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.’