Selected Essays of Plutarch, Vol. I.

by Plutarch

ON MORAL IGNORANCE IN HIGH PLACES

|779 D| When Plato was invited by the Cyrenaeans to draw up a code of laws for their use and to organize their constitution, he begged to be excused, on the ground that it was difficult to legislate for so prosperous a people:

For nought so arrogant—

nor so impracticable and headstrong—

as human kind,

when prosperity—or what is so considered—lies within its grasp.

|E| No less difficult is the task of advising a ruler how to rule. To admit reason, he fears, is to admit a ruler, whose law of duty will make a slave of him and curtail the advantage he derives from power. He has yet to learn a lesson from Theopompus, the Spartan king, who was the first to modify the powers of the throne by means of that of the Ephors. When his wife reproached him for proposing to leave to his children less authority than he had inherited, he replied: ‘Nay, greater, because more assured.’ By relaxing its excessive absolutism he escaped the |F| consequent ill-feeling, and therewith its dangers. But note. Theopompus, in diverting into other channels a portion of the full stream of power, deprived himself of just so much as he gave away. But when philosophic reason becomes the established colleague and protector of a ruler, it merely removes the perilous element and leaves the healthy—a process as necessary to power as to sound health.

In most cases, however, monarchs or rulers show as little wisdom as a tasteless sculptor, who fancies that to represent a figure with a huge stride, strained muscles, and gaping mouth, is to make it appear massive and imposing. They imagine that |780| an arrogant tone, harsh looks, short temper, and exclusiveness give them the true regal air of awe and majesty. In reality they are not a bit better than a colossal statue with the outward shape and form of a god or demigod, while the inside is a mass of earth, stone, or lead. Indeed, in the case of the statue, these heavy materials serve to keep it erect and prevent it from warping; whereas, with an unschooled governor or chief, the unreason within is often the cause of instability and collapse. |B| His foundation being out of plumb, the lofty power which he builds upon it is correspondingly unstable. Now it is only when the builder’s square is itself faultless in line and angle, that it can make other things true to line by adjustment to, and comparison with, itself. So a ruler must begin by acquiring rule within himself. Let him set his own soul straight, and make his own character firm, and then begin adjusting his subjects thereto. You cannot set upright, when you are falling; teach, when you are ignorant; discipline, when unruly; command, when disobedient; govern, when ungoverned. And yet it is a common error to suppose that the chief blessing of authority |C| is to be above authority. To the King of Persia every one was a slave except his own wife, the very person whose master he ought to have been.

By whom, then, is the ruler to be ruled? By the

Law,

Sovereign of mortals and immortals all,

as Pindar says; not a law written outwardly in books or on wooden tables, but a living law of reason in himself, abiding with him, watching him, and never leaving his soul destitute of guidance. The King of Persia kept one chamberlain whose special function was to enter in the morning and say to him: ‘Rise, Sire, and attend to matters which Great Oromazdes |D| meant for your concern.’ The ruler who has learned wisdom and self-control hears the same voice of exhortation from within. It was a saying of Polemo that love is ‘serving the Gods in the care and protection of the young‘. With more truth it might be said that a ruler serves God in the care and protection of men, by dispensing, or safeguarding, the blessings which God gives to mankind.

See’st thou yon boundless sky and air aloft,

How in soft arms it clasps the world about?

From it descend the first principles of seeds in due kind; earth brings them forth; their growth is fostered by rains or winds or the warmth of moon and stars; while the sun brings everything |E| to beauty and tinctures all creation with that peculiar love-spell which is his. But though the Gods may lavish these great boons and blessings, who can enjoy or use them rightly, if there be no law, justice, or ruler? Justice is the end of law; law is the work of the ruler; and a ruler is an image of the God who orders all things. He needs no Pheidias or Polycleitus or Myro to fashion him, but brings himself into likeness with deity |F| by means of virtue, and so creates the fairest and most divine of effigies. In the heavens the sun and moon were set by God as His own beauteous image; and, in a state, the same shining embodiment is to be found in the ruler

Godfearing, who justice upholdeth,

—that is to say, when he holds, not a sceptre, but a mind which is the reason of God; not when he holds the thunderbolt or trident with which some represent themselves in statue or picture, rendering their folly odious to Heaven by such impossible assertion. For God visits with righteous wrath him who makes pretence of thunder or thunderbolt or darting sun-ray; but when a man studies to emulate His goodness, and to take |781| a pattern by His virtue and benevolence, He delights in furthering him and bestowing a portion of His own righteousness, justice, truth, and mercy. Not fire or light, not the course of the sun, the risings and settings of the stars, everlastingness and immortality, are more divine that these attributes. For it is not by reason of length of life that God is happy, but by reason of the virtue which rules. This is ‘divine’. ‘Noble’, however, is the virtue whose part it is only to obey.

When Alexander was in sore distress at killing Cleitus, Anaxarchus told him, by way of comfort, that Right and Justice were |B| but the ‘assessors’ of Zeus—making out that any act was right and lawful for a king. A false and pernicious salve for his repentance at his sin, this encouragement to repeat it! If we are to use such figures of speech, Right is no ‘assessor’ of Zeus, but He himself is Right and Justice, the oldest and most consummate Law. What the ancients tell and write and teach is that, without Justice, not even Zeus can properly rule. According to Hesiod

A virgin is she,

the incorruptible partner of feeling, self-control, and beneficence. |C| Hence are kings called ‘merciful’, for mercy best becomes those who are least afraid. A ruler’s fear should be of doing harm rather than of suffering it; for the former action is the cause of the latter, and this kind of fear on the part of a ruler is creditable to humanity. There is nothing ignoble in a fear for his subjects and of possible injury to them. Such rulers are like

Dogs that keep ward o’er the sheep in the farmstead, anxiously watching

At sound of a fierce wild beast—

their anxiety being not for themselves, but for their charges.

Once when the Thebans had recklessly abandoned themselves |D| to feasting and carousal, Epaminondas went the round of the walls and the military posts all by himself, remarking that he was keeping sober and wakeful so that the rest might be drunk and asleep. When Cato, after the defeat at Utica, gave orders that every one else should be sent to sea, saw them on board, prayed that they might have a prosperous voyage, and then went back home and stabbed himself, it was a lesson on the text, ‘For whose sake should a ruler feel fear, and for what should he feel contempt?’ On the other hand, Clearchus, despot of Pontus, used at bedtime to crawl like a snake into a chest. |E| Similarly, Aristodemus of Argos crept into an upper room entered by a trap-door. Over this he would put the couch upon which he passed the night with his mistress. Meanwhile her mother dragged away the ladder from below, bringing it back and putting it in place in the morning. How, think you, must he have shuddered at the theatre, at the Government offices, at the Senate-House, at the banquet, when he turned his own bedchamber into a prison? Yes, kings are afraid for their subjects, despots are afraid of them. It follows that, as they add to their power, they add to their alarms; the more people they rule, the more people they fear.

|F| It is an improbable and unworthy view to hold of God—as some philosophers do—that He exists as an element in matter to which all sorts of things may happen, and in entities which are subject to innumerable accidents, chances and changes. In reality He is stablished somewhere aloft ‘on holy pedestal’ (as Plato puts it) in the realm of nature uniform and constant, and there ‘moves according to Nature in a straight line towards the accomplishment of His end‘. And as in heaven the sun, His beauteous counterfeit, shows itself as His reflection in a mirror to those who have the power to see Him through it, so, in the justice and reason which shine in a state, He sets up a likeness of that which is in Himself, and, by copying that likeness, men |782| whom philosophy has gifted and chastened model themselves after the highest pattern.

This condition of mind nothing can implant except reason acquired from philosophy. Otherwise we are in the position of Alexander, when he went to see Diogenes at Corinth. In delight at his talent, and in admiration of his proud and lofty spirit, he exclaimed: ‘If I had not been Alexander, I would have been Diogenes.’ And what did this virtually mean? That he was vexed at his own high fortune, splendour, and |B| power, because they were an obstacle to the virtue for which he could find no time, and that he envied the cloak and the wallet, which made Diogenes as invincible and unassailable as he himself was made by armour and horses and spears. And yet by the practice of philosophy he might have secured the moral character of a Diogenes while retaining the position of an Alexander. Nay, he should have become all the more a Diogenes for being an Alexander, since his high fortune, so liable to be tossed by stormy winds, required ample ballast and a master hand at the helm.

In the case of private men without strength or standing, folly is so qualified by impotence that in the end no mischief is done. It is as with a bad dream, in which, though the mind is excited with passion, no harm results, inasmuch as it is unable to rise and act in accordance with the desires. When, on the other |C| hand, vice is adopted by power, the passions acquire sinew and strength. Dionysius spoke truly when he said that the highest advantage of power was to give speedy effect to a wish. A most parlous thing, if you can give effect to a wish, and yet wish what is wrong!

No sooner the word had been utter’d, than straightway the deed was accomplish’d.

Vice, when enabled by power to run rapid course, forces every passion into action, converting anger into murder, love into adultery, greed into confiscation.

No sooner the word hath been utter’d,

than your opponent has met his doom. No sooner a suspicion, than the victim of slander is a dead man.

|D| Scientists tell us that, whereas lightning really follows and issues from thunder like blood from a wound, it is perceived first because, while the hearing waits for the sound, the vision goes out to meet the light. So with rulers. The punishment outstrips the charge; the condemnation does not wait for the proof.

For forthwith anger slips and loses hold,

Like anchor’s tooth in sand when seas swell high,

unless reason with all its weight puts a heavy drag on power; unless, that is, the ruler acts like the sun, whose motion is least |E| when its height is greatest, namely, at the time of its northern altitude, its course being steadied by the diminished speed.

Vice in high places cannot be hid. When an epileptic is placed upon a height and made to turn round, he is seized with giddiness and begins to totter, his malady being betrayed thereby. So with an unschooled and ignorant person. After a brief uplifting by wealth or fame or place, the same fortune which raised him up immediately reveals how ready he is to fall. To put it another way; when a vessel is empty, you cannot detect the crack or flaw, but when you begin to fill it, the leak appears. |F| So with a mind which is too unsound to hold power and authority; its leaks are to be seen in its exhibitions of lust, anger, pretentiousness, and ignorance. Yet why speak of this, when holes are picked in eminent and distinguished men for the merest peccadilloes? Cimon was reproached for his addiction to wine, Scipio for his addiction to sleep, and Lucullus for his extravagance at table[^[47]]....

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 virtues 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 nature 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; whereas, 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 friend, 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 character. 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.

The 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 for 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 Alcibiades. 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 it 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 he 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 messages 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.

So 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 will 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 Cleanthes. 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 that 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 the 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.

But 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 the 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, since 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 a 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 it 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 being 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 was 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 becomes 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 that 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, titillating, 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| throws 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 indications 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.

|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.

Why, 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, but 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 he 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, |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 to 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 complaisance; 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.

Since, 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,

silently 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 intention 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 sort 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 inebriation 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 inflated 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 plain-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 splendour 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 unacquainted 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 again 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 humbling 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 character 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 among our remedies is to add a slight tincture of praise. For example:

Ugly is this that ye do, to cease from your valour and prowess,

All ye best of the host! I would not move me to quarrel,

If ’twere some other who thus might hold his hand from the fighting,

Some craven man; but with you is my heart exceedingly anger’d:

or:

Pandarus, where is thy bow, and where thy feathery arrows?

Where thy glory, the which no man among us doth challenge?

If a man is giving way, there is also a vigorous rallying power in such language as

Where now

Is Oedipus and all his far-famed rede?

or:

Is ‘t Heracles,

He who hath borne so many a brunt, speaks thus?

Not only does it temper the harshness of the punishment |D| inflicted by the reproach; it sets a man at rivalry with himself. When reminded of the things which stand to his credit, he is ashamed of those which degrade him, and he finds an elevating example in his own person. But when we make comparisons with others—with mates, fellow citizens, or kinsmen—the contentiousness which belongs to his failings is piqued and exacerbated. It has a habit of retorting angrily, ‘Then why don’t you go to my betters, instead of harassing me?’ We must therefore beware of belauding one person while we are speaking our minds to another—always, of course, with the exception of his parents. Thus Agamemnon can say:

Truly, a son little like to himself hath Tydeus begotten;

|E| or Odysseus, when in Scyrus:

But thou o’ersham’st the brilliance of thy race,

Wool-spinner! thou, whose sire was Greece’s hero!

By no means should we use reproof to answer reproof, or plain-speaking in counter-attack to plain-speaking. Otherwise we quickly produce heat and create a quarrel. Moreover, such disputatiousness is naturally regarded, not as a return of candour, |F| but as intolerance of it. It is better, therefore, to listen with a good grace when a friend believes he is reproving you. For this, if at a later time some offence of his own calls for reprobation, is the very thing which gives your plain-speaking its right—as it were—to speak. When, without bearing any grudge, you remind him that it has not been his own habit to let his friends go wrong, but to teach them better and set them right, he will be the more ready to give in and accept the proffered correction; for he will believe that it is good feeling and good intention, not anger and fault-finding, which prompt this payment in return.

|73| In the next place, remember the saying of Thucydides: ‘Well advised is he who accepts unpopularity in a great cause.’ It is the duty of a friend to accept the odium of reproof when questions of great moment are at stake. But if he is everywhere and always being displeased; if he behaves to his intimates as if he were their tutor and not their friend, his reproofs will possess no edge and produce no effect when it comes to matters of importance. He will have frittered away his candour, after the manner of a physician who takes a pungent or bitter drug |B| of a sovereign and costly character, and parcels it out in a large number of petty doses for which there is no necessity. No! while a friend will, for his own part, carefully avoid such unremitting censoriousness, the incessant niggling and pettifogging of some other person will afford him an opening to attack those faults which are more serious. Once when a man with an ulcerated liver showed the physician Philotimus a sore on his finger, the doctor observed, ‘My good sir, your case is not a matter of a whitlow!’ So when some one is finding fault with a number of insignificant peccadilloes, the real friend will be offered the opportunity of saying to him, ‘What have his tippling and foolery to do with us? My good sir, let our friend here dismiss his mistress or stop dicing, and he is otherwise an admirable fellow.’ If a man finds that allowance is made |C| for his trifling errors, he will take it in good part when a friend speaks his mind against those which are of more moment. But to be everlastingly girding, to be bitter and harsh on all occasions, to be continually meddling and taking cognisance of every action, is intolerable even to a child or a brother, nay, unendurable even to a slave.

Again, it is no more true of the folly of our friends than it is—despite Euripides—of old age, that

All things are wrong with it.

Our friends have their right actions, and we should keep an eye upon these no less than upon their errors. We should, in fact, begin by zealously praising them. In dealing with iron we have first to soften it with heat before the chilling process |D| can impart to it the consistency and hardness of steel. So with our friends. First we warm and fuse them with praise; then a quiet application of candour serves as a tempering douche. We have, for instance, the opportunity of saying, ‘Is there any comparison between the other conduct and this? Do you see what good fruit comes of doing the right thing? This is what your friends expect of you; it is like you, and what nature meant you for. The other conduct is abominable; away with it

To the mountain or to the wave of the surging tumultuous ocean!‘

A sensible physician will always rather cure a sick man with sleep and feeding than with castor and scammony; and a right-minded friend, or a kind father or teacher, prefers to use praise |E| rather than blame as his means of moral correction. For a candid friend to cause least pain and work most benefit, there is nothing like showing the least possible anger and treating the offender with polite good feeling. We must not, therefore, sharply confute him if he denies a thing, nor try to stop him if he defends himself. On the contrary, we must help him to contrive some kind of plausible excuse; and, when he refuses to own to the more discreditable motive, we must ourselves concede him a less heinous one. Thus Hector says to his brother:

Not well is this wrath, foolish man, that thus thou hast stored in thy bosom,

|F| as if his retirement from the battle, instead of being a dastardly running away, was an exhibition of temper. So Nestor to Agamemnon:

Thou didst yield to the pride of thy spirit.

It is manifestly more courteous to say, ‘You did not stop to think,’ or, ‘You failed to perceive,’ than ‘You behaved badly’, or ‘You behaved unfairly’; to say, ‘Do not be hard upon |74| your brother,’ than ‘Do not be jealous of your brother’; to say, ‘Flee from the woman’s seductions,’ than ‘Stop trying to seduce the woman’. This is the manner cultivated by curative |*| candour; the other belongs to vexatious candour.

Suppose a person is about to do wrong and that we are called upon to check him—to stem the current of some vehement impulse. Or suppose that he is inclined to be unready in the performance of duty, and we wish to brace him up and stimulate him. We should do so by making charges which put the matter in an outrageously unbecoming light. For instance, in Sophocles, when Odysseus is working upon Achilles, he makes out, not that Achilles is angry at the affair of the banquet, but |B|

Now that thou hast the Trojan burghs in sight,

Thou art afraid.

And when, in answer to this, Achilles is so enraged that he declares he is off home:

I know what ’tis thou flyest—not reproach:

Hector is nigh, and ’tis not well to stay.

In inciting to high courses and dissuading from low ones, we may frighten a man with the reputation he will win: a man of courage and spirit with that of coward; a man of temperance and self-control with that of profligate; a man of magnificent generosity with that of miser and cheeseparer. Where a thing is past cure, we must show ourselves reasonable; our candour |C| must display more sorrow and sympathy than blame. But when we are preventing a misdeed or fighting against a passion, we must be vigorous, inflexible, and insistent. Then is the right moment for incorruptible affection and genuine frankness.

To blame an action when it is done is no more than we find enemies doing to each other. Diogenes used to say that, if you are to be kept right, you must possess either good friends or red-hot enemies. The one will warn you, the other will expose you. But it is better to avoid errors by taking advice than to repent of an error because of abuse. For this reason |D| we must study tact even in the matter of candour. As it is the most effective drug that can be employed in friendship, so it stands in most need of unfailing discretion as to time and moderation as to strength.

And, finally, since, as I have said, it is in the nature of plain-speaking that it should often cause pain to the person under treatment, we must take a pattern by the medical man. He does not use his lancet and then leave the part to suffer; he eases it with gentle lotions and fomentations. Similarly, if our admonitions are to be tactful, we do not administer a sharp sting and then run away. We adopt a different strain, and soothe |E| and calm the patient with courteous language, much as sculptors put smoothness and gloss upon a statue where they have chipped it with hammer and chisel. If we strike and gash a man with plain-speaking and then leave him in the rough—lumpy and uneven with anger—it is a hard matter afterwards to call him back and smooth him over. This, therefore, is a result against which the admonisher must be especially on his guard. He must not leave the patient too soon, nor allow the last words of his conversation to be such as pain and exasperate his intimate friend.

ON BRINGING UP A BOY[^[55]]

I propose to offer some remarks upon the bringing-up of |1| free-born children, as a means of securing soundness of character.

Perhaps the best starting-point is that at which they are brought into existence.

Upon one who desires to become the father of reputable |B| children I would urge that he should be careful as to his consort. She must be no mistress or concubine. Base birth, whether on mother’s or father’s side, is an indelible reproach. It sticks to a man all the days of his life; it offers a handle to those who are minded to discredit or vilify him; and it is a wise saying of the poet that

When the foundation of a stock is laid

Amiss, needs must the issue be unhappy.

A sure fund of confidence for facing the world lies therefore in honourable birth, and this must be a first consideration with all who are anxious for a right and proper procreation of children.

It is quite natural that those whose birth is of base metal which will not bear scrutiny should tend to be weak-spirited and abject. The poet is quite right in saying: |C|

It slaves a man, stout-hearted though he be,

To know his mother or his father base.

It is no doubt equally the case that persons of distinguished parentage become full of pride and self-assertion. Thus Themistocles’ son, Diophantus, is reported to have said on many occasions and to many persons that he had only to wish for a thing and the Athenian people voted for it. ‘What he liked, |D| his mother liked; what his mother liked, Themistocles liked; and what Themistocles liked, all Athens liked.’

A most praiseworthy pride was that exhibited by the Lacedaemonians, when they mulcted their own king Archidamus for condescending to marry a woman of small stature, their plea being that he intended to provide them with kinglets instead of kings.

In this connexion there is one observation which my predecessors also have duly made. It is that those who approach their wives with a view to offspring should do so either while wholly abstaining from wine or at least after tasting it in moderation. |2| This explains the remark of Diogenes on seeing a youth in a state of mad excitement: ‘Young fellow, your father begat you when he was drunk.’

So much for the question of birth. We will now turn to that of upbringing.

Speaking generally, we must say of virtue what it is customary to say of the arts and sciences—that for right action three things must go together, namely, nature, reason, and habit. By reason I mean instruction; by habit I mean exercise. The |B| first elements come from nature; progress, from instruction; the actual use, from practice; the consummation, from all combined. In so far as any of these is defective, character must necessarily be maimed. Nature without instruction is blind; instruction without nature is futile; practice without both is abortive. In farming, the soil must first be good; next, the farmer must know his business; third, the seeds must be sound. Similarly with education. Nature is the soil, the teacher is the farmer, |C| the lessons and precepts are the seed. It may be confidently asserted that all three were harmoniously blended in the souls of those men whose renown is universal—Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and others who have won imperishable glory.

Blest indeed, and divinely favoured, is the man on whom Heaven has bestowed each and all. Yet it would be a great, or rather a total, mistake to suppose that, when natural gift is defective, no right moral instruction and practice will lead one to improve his faulty nature in some attainable degree. For while neglect will ruin an excellent natural gift, teaching will correct an inferior one. Be careless, and you miss a thing, however easy: take pains, and you secure it, however difficult. You have only to glance at a number of everyday facts in order |D| to perceive how complete is the success of persistent effort. Drops of water will hollow a rock; iron and bronze are worn away by the touch of the hands; wood bent by pressure into a carriage-wheel can never recover its original straightness. To straighten the curved sticks used by actors is impossible, the unnatural form having become, by dint of straining, stronger than the natural.

Nor are these the only examples to prove the efficacy of painstaking. Instances are countless. Soil may be naturally |E| good; but neglect it, and it becomes a waste. Indeed, the better it is by nature, the more hopeless a wilderness will your neglect make of it. On the other hand, it may be too hard and rugged; yet cultivation will speedily cause it to produce excellent crops. Is there any tree which will not grow crooked and cease to bear fruit if left untended, whereas, when properly trained, it bears well and brings its fruit to perfection? Does not bodily strength invariably become effete when you take your ease and neglect to keep in good condition, whereas a feeble physique gains immensely in strength through gymnastic and athletic exercise? Is there any horse which a rider cannot render obedient by |F| a thorough breaking-in, whereas, if left unbroken, it will prove stiff-necked and full of temper?

But why dwell longer on such cases, when there are so many examples of the most savage creatures being tamed and made amenable to hard work?

When a Thessalian was asked which of his countrymen were the gentlest in manner, his answer was a good one: Those who are giving up war. But it is useless to multiply instances. Character is long-standing habit, and it would scarcely be beside |3| the mark to speak of the virtues of the mind as the virtues ‘of minding’.[^[56]] One more illustration, and we will dispense with further elaboration of the subject. The Spartan legislator Lycurgus once took two puppies belonging to the same parents and brought them up in entirely different ways. The one he turned into a gluttonous good-for-nothing, the other into a keen and capable hunting-dog. Subsequently he got the Lacedaemonians together and said to them: ‘A great factor |B| in engendering virtue consists of habit and education—of instruction in the conduct of life—as I am about to prove to you here and now.’ He then brought forward the two young dogs, put down directly in front of them a plate of food and a hare, and let the dogs loose; whereupon the one darted after the hare, while the other made for the plate. The Lacedaemonians, who were not yet in the secret, failed to perceive the meaning of his demonstration, until he told them: ‘Both these dogs come from the same parents, but the difference in their education has turned the one into a glutton and the other into a hunter.’

No more need be said of habit and conduct of life. We may |C| proceed to the question of nurture.

In my opinion mothers should nurse their own children and offer them the breast; for their nursing will be of a more sympathetic and painstaking kind, since their love is from the heart, or, as the saying goes, ‘down to the finger-tips,’ whereas the affection of professional nurses and foster-mothers—who are paid for it—can only be spurious and factitious. That it is the duty of the mother herself to suckle and nurse her offspring is evident from the arrangement of nature, which has supplied every animal after parturition with the necessary provision of milk. Here Providence further shows its wisdom, inasmuch as it has furnished a woman with a pair of breasts, |D| so that, even if she bears twins, there may be a double source for them to draw upon. Moreover she will by so acting become more tender and affectionate to her child. It can, indeed, scarcely be otherwise; the connexion of nurse and nursling is the means of raising affection to its highest pitch. One can see how even a brute beast will yearn for its nursling, if you tear them apart.

If possible, then, the mother should endeavour to nurse the child herself. But if—as may sometimes happen—she is prevented by physical weakness, or if other children are speedily on the way, it is at least desirable not to accept as foster-mother or nurse the first that offers, but to choose the best possible. |E| To begin with, her character should be Greek. It is as with the treatment of the body. As soon as children are born, we have to mould their limbs in order that they may grow straight and shapely. Similarly their characters ought to be regulated from the first. For youth is supple and plastic, and it is while the mind is still soft and yielding that it acts as a mould for instruction, whereas it is always difficult to knead into shape |F| anything hard. As it is in soft wax that we make the impression of a seal, so it is in the minds of those who are still little children that we imprint a lesson.

That great thinker Plato is right, it seems to me, in exhorting a nurse to use discretion in the tales she tells to young children; otherwise their minds may become infected from the first with folly and corruption. It is also sound advice which the poet Phocylides gives in the words:

While yet but a child, it behoveth

To learn such deeds as are good.

Another point which we cannot afford to omit concerns the slave children who are to serve the young master and to be brought up with him. Pains must be taken, first, of course, that |4| they shall be well-behaved, but also that they shall talk Greek, and talk it with good articulation. Otherwise, through rubbing against barbarians and bad characters, he will pick up something of their vices. The proverb-makers have good reason for saying: If you have a lame man for a neighbour, you will learn to limp.

When children reach the age to be put under a mentor, it becomes especially necessary to take pains in the appointment of such a person. Otherwise we shall have them entrusted to some uncivilized or rascally fellow. What actually happens |B| is often in the highest degree absurd. Respectable slaves are made into farmers, skippers, traders, stewards, or money-lenders, while any low specimen who is found to be a glutton and a tippler and of no use in any kind of business is taken and put in charge of the sons. A fit and proper attendant should possess the same qualities of mind as Phoenix, the attendant of Achilles.

We now reach a topic more important and vital than any yet treated—that of the right teachers for our children. The kind to be sought for are those whose lives are irreproachable, whose characters are unimpugned, and whose skill and experience |C| are of the best. The root or fountain-head of character as a man and a gentleman lies in receiving the proper education. As farmers put stakes beside their plants, so the right kind of teacher provides firm support for the young in the shape of lessons and admonitions, carefully chosen so as to produce an upright growth of character.

As things are, the behaviour of some fathers is contemptible. Before making inquiry as to the proposed teachers, they put their children into the hands of frauds and charlatans, without knowing what they are about, or, maybe, because they are not competent to judge. In the latter case their behaviour is not so ridiculous, but there is another case in which it is in the last degree absurd. I mean, when they know, either from their own |D| observation or from the accounts of others, how ignorant and |*| bad certain educators are, and yet entrust their children to them. Sometimes this is because they cannot resist the fawning of some obsequious flatterer; sometimes it is done to gratify the whim of a friend. It would be just as reasonable for a sick man to gratify a friend by rejecting the doctor whose science could save him, and preferring the ignoramus who will kill him; or for a man to dismiss the best ship’s-captain and appoint the worst, because a friend asked for it. In the name of all that is sacred, can any one called a ‘father’ set the pleasing of |E| somebody who asks a favour above the education of his children? There was good sense in a frequent saying of famous old Socrates, ‘If it could be done, one ought to mount the loftiest part of the city and shout: Good people, what are you after? Why in such deadly earnest about making money, while troubling so little about the sons to whom you are to leave it?’ We may add that the conduct of such fathers is like that of a man who is anxious as to his shoe, while his foot may look after itself. Many fathers go to such lengths in the way of fondness for their money and |F| want of fondness for their children, that, to avoid paying a larger fee, they choose utterly worthless persons to educate their sons, their object being an inexpensive ignorance. This reminds one of Aristippus and his neat and witty repartee to a foolish father. Questioned as to what fee he asked for educating the child, he replied, ‘Forty pounds.’ ‘Good heavens!’ said the father: ‘What an extravagant demand! For forty pounds I can buy a slave.’ ‘Very well,’ was the answer: ‘then you |5| will have two slaves—your son, and the one you buy.’

To put it shortly, it is surely absurd to train little children to receive their food with the right hand, and to scold them if they put out the left, and yet to take no precautions that they shall be taught moral lessons of a sound and proper kind.

What the consequence is to these admirable fathers, when they bring up their sons badly and educate them badly, is soon told. On coming of age and taking rank as men, the sons show an utter disregard of a wholesome and orderly life, and throw themselves headlong into low and irregular pleasures. Then |B| at last, when it is of no use, and when their wrongdoing has brought him to his wits’ end, the father repents of having sacrificed his children’s education. Some of them take up with toadies and parasites, wretched nondescripts who are the ruin and bane of youth; others with haughty and expensive mistresses and strumpets, whom they ransom from their employers. Some spend recklessly on gormandizing; some are wrecked upon dice and carousals; some go so far as to venture on the more daring vices—they commit adultery, and think death not too much |C| to pay for a single pleasure. Had these last studied philosophy, they would in all probability not have succumbed to temptation of this kind. They would have been told of the advice of Diogenes—who, however coarse in his language, is right in his facts—‘Go to a brothel, my boy, and you will find that the |*| expensive article is not a bit better than the cheap one.’

In brief, then, I assert—and it would be fairer to regard me as repeating an oracle than as giving advice—that in these matters the one and essential thing, the first, middle, and last, is a sound upbringing and right education. It is this, I say, which leads to virtue and happiness.

|D| Other blessings are on the human plane; they are slight and not worth serious pursuit. Good birth is a distinction, but the boon depends on one’s ancestors. Wealth is a prize, but its possession depends on fortune, which often carries it off from those who have it and bestows it on those who never hoped for it. Moreover, great wealth is a target exposed to any rogue of a servant or blackmailer who is minded to ‘aim a purse’ at it. And, worst of all, even the basest of men have their share of it. Fame, again, is imposing, but uncertain. Beauty, though greatly courted, is short-lived; health, though highly prized, is unstable; strength is a thing to be envied, but it falls an easy prey to disease and age. Let us tell any one who prides himself |E| on his bodily strength that he is manifestly under a delusion. How small a fraction is human strength of the might of other animals, such as the elephant, the bull, and the lion!

Meanwhile culture is the only thing in us that is immortal and divine. In the nature of man there are two sovereign elements—understanding and reason. It is the place of the understanding to direct the reason and of the reason to serve the understanding. Fortune cannot overcome them, calumny cannot rob us of them, disease cannot corrupt them, old age cannot impair them. The understanding is the only thing that renews its youth as it grows old, and, while time carries off everything else, it brings old age one gift—that of knowledge. When, again, war comes like a torrent, tearing and sweeping everything away, it is of our mental culture alone that it cannot rob us. Stilpo, the Megarian philosopher, made what seems a memorable answer when Demetrius, after enslaving the city and razing it to the ground, asked him if he had lost anything. ‘O no!’ said he, ‘for virtue is not made spoil of war.’ The reply of Socrates is evidently to the same tune and purpose. |6| It was Gorgias, I believe, who asked him his opinion of the Great King, and whether he considered him happy. ‘I have no knowledge,’ said Socrates, ‘as to the state of his character and culture.’ He assumed that happiness depended upon these, and not upon the gifts of fortune.

Not only should the education of our children be treated as of the very first importance, but I once more urge that we should insist upon its being of the sound and genuine kind. From pretentious nonsense our sons should be kept as far aloof |B| as possible. To please the many is to displease the wise, an assertion in which I have the support of Euripides:

I am not deft of words before the crowd,

More skilled when with my compeers and the few.

’Tis compensation: they who ‘mid the wise

Are naught, surpass in gift of speech to mobs.

My own observation tells me that persons who make a business of speaking in a way to please and curry favour with the rabble, generally prove correspondingly dissolute and pleasure-loving in their lives. Nor, indeed, should we expect anything else; for if they have no regard to propriety when catering for the |C| gratification of other people, it is not likely that they will permit right and sound principles to have the upper hand of their own voluptuous self-indulgence, nor that they will cultivate self-control rather than enjoyment.

|*| And how can children learn from them anything admirable? Among admirable things is the practice of neither saying nor doing anything at random; and, as the proverb goes, ‘admirable things are difficult.’ Meanwhile, speeches made offhand are a mass of reckless slovenliness, without a notion where to begin or where to end.

Apart from other faults, extempore speakers drop into a terrible prolixity and verbiage, whereas premeditation keeps |D| a speech safe within the lines of due proportion. When Pericles, ‘as tradition informs us,’ was called upon by the assembly, he frequently refused the call, on the ground that his thoughts were ‘not arranged’. Demosthenes, who took him for his own political model, acted in the same way. If the Athenians called upon him to address them, he would resist, with the words, ‘I have not arranged my thoughts.’ This, it is true, may be unauthentic and a fabrication; but in the speech against Meidias we have an explicit statement as to the advantage of preparation. His words are: ‘I admit, gentlemen, that I come prepared; and I have no wish to deny it. I have even conned over my speech to the best of my poor ability. It would have been insane conduct, if, after and amid such harsh treatment, I had paid no regard to what I meant to say to you on the subject.’

That impromptu speaking should be rejected altogether, or, |E| failing this, that it should be practised only on unimportant subjects, I do not say. I am recommending a tonic regimen. Before manhood, I claim that there should be no speaking on the spur of the moment. But when the ability has taken firm root, it is only right for speech to enjoy free play as occasion invites. Though persons who have been in prison for a long time may subsequently be liberated, they are unsteady on their feet, |F| a protracted habit of wearing chains making them unable to step out. Similarly if those who have for a long time kept their speaking under close constraint some day find it necessary to speak offhand, they nevertheless retain the same style of expression. But to let mere children make extempore speeches is to become responsible for the worst of twaddle and futility. There is a story of a wretched painter who showed Apelles a picture, with the remark, ‘I have just painted this at one |7| sitting.’ ‘I can see,’ said Apelles, ‘without your telling me, that it has been quick work. But my wonder is that you haven’t painted more than one as good.’

While (to return to the original matter in hand) we must be careful to avoid a style which is theatrical and bombastic, we must be equally on our guard against one which is low and trivial. If the turgid style is unbusinesslike, too thin a style is ineffective. Just as the body should be not only healthy but also in good condition, so language must be full of strength |B| and not simply free from disease. Keep on the safe side, and you are merely commended: face some risk, and you are admired. I take the same view of the mental disposition also. One should neither be over-bold, and so become brazen, nor yet timid and bashful, and so become mean-spirited. The rule of art and taste is The middle course in all things.

|*| While I am still upon the subject of this part of education there is an opinion which I desire to express. A style consisting of single clauses I regard in the first instance as no slight evidence of poor taste, and, in the next, as too finical a thing ever to |C| be maintained in practice. Here, as in everything else that caters for ear or eye, monotony is as cloying and irksome as variety is delightful.

There is no subject in the ‘regular curriculum’ of which the eye or ear of a freeborn boy should be permitted to remain uninformed. But while he receives a cursory education in those subjects in order to taste their quality, the most important place—complete all-round proficiency being impossible—must belong to philosophy. We may explain by a comparison with |D| travel, in which it is an excellent thing to visit a large number of cities, but good policy to settle in the best. As the philosopher Bion wittily remarked, when the suitors could obtain no access to Penelope they satisfied themselves with her handmaids, and when a man is unable to get hold of philosophy he makes dry bones of himself upon the remaining subjects, which are of no account.

Philosophy, then, should be put at the head of all mental culture. The services which have been invented for the care of the body are two—medicine and gymnastics—the one imparting health, the other good condition. But for the weaknesses and ailments of the soul philosophy is the only thing to be prescribed. It is from and with philosophy that we can tell what is becoming or disgraceful, what is just or unjust, |E| what course, in short, is to be chosen or shunned. It teaches us how to behave towards the Gods, our parents, our elders, the laws, our rulers, friends, wives, children, and servants: that we should worship the Gods, honour our parents, respect our elders, obey the laws, give way to our rulers, love our friends, be continent towards our wives, show affection to our children, and abstain from cruelty to our slaves. Above all, it warns us against excess of joy when prosperous and excess of grief when unfortunate; against dissoluteness in our pleasures, or fury and brutality in our anger. These I judge to be chief among |F| the blessings conferred by philosophy. To bear adversity nobly is to act the brave man,[^[57]] to bear prosperity unassumingly, the |*| modest mortal. To get the better of pleasures by reason needs wisdom; to master anger requires no ordinary character.

Perfect men I take to be those who can blend practical ability |8| with philosophy, and who can achieve both of two best and greatest ends—the life of public utility as men of affairs, and the calm and tranquil life as students of philosophy. For there are three kinds of life: the life of action, the life of thought, and the life of enjoyment. When life is dissolute and enslaved to pleasure, it is mean and animal; when it is all thought and fails to act, it is futile; when it is all action and destitute of philosophy, it is crude and blundering. We should therefore do our best to engage both in public business and in the pursuit |B| of philosophy, as occasion offers. Of this kind was the public career of Pericles, of Archytas of Tarentum, of Dion of Syracuse, and of Epaminondas of Thebes. Of these Dion actually attached himself to Plato as his pupil.

There is no need, I think, to deal at any greater length with mental cultivation. It is, however, further desirable—or rather it is essential—that we should not neglect to possess the standard treatises, but should collect a stock of them, with the result of keeping our knowledge from starvation.[^[58]] Farmers stock |*| [their fertilizers], and the employment of books is instrumental to culture in the same way.

|C| Meanwhile we must not omit to exercise the body also. Our boys must be sent to the teacher of gymnastics and receive a sufficient amount of physical training, both to secure a good carriage and also to develop strength. Good condition is the foundation laid in childhood for a hale old age, and, just as our preparations for wintry weather should be made while it is fine, so we should store up provision for age in the shape of regular and temperate behaviour in youth. Physical exertion should, however, be so regulated that a boy does not become too exhausted to devote himself sufficiently to mental culture. |D| As Plato observes, sleep and weariness are the enemies of study.

Upon this topic I need not dwell, but will pass on at once to the most important consideration of all—the necessity of training a boy for service as a fighting-man. For this he must go through hard drill in hurling the javelin, in shooting with the bow, and in hunting. ‘The goods of the vanquished,’ it has been said, ‘are prizes offered to the victor.’ There is no place in war for the physical condition of the cloister, and a lean soldier accustomed to warlike exercises will break through |*| a phalanx of fleshy prize-fighters.

|E| ‘Well but,’ some one may urge, ‘while you promised us a set of rules for the upbringing of free men, it turns out that you have nothing to say concerning that of poor and common people, but are satisfied to confine your suggestions to the rich.’ There is a ready reply to the objection. If possible, I should desire the proposed education to be applicable to all alike. But if there are cases in which limited private circumstances make it impossible to carry my rules into practice, the blame should be laid upon fortune, not upon him who offers the advice. Though a man is poor, he should make every possible effort to bring up his children in the ideal way. Failing this, he must come as near to it as he can.

After thus encumbering our discussion with this side-issue, |F| I will now proceed with the connected account of such other |*| matters as contribute to the right upbringing of the young.

And first, children should be led into right practices of persuasion and reasoning: flogging and bodily injury should be out of the question. Such treatment is surely more fit for slaves than for the free, whom the smart, or even the humiliation, of a beating deprives of all life and spirit, making their tasks a horror to them. The freeborn find praise a more effective |9| stimulus to the right conduct, and blame a more effective deterrent from the wrong, than any kind of bodily assault. In the use of such praise and reprimand there should be a subtle alternation. When a child is too bold, it should first be shamed by reproof and then encouraged by a word of praise. We may take a pattern by nurses, who may have to make an infant cry, but who afterwards comfort it by offering it the breast. We must, however, avoid puffing children up with eulogies, the consequence of excessive praise being vanity and conceit.

I have noticed more than one instance in which the over-fondness |B| of a father has proved to be a lack of fondness. To make my meaning clear, I will use an illustration. Being in too great haste for their children to take first place in everything, they impose extravagant tasks, which prove too great for their strength and end in failure, besides causing them such weariness and distress that they refuse to submit patiently to instruction. Water in moderation will make a plant grow, while a flood of water will choke it. In the same way the mind will thrive under |C| reasonably hard work, but will drown if the work is excessive. We must therefore allow children breathing-time from perpetual tasks, and remember that all our life there is a division of relaxation and effort. Hence the existence of sleep as well as waking, of peace as well as war, of fine weather as well as bad, of holidays as well as business. In a word, it is rest that seasons toil. The fact is obvious, not merely in the case of living things, but in that of the inanimate world. We loosen a bow or a lyre, so that we may be able to tighten it. In fine, the body is kept sound by want and its satisfaction, the mind by relaxation and labour.

|D| There are some fathers who have a culpable way of entrusting their sons to attendants and teachers, and then entirely omitting to keep the instruction of such persons under their own eye or ear. This is a most serious failure in their duty. Every few days they should personally examine their children, instead of confiding in the character of a hireling, whose attention to his pupils will be more conscientious if he is to be brought continually to book. In this connexion there is aptness in the groom’s dictum that nothing is so fattening to a horse as the eye of the king.

|E| Above all things one should train and exercise a child’s memory. Memory serves as the storehouse of culture, and hence the fable that Recollection is the mother of the Muses—an indirect way of saying that memory is the best thing in the world to beget and foster wisdom. Whether children are naturally gifted with a good memory, or, on the contrary, are naturally forgetful, the memory should be trained in either case. The natural advantage will be strengthened, or the natural shortcoming made up. The former class will excel others, the latter will excel themselves. As Hesiod well puts it: |F|

If to the thing that is little you further add but a little,

And do the same oft and again, full soon it becometh a great thing.

This, then, is another fact for fathers to recognize—that the mnemonic element in education plays a most important part, not only in culture, but also in the business of life, inasmuch as the recollection of past experience serves as a guide to wise policy for the future.

Our sons must also be kept from the use of foul language. ‘The word,’ says Democritus, ‘is the shadow of the deed.’ More than that, we must render them polite and courteous, |10| for there is nothing so detestable as a boorish character. One way in which children may avoid becoming disagreeable to their company is by refraining from absolute stubbornness in discussion. Credit is to be gained not merely by victory, but also by knowing how to accept defeat where victory is harmful. There is unquestionably such a thing as a ‘Cadmean victory’. À propos I may quote the testimony of that wise poet Euripides: |B|

When two men speak, and one is full of anger,

Wiser the one who strives not to reply.

This is the time to remember certain other habits quite as necessary—and more so—for the young to cultivate as any yet mentioned. These are modesty of behaviour, restraint of the tongue, mastery of the temper, and control of the hands. Let us see how important each of them is. We may take an illustration to bring home the notion more clearly. And we will begin with the last. There have been those who, by lowering their hands to ill-gotten gains, have thrown away all the reputation won by their previous career. This was the case with the Lacedaemonian, Gylippus, who was driven into exile from Sparta |C| for secretly broaching the money-bags. Absence of anger, again, is a quality of wisdom. Socrates once received a kick from a very impudent and gross young buffoon, but on seeing that his own friends were in such a violent state of indignation that they wanted to prosecute him, he remarked: ‘If a donkey had kicked me, would you have condescended to kick him back?’ The fellow did not, however, get off scot-free, but finding himself universally reproached and nicknamed ‘Kicker’, he hanged himself. When Aristophanes brought out the Clouds, and poured all manner of abuse upon Socrates, one of those present asked: ‘Pray, are you not indignant at his ridiculing you in this manner?’ |D| ‘Not I, indeed,’ replied Socrates; ‘this banter in the theatre is only in a big convivial party.’ A close counterpart of this attitude will be found in the behaviour of Plato and of Archytas of Tarentum. When the latter, on his return from the war in which he had held command, found that his land had gone out of cultivation, he summoned his manager and remarked: ‘You would have suffered for this, if I had not been too angry.’ When Plato, again, was once worked into a passion with a greedy and impudent slave, he called his sister’s son Speusippus and said, ‘Go and give this fellow a thrashing: I am myself in a great passion.’

But, it may be argued, it is difficult to reach so high a standard |E| as this. I am well aware of it. We can therefore only do our best to take a pattern by such conduct, and minimize any tendency to ungovernable rage. As in other matters, we are no match for either the moral mastery or the finished character of those great models. Nevertheless we may act towards them as we might towards the Gods, serving as hierophants and torch-bearers of their wisdom and endeavouring to imitate in our nibbling way as much as lies in our power.

As for the control of the tongue—the remaining point to be considered according to our promise—any one who regards it as of trivial moment is very much in the wrong. In a timely |F| silence there is a wisdom superior to any speech. It is apparently for this reason that men in old times invented our mystic rites and ceremonies. The notion was that, through being trained to silence in connexion with these, we should secure the keeping of human secrets by carrying into them the same religious fear. Moreover, though multitudes have repented of talking, no man has repented of silence, and while it is easy to utter what has been kept back, it is impossible to recall what has been uttered.

My own reading affords countless instances of the greatest disasters resulting from an ungoverned tongue. I will content |11| myself with mentioning one or two typical examples. When, upon the marriage of Philadelphus with his sister, Sotades composed a scurrilous verse, he paid ample atonement for talking out of season by rotting for a long time in prison. He thus purchased a laugh in others by long weeping of his own. The |*| story is closely matched by that of the sophist Theocritus, who endured similar, but much more terrible, consequences for a similar remark. Alexander had ordered the Greeks to provide a stock of purple garments, with a view to the thanksgiving |B| sacrifice on his return from his Persian victories, and the various peoples were contributing at so much per head. Hereupon Theocritus observed: ‘I have now become clear upon a point which used to puzzle me. This is what is meant by Homer’s “purple death”‘—words which earned him the enmity of Alexander. Antigonus, the Macedonian king, had but one eye, and Theocritus made him excessively angry by a taunt at this disfigurement. Eutropion, the chief cook, who had become a person of importance, was sent to him by the king with a request that he would come to court and engage him in argument. On receiving repeated visits from Eutropion with this message, he |C| remarked, ‘I am well aware that you want to dish me up raw to the Cyclops,’ thus twitting the one with being disfigured, the other with being a cook. ‘Then,’ replied Eutropion, ‘it will be without your head, for you shall be punished for such mad and reckless language.’ Thereupon he reported the words to the king, who sent and put Theocritus to death.

The last and most sacred requirement is that children should be trained to speak the truth. Lying is a servile habit; it deserves universal detestation and is unpardonable even in a decent slave.

|D| So far I have had no doubt or hesitation in what I have said of the modesty and good behaviour of children. But upon the matter which now calls for mention I am dubious and undecided, my judgement swaying in the balance first one way and then the other, without finding it possible to turn the scale in either direction. It concerns a practice which I can neither recommend nor discountenance without great reluctance. Nevertheless one must venture a word upon it. The question is whether a man who is enamoured of a boy is to be allowed to keep intimate |E| company with him, or whether, on the contrary, association with such a person is to be tabooed. When I look at fathers whose disposition is uncompromisingly harsh and austere, and who regard such association as an intolerable insult to their children, I have many scruples in recommending it or speaking in its favour. When, on the other hand, I think of Socrates, Plato, Xenophon, Aeschines, Cebes, and all those great men who have with one accord approved of love between males, while they have led youths on to culture, to public leadership, and to |F| a virtuous character, I change my mind and am inclined to copy those great exemplars. Euripides is on their side, when he says:

Nay, men may feel passion of other sort,

Love of a just, chaste, virtuous mind and soul.

Nor must we omit the saying of Plato, partly serious and partly humorous, that those who have shown special excellence should have the right to kiss any beautiful person they choose. The proper course is to drive away those who are enamoured of the person, but, generally speaking, give a sanction to those who are in love with the mind and soul. While we must have nothing to say to the connexions in vogue at Thebes or in Elis, or to the so-called ‘abduction’ of Crete, we may well imitate that kind |12| which is usual at Athens or in Lacedaemon.

On this matter it is for every man to hold such convictions as he has formed for himself. I will now leave it, and, having spoken of the discipline and good behaviour of the boy, will pass on to deal with the age of adolescence. I shall do so in very few words, for I have often expressed my disapproval of those who encourage vicious habits by proposing to put a boy under the charge of tutors and teachers, whereas, with a stripling, they would permit his inclinations to range at will. As a matter of |B| fact, there is need of more anxious precautions in the case of the stripling than in that of the boy. Every one is aware that the faults committed by a boy are small matters, which can be cured without difficulty—such as paying no heed to his tutor, or trickery and inattention in school. But the sins of adolescence often reach a flagrant and shocking pitch—stealing the father’s money, gormandizing, dicing, roistering, drinking, loose passion for young girls, or corruption of married women. The propensities of young manhood ought therefore to be carefully watched and kept closely under the chain. When capacity for |C| pleasure is at its prime, it rejects control, kicks over the traces, and requires the curb. If therefore we do not take a firm hold upon this time of life, we are giving folly a licence to sin. This is the moment when wise fathers should be most watchful and alert; when they should bring their lads within bounds by warnings, threats, or entreaties, and by pointing out instances of disaster caused by devotion to pleasure, and of praise and good repute won by continence. These two things form what may be called first principles of virtue, namely, hope of honour and fear of punishment, the one producing a greater eagerness |D| for the noblest pursuits, the other a shrinking from bad actions.

One general rule of duty is to keep boys from associating with vicious persons; otherwise they will pick up something of their vice. This has been urged by Pythagoras among a number of dark sayings. Since these also possess great value as aids to the attainment of virtue, I will proceed to quote them, adding their explanation. Do not taste black-tails[^[59]]—keep no company with persons who are malignant and therefore ‘black’. Do not |E| step over a beam—justice must be scrupulously respected and not ‘overstepped’. Do not sit on a quart-measure—beware of idleness, and see to the providing of daily bread. Do not clasp hands with every man—we should form no sudden connexions. Do not wear a tight ring—one should carry out the practice of |*| life, and not fasten it to any chain. Do not poke a fire with iron—do not irritate a wrathful man (the right course being to let angry men go their own way). Do not eat the heart—do not injure |F| the mind with worry and brooding. Abstain from beans—avoid public life (office in former times being determined by voting with beans). Do not put victuals in a chamber-vessel—clever speech ought not to be put into a wicked mind, since speech, which is the food of thought, is polluted by the wickedness in a man. Do not turn back on coming to the border—when about to die, and with the end of life close in sight, behave calmly and without losing heart.

To return to the topic with which we were dealing before this digression. While, as I observed, boys should be kept from every kind of vicious company, especially should they be kept |13| from parasites. I venture to repeat here what I am continually urging upon fathers. There is no set of creatures so pernicious—none which so quickly and completely brings youth to headlong destruction—as parasites. They are utter ruin to both father and son, filling the old age of the one and the youth of the other with vexation. To gain their purpose they offer an irresistible bait in the shape of pleasure. In the case of rich men’s sons, the father preaches sobriety, the parasite drunkenness. The father urges temperance and economy, the parasite profligacy and extravagance. The father says: ‘Be industrious’; the parasite says: ‘Be idle; for life is only a moment altogether. |B| One ought to live, not merely exist. Why trouble about your father’s threats? He is an old driveller with one foot in the coffin, and we will promptly pick him up on our shoulders and carry him off to his grave.’ One person tempts him with a drab, or with the seduction of a married woman, plundering and stripping the father of all the provision for his old age. They are an abominable crew; their friendship is a sham; of candour they have no idea; they toady the rich and despise the poor. They are drawn to young men like puppets on a string; they |*| grin, when those who feed them laugh; they counterfeit the possession of a mind, and give a spurious imitation of details of real life. They live at the rich man’s beck, and though fortune |C| has made them free, their own choice makes them slaves. If they are not insulted, they regard it as an insult, their maintenance in that case being without a motive. If, therefore, a father is concerned for the obedient conduct of his children, he must keep these abominable creatures at a distance. And he must by all means do the same with vicious fellow-pupils, who are capable of corrupting the most moral of natures.

While these principles are right and expedient, I have a word to say upon a human aspect of the matter. I have no desire, all this time, that a father’s disposition should be altogether |D| harsh and unyielding. I would have him frequently condone a fault in his junior and recollect that he was once young himself. The physician mixes his bitter drugs with syrup, and so finds a way to work benefit through the medium of enjoyment. In the same way a father should blend his severe reprimande with kindliness, at one time giving the boy’s desires a loose or easy rein, at another time tightening it. If possible, he should |E| take misdeeds calmly; failing that, his anger should be seasonable and should quickly cool down. It is better for a father to be sharp-tempered than sullen-tempered; to sulk and bear malice goes far to prove a lack of parental affection. Sometimes, when a fault is committed, it is a good thing to pretend ignorance, turning to advantage the dim sight and defective hearing of old age, and refusing to see or hear certain occurrences which one hears and sees. We put up with the lapses of a friend. Is it strange to do so with those of a child? A slave is often heavy-headed from a debauch, without our taking him to task. The other day you refused the boy money; there are times to meet his requests. The other day you were indignant; there are times to be lenient. Perhaps he has cozened you through a servant; |F| restrain your anger. Has he borrowed the team from the farm? Does he come reeking of yesterday’s bout? Do not notice it. Smelling of perfumes? Say nothing. Such is the way to manage the restiveness of youth.

A son who cannot resist pleasure and is deaf to remonstrance should be put into matrimonial harness, that being the surest way of tying a young man down. The woman who becomes his wife should not, however, be to any great extent his superior either in birth or means. Keep to your own level is a sound maxim, and a man who marries much above him finds himself, |14| not the husband of the woman, but the slave of the dowry.

A few words more, and I will conclude my list of principles.

Above all things a father should set an example to his children in his own person, by avoiding all faults of commission or omission. His life should be the glass by which they form themselves and are put out of conceit with all ugliness of act or speech. For him to rebuke his erring sons when guilty of the same errors himself, is to become his own accuser while ostensibly theirs. Indeed, if his life is bad, he is disqualified from reproving even a slave, much more his son. Moreover, he will naturally |B| become their guide and teacher in wrongdoing. Where there are old men without shame, inevitably there are quite shameless young ones also. To obtain good behaviour from our children we should therefore strive to carry out every moral duty. An example to follow is that of Eurydice, who, though belonging to a thoroughly barbarous country like Illyria, nevertheless took to study and self-improvement late in life for the sake of her children’s education. Her maternal affection finds apt expression in the lines inscribed upon her offering to the Muses: |C|

In that, when mother to grown boys, she won

Her soul’s well-known desire—the skill to use

The lore of letters—this Eurydice

From Hierapolis sends to each Muse.[^[60]]

To compass the whole of the foregoing elements of success is |*| perhaps visionary—a counsel of perfection. But to cultivate the majority of them, though itself requiring good fortune as well as much care, is at any rate a thing within the reach of a human being.