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|