How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend (intro-1)

Plutarch’s essay on flatterers is addressed to C. Julius Antiochus Philopappus, a descendant of the kings of Commagene, whose monument still stands on the Museum Hill at Athens. He was a patron of art and literature, and on friendly terms with Plutarch.a

The essay is not concerned with the impecunious and dependent adherents (parasites) of the rich, but with the adroit flatterers of a higher standing, who worm their way into the confidence of great men, and exercise a pernicious influence upon them. That Philopappus may have stood in need of such a warning may readily be inferred.

The essay, at the close, digresses into a disquisition on frank speech (παρρησία) that might easily have been made into a separate treatise, but which is developed naturally from the attempt to distinguish the genuineness of a friend from the affectation of a flatterer. Frank speech was regarded in classical times as the birthright of every Athenian citizen, but under the political conditions existent in Plutarch’s day it was probably safer to cultivate it as a private virtue.

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Plato [*] says, my dear Antiochus Philopappus, that everyone grants forgiveness to the man who avows that he dearly loves himself, but he also says that along with many other faults which are engendered thereby the most serious is that which makes it impossible for such a man to be an honest and unbiased judge of himself. For Love is blind as regards the beloved, [*] unless one, through study, has acquired the habit of respecting and pursuing what is honourable rather than what is inbred and familiar. This fact affords to the flatterer a very wide field within the realm of friendship,[*] since in our love of self he has an excellent base of operations against us. It is because of this self-love that everybody is himself his own foremost and greatest flatterer, and hence finds no difficulty in admitting the outsider to witness with him and to confirm his own conceits and desires. For the man who is spoken of with opprobrium as a lover of flatterers is in high degree a lover of self, and, because of his kindly feeling toward himself, he desires and conceives himself to be endowed with all manner of good qualities; but although the desire for these is not unnatural, yet the conceit that one possesses them is dangerous and must be carefully avoided. Now

if Truth is a thing divine, and, as Plato [*] puts it, the origin of all good for gods and all good for men, then the flatterer is in all likelihood an enemy to the gods and particularly to the Pythian god. For the flatterer always takes a position over against the maxim Know thyself, by creating in every man deception towards himself and ignorance both of himself and of the good and evil that concerns himself; the good he renders defective and incomplete, and the evil wholly impossible to amend.