How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend (24-25)

The great difference between flatterer and friend may be most clearly perceived by his disposition towards one’s other friends. For a friend finds it most pleasant to love and be loved along with many others, and he is always constant in his endeavours that his friend shall have many friends [*] and be much honoured; believing that friends own everything in common [*] he thinks that no possession ought to be held so much in common as friends. But the flatterer is false, spurious, and debased, inasmuch as he fully understands that he is committing a crime against friendship, which in his hands becomes a counterfeit coin as it were. While he is by nature jealous, yet he employs his jealousy against his own kind, striving constantly to outdo them in scurrility

and idle gossip, but he stands in awesome dread of his betters, not indeed because he is

Trudging afoot beside a Lydian chariot,[*]

but because, as Simonides [*] puts it, he

Hath not even lead to show ’Gainst gold refined and unalloyed.

Whenever, then, the flatterer, who is but a light and deceptive plated-ware, is examined and closely compared with genuine and solid-wrought friendship, he does not stand the test, but he is exposed, and so he does the same thing as the man who had painted a wretched picture of some cocks. For the painter bade his servant scare all real cocks as far away as possible from the canvas; and so the flatterer scares all real friends away, and does not allow them to come near; or if he cannot accomplish this, he openly cringes to them, pays them attentions, and makes a great show of respect for them as for superiors, but secretly he is suggesting and spreading some sort of calumny; and when secret talk has caused an irritating sore, even though he be not entirely successful at the outset, yet he remembers and observes the precept of Medius. This Medius was, if I may call him so, leader and skilled master of the choir of flatterers that danced attendance on Alexander, and were banded together against all good men. Now he urged them not to be afraid to assail and sting with their calumnies, pointing out that, even if the man who is stung succeeds in healing the wound, the scar of the calumny will still remain. In fact it was by such scars, or rather such gangrenes and cancers, that Alexander was consumed so that he destroyed Callisthenes, Parmenio, and Philotas, and put himself without reserve into the hands of men like Hagno, Bagoas, Agesias, and Demetrius, to be brought low, by submitting to be worshipped, bedecked and fantastically tricked out by them, after the manner of a barbaric idol. So great is the power wielded by giving gratification, and it is greatest, apparently, with those who seem to be the greatest personages. For self-conceit regarding the noblest qualities, coupled with the wish to have them, gives both confidence and boldness to the flatterer.[*] It is true that lofty places are difficult of approach and access for those who propose to capture them, but loftiness or conceit, in a mind which lacks sense because of the favours of Fortune or Nature, lies at the mercy of the insignificant and mean.

Wherefore I now urge, as I did at the beginning of this treatise, that we eradicate from ourselves self-love and conceit. For these, by flattering us beforehand, render us less resistant to flatterers from without, since we are quite ready to receive them. But if, in obedience to the god, we learn that the precept, Know thyself, is invaluable to each of us, and if at the same time we carefully review our own nature and upbringing and education, how in countless ways they fall short of true excellence, and have inseparably connected with them many a sad and heedless fault of word, deed, and feeling, we shall not very readily let the flatterers walk over us. Now Alexander [*] said that two things moved him to discredit those who proclaimed him a god, his sleeping and his passion for women, evidently feeling that

in these matters he revealed the more ignoble and susceptible side of himself; and so in our own case, if we are careful to observe many and many a fault of our own, shameful and grievous, both of omission and commission, we shall constantly be detecting our own need, not of a friend to commend and extol us, but of a friend to take us to task, to be frank with us, and indeed to blame us when our conduct is bad. For there are but few among many who have the courage to show frankness rather than favour to their friends. And again, among those few you cannot easily find men who know how to do this, but rather you shall find those who think that if they abuse and find fault they use frankness. Yet frankness, like any other medicine, if it be not applied at the proper time, does but cause useless suffering and disturbance, and it accomplishes, one may say, painfully what flattery accomplishes pleasantly. For people are injured, not only by untimely praise, but by untimely blame as well; and it is this especially that delivers them over, broadside on, to the flatterers, an easy prey, since like water they glide away from the steeps that repel toward the valleys that softly invite. Frankness, therefore, should be combined with good manners, and there should be reason in it to take away its excess and intensity, which may be compared to that of light, so that any who are exposed to it shall not, for being disturbed and distressed by those who find fault with everything and accuse every one, take refuge in the shadow of the flatterer, and turn away towards what does not cause pain. Now every form of vice, my dear Philopappus, is to be avoided through virtue, and not through the vice that is its antithesis,[*] as some people, for instance, think to escape bashfulness through shamelessness, rusticity through scurrility, and to make their manner to be farthest removed from cowardice and softness if they can make themselves seem nearest to impudence and boldness. Others again, to prove themselves free from superstition, adopt atheism, and play the knave to show that they are not fools, and thus distort their character, like a piece of wood, from one form of crookedness to its opposite, because they do not know how to straighten it. But the most shameful way of disavowing the name of flatterer is to cause pain without profit; and it shows an utterly rude and tactless disregard of goodwill in one’s relations with friends to resort to being disagreeable and harsh in order to avoid abasement and servility in friendship. Such a person is like a freedman of the comic stage, who thinks that abuse is a fair use of equal speech. Since, therefore, it is a shameful thing to fall into flattery in aiming to please, and a shameful thing also, in trying to avoid flattery, to destroy the friendly thoughtfulness for another by immoderate liberty of speech, we ought to keep ourselves from both the one and the other extreme, and in frankness, as in anything else, achieve the right from the mean. The subject itself requiring, as it does, consequent elaboration, seems to determine that this be the final complement of our work.