A flatterer destroys
By his pernicious speeches
Both general and prince,
Both private friends and states;
He pleases for a while,
But causes lasting ruin.
And now this evil habit
Has spread among the people,
Our courts are all diseased,
And all is done by favour.

So that the Thessalians did well who razed the city which was called Colaceia (Flattery), which the Melians used to inhabit, as Theopompus relates in the thirtieth book of his History.

66. But Phylarchus says, that those Athenians who settled in Lemnos were great flatterers, mentioning them as such in the thirteenth book of his History. For that they, wishing to display their gratitude to the descendants of Seleucus and Antiochus, because Seleucus not only delivered them when they were severely oppressed by Lysimachus, but also restored both their cities to them,—they, I say, the Athenians in Lemnos, not only erected temples to Seleucus, but also to his son Antiochus; and they have given to the cup, which at their feasts is offered at the end of the banquet, the name of the cup of Seleucus the Saviour.

Now some people, perverting the proper name, call this flattery ἀρέσκεια, complaisance; as Anaxandrides does in his Samian, where he says—

For flattery is now complaisance call'd.

But those who devote themselves to flattery are not aware that that art is one which flourishes only a short time. Accordingly, Alexis says in his Liar—

A flatterer's life but a brief space endures,
For no one likes a hoary parasite.

[[401]] And Clearchus the Solensian, in the first book of his Amatory treatises, says—"No flatterer is constant in his friendship. For time destroys the falsehood of his pretences, and a lover is only a flatterer and a pretended friend on account of youth or beauty." One of the flatterers of Demetrius the king was Adeimantus of Lampsacus, who having built a temple in Thriæ, and placed statues in it, called it the temple of Phila Venus, and called the place itself Philæum, from Phila the mother of Demetrius; as we are told by Dionysius the son of Tryphon, in the tenth book of his treatise on Names.

67. But Clearchus the Solensian, in his book which is inscribed Gergithius, tells us whence the origin of the name flatterer is derived; and mentioning Gergithius himself, from whom the treatise has its name, he says that he was one of Alexander's flatterers; and he tells the story thus—"That flattery debases the characters of the flatterers, making them apt to despise whoever they associate with; and a proof of this is, that they endure everything, well knowing what they dare do. And those who are flattered by them, being puffed up by their adulation, they make foolish and empty-headed, and cause them to believe that they, and everything belonging to them, are of a higher order than other people." And then proceeding to mention a certain young man, a Paphian by birth, but a king by the caprice of fortune, he says—"This young man (and he does not mention his name) used out of his preposterous luxury to lie on a couch with silver feet, with a smooth Sardian carpet spread under it of the most expensive description. And over him was thrown a piece of purple cloth, edged with a scarlet fringe; and he had three pillows under his head made of the finest linen, and of purple colour, by which he kept himself cool. And under his feet he had two pillows of the kind called Dorian, of a bright crimson colour; and on all this he lay himself, clad in a white robe.

68. "And all the monarchs who have at any time reigned in Cyprus have encouraged a race of nobly-born flatterers as useful to them; for they are a possession very appropriate to tyrants. And no one ever knows them (any more than they do the judges of the Areopagus), either how many they are, or who they are, except that perhaps some of the most