POLYSTRATUS 
This is the lady’s reply: “Lycinus, I have discerned, to be sure, from what you have written that
your friendliness and esteem for me is great, for
nobody would bestow such high praise if he were
not writing in a friendly spirit. But my own attitude, please understand, is this. In general, I do
not care for people whose disposition inclines to
flattery, but consider such persons deceivers and not
at all generous in their natures. Above all, in the
matter of compliments, when anyone in praising me
employs vulgar and immoderate extravagances I
blush and almost stop my ears, and the thing seems
to me more like abuse than praise.
 
For praise is
endurable only as long as the person who is being
praised recognizes that everything which is said is
appropriate to him, Whatever goes beyond that
is alien, and outright flattery. 
“Yet,” said she, “I know many who like it if, in
praising them, one bestows upon them qualities
which they do not possess; for example, if they are
old, congratulates them upon their youthfulness, or
if they are ugly, clothes them in the beauty of a
Nireus or a Phaon. They think that their appearance will be transformed by these compliments, and

 

that they will regain their youth afresh, as Pelias
thought to do.
 
That, however, is not the case.
Praise would be highly valuable if it were possible
to derive any actual profit from it through such
extravagant employment. But as it is, those people
in my opinion are in the same case that an ugly
man would be in if someone should officiously put a
handsome mask upon him and he were to pride
himself greatly upon his beauty, regardless of the
fact that it was detachable and could be destroyed
by the first comer, in which event he would look
still more ridiculous when he stood revealed in
his own proper features and showed what ugliness
had been hidden behind that lovely mask. Or it
would be as if someone who was small should put on
the buskins of an actor and try to compete in height
with those who, on an even footing, overtop him by
a full cubit.”
 
She mentioned an instance in point. She said
that a woman of conspicuous position, who was
pretty and attractive in every other way, but small,
and far beneath the well-proportioned height, was
being lauded in song by a certain poet, not only
on all other grounds, but because she was fair
and tall; he likened her to a black poplar for
goodly stature and straightness! Well, she was
delighted with the compliment, just as if she were
going to grow to match the song, and lifted her
hand in approval. So the poet gave many encores,
seeing that she liked to be praised, until at last one
of the company leaned over to his ear and said:
“Have done with it, man—you might make her
stand up!”
 
Something similar and much more comical was

 

done, she said, by Stratonice, the wife of Seleucus,
who set a competition for the poets, with a talent as
the prize, to see which of them could best praise
her hair, in spite of the fact that she was bald and
had not even a paltry few hairs of her own. Nevertheless, with her head in that pitiful state, when
everybody knew that a long illness had affected her
in that way, she listened to those rascally poets while
they called her hair hyacinthine, and platted soft
braids of it, and compared to wild parsley what did
not even exist at all!