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|