeus, the associates of Perseus. In his prosperity they followed him like the rest, always assenting, always complaisant. But when he met the Romans at Pydna, was defeated, and fled, they attacked him with bitter censure, reminding him of his errors and oversights and throwing them one after the other in his teeth, until the man became so utterly sore and |B| angry that he made an end of both by stabbing them with his dagger.

This, then, may serve for the general rule as to place and time.

But opportunities are often offered by a man himself, and no one who cares for his friend should let these occasions slip or omit to use them. Sometimes a question asked, a story told, blame or praise of a similar action in the case of other people, gives you the cue for a piece of plain-speaking. For instance, the story goes that Demaratus visited Macedonia at a time when |C| Philip was at variance with his wife and son. Upon Philip welcoming him and inquiring how far the Greeks were in harmony with each other, Demaratus—who was his well-wisher and intimate friend—remarked, ‘It becomes you excellently, Philip, to be asking about the harmonious relations of Athens and the Peloponnese, while you allow your own house to be so full of feud and discord.’ A good hit was also made by Diogenes. Philip was on his way to fight the Greeks, and Diogenes, who had entered the camp, was brought before him. Philip, being 231unacquainted with him, asked him if he was a spy. ‘Certainly I am,’ he replied. ‘I am a spy upon the short-sighted foolishness which induces you to come, without any compulsion, and risk |D| your throne and person upon the cast of a single hour.’ This, however, was perhaps somewhat too forcible.

Another good opportunity for admonition occurs when a man has been abused for his mistakes by some one else and is feeling small and humbled. A person of discretion will make a happy use of the occasion by sending the abusive parties to the right about and himself taking his friend in hand, reminding him that, if there is no other reason for being careful, he should at least give his enemies no encouragement. ‘How can they open their mouths or say another word, if you cast aside once for |E| all these faults for which they abuse you?’ By this means the abuser gets the credit of the pain, and the admonisher that of the benefit.

Some are more subtle. They convert their familiar friends by blaming some one else, accusing others of the things they know that those friends do. Once at a lecture in the afternoon our professor, Ammonius, aware that some of his class had not lunched as simply as they might, ordered his freedman to give his own boy a whipping, on the charge that ‘he must have vinegar with his lunch’. Meanwhile the glance he threw at us brought the reproach home to the guilty parties.

In the next place, we should be cautious of speaking plainly to a friend before company. Remember the case of Plato. |F| Socrates having handled one of his associates somewhat vigorously in conversation at table, Plato remarked, ‘Would it not have been better if this had been said in private?’ ‘And,’ retorted Socrates, ‘would you not have done better if you had said that to me in private?’ The story goes that, when Pythagoras once dealt rather roughly with a pupil before a number of persons, the youth hanged himself, and from that time Pythagoras never 232again reproved anyone in another’s presence. A fault should be treated like a humiliating complaint. The uncovering and |71| prescribing should be secret, not an ostentatious display to a gathering of witnesses or spectators. It is not the act of a friend, but of a sophist, to use another’s slips to glorify oneself, showing off before the company like those medical men who perform surgical operations in the theatre in order to advertise themselves. And apart from the insult—which has no right to accompany any curative treatment—we have to consider the contentiousness and obstinacy of a man in the wrong. Not merely is it the case that—as Euripides has it—

Love, when reproved,

Is but more tyrannous,

|B| but if you make no scruple about offering reproof in public, you drive any moral disease or passion into becoming shameless. Plato insists that, if old men are to inculcate reverence in the young, they must themselves first show reverence towards the young. In the same way the friendly candour which most abashes is that which itself feels abashed. Let it be gently and considerately that you approach and handle the offender; then you undermine and destroy his vice, since regard is contagiously felt where regard is shown. Excellent, therefore, is the notion:

Putting his head close down, to the end that the rest should not hear it.

|C| Least propriety of all is there in exposing a husband in the hearing of the wife, a father before the eyes of his children, a lover in the presence of the beloved, or a teacher in that of his pupils. He becomes frantic; so sore and angry is he at being set right before persons in whose eyes he is all anxiety to shine. When Cleitus enraged Alexander, it was, I imagine, not so much the fault of the wine as that he appeared to be 233humbling him before a large company. Another case is that of Aristomenes, the tutor^[54] of Ptolemy. Once, when an embassy was in the room, Ptolemy fell asleep and Aristomenes gave him a hit to wake him up. The flatterers seized the opportunity, and affected to be indignant on the king’s behalf. ‘If,’ said |D| they, ‘you did drop off, thanks to hard work and want of sleep, we ought to set you right privately, not lay hands on you before so many people.’ As the result, he sent Aristomenes a cup of poison and ordered him to drink it off. Aristophanes also tells us how Cleon tried to exasperate the Athenians against him by making it a charge that he

Abused the country before foreigners.

This, then, is another of the mistakes to be avoided, if your desire is not so much to make a self-advertising display as to make your candour produce helpful and healing results.

In the next place, your plain-speaker ought to bear in mind |E| the principle which Thucydides makes the Corinthians so properly express, in saying that they ‘had a right to find fault’ with others. It was Lysander, I believe, who said to the man from Megara, when he was delivering himself at the Federal Council concerning the interests of Greece, ‘You need a country to back your talk.’ In any case, doubtless, you need character for plain-speaking, but in no case is this so true as when you are admonishing and lecturing other people. Plato used to say that it was by his life he admonished Speusippus, and the mere sight of Xenocrates at lecture, and a glance from him, |F| sufficed to convert Polemon to better ways. When we lack weight and strength of character the result of any attempt at plain-speaking on our part is to draw upon ourselves the words:

Why physic us, thyself one mass of sores?

Nevertheless it often happens that, though a man’s own 234character is as weak as that of his neighbour, circumstances drive him to administer reproof. In that case the civillest behaviour is to contrive somehow to imply that the speaker is included in the reproach. In this tone are the words:

Tydeus’ son, what ails us, forgetting our prowess and valour?

|72| and:

But no match are we now for Hector alone....

Socrates’ way of quietly setting young men right was of the same kind. He would not be taken as being himself free from ignorance, but as feeling it a duty to share with them in the cultivation of virtue and the quest of truth. We inspire affection and confidence when it is thought that, being equally to blame, we are applying to our friends the same correction as to ourselves. But if, when rebuking your neighbour, you put on the superior air of a flawless and passionless being, unless you are much the senior or possess an acknowledged eminence of character and reputation, you do no good and only make yourself |B| offensive and a nuisance. For this reason, when Phoenix introduced the story of his own misfortunes—how in anger he set to work to kill his father, but speedily repented:

Lest the Achaeans should name me ‘the man who murdered his father’—

it was of set purpose, that it might not seem as if, in reproving Achilles, he claimed to be an impeccable person whom anger had no power to corrupt. In such cases the moral effect sinks in, since we yield more readily to a show of fellow-feeling than to one of contempt.

Another point. Since a mind diseased can no more bear unqualified candour and reproof than an inflamed eye can |C| be submitted to a brilliant light, one most useful resource 235among our remedies is to add a slight tincture of praise. For example: