All that is really a minor matter. But we come now to matters that are a
serious problem, and do great damage to the foolish, when the flatterer's
accusations are directed against emotions and weaknesses the contrary to
those that a person really has. For example, Himerius the flatterer used to
vilify a man, the most illiberal and avaricious of the rich men at Athens,
as a careless profligate destined to starve miserably together with his
children. Or again, on the other hand, they will reproach profligate and
lavish spenders with meanness and sordidness (as Titus Petronius did with
Nero) ; or they will bid rulers who deal savagely and fiercely with their
subjects to lay aside their excessive clemency and their inopportune and
unprofitable pity. Very like to these also is the man who pretends to be on
his
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guard against some simple and stupid fool, and to
fear him as a clever rascal; and so, too, if a malicious person, and one
that delights in constant evil-speaking and fault-finding, be induced to
commend some man of note, a flatterer of this stamp takes him straight in
hand, and contradicts him, declaring that it is a weakness of his to commend
even the worthless. ‘For who is this fellow, or what brilliant thing
has he said or done ?’ Especially in regard to love affairs they
beset their victims and add fuel to their fire. Likewise if they see that
any are in disagreement with their brothers, or that they contemn their
parents, or deal scornfully with their wives, they do not admonish or
arraign them, but try to intensify such feelings. ‘You have no proper
appreciation of yourself,’ they say, and, ‘You have
yourself to blame for this, because you always affect such an obsequious
and humble air.’ And if, as a result of temper and jealousy, a
feeling of irritation is engendered toward a mistress or another man's wife
with whom the man has a love-affair, in comes flattery at once with a
splendid frankness, adding fire to fire, pleading for justice, accusing the
lover of many unloving, obdurate, and reprehensible actions :
O ingrate,
after crowding kiss on kiss !1
So the friends of Antony, who was consumed
with love of the Egyptian woman,
2 tried to make him believe that she was
enamoured of him, and, upbraiding him, they would call him cold and haughty
: ‘For the woman, forsaking so great a kingdom and so many happy
employments, is wearing her life away, as she follows with you on your
marches in the guise of a concubine;
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But the mind in
your breast is proof against enchantment,3
and you are indifferent to
her distress.’ He was pleased at being taken to task for such
wrongdoing, and taking more pleasure in those who accused him than he did
even in any who commended him, he failed to see that by this seeming
admonition he was being perversely drawn towards her. Such frankness is like
the love bites of lascivious women ; it arouses and tickles the sense of
pleasure by pretending to cause pain. So undiluted wine is of itself a
helpful remedy for the hemlock poison, but if they add it to hemlock and mix
the two together they make the potency of the drug quite beyond remedy,
since it is rapidly carried to the heart by the heat. In like manner the
unscrupulous, being well aware that frankness is a great remedy for
flattery, flatter by means of frankness itself. It is for this reason that
Bias did not give a good answer to the man who asked him ‘What is the
fiercest animal ?’ when he replied, ‘Of the wild animals
the tyrant, and of the domesticated the flatterer.’ For it were
nearer the truth to say, that among flatterers those who hover about the
bath and the table are domesticated, whereas he that extends his meddling
and slander and malice like tentacles into the bedchamber and the women's
privacy, is an uncivilized brute and most hard to handle.
