Plutarch Quomodo adulator ab amico internoscatur 24

[24] The great difference between flatterer and friend may be most clearly perceived by his disposition towards one’s other friends. For a friend finds it most pleasant to love and be loved along with many others, and he is always constant in his endeavours that his friend shall have many friends ¹ and be much honoured; believing that friends own everything in common ² he thinks that no possession ought to be held so much in common as friends. But the flatterer is false, spurious, and debased, inasmuch as he fully understands that he is committing a crime against friendship, which in his hands becomes a counterfeit coin as it were. While he is by nature jealous, yet he employs his jealousy against his own kind, striving constantly to outdo them in scurrility and idle gossip, but he stands in awesome dread of his betters, not indeed because he is but because, as Simonides ⁴ puts it, he Whenever, then, the flatterer, who is but a light and deceptive plated-ware, is examined and closely compared with genuine and solid-wrought friendship, he does not stand the test, but he is exposed, and so he does the same thing as the man who had painted a wretched picture of some cocks. For the painter bade his servant scare all real cocks as far away as possible from the canvas; and so the flatterer scares all real friends away, and does not allow them to come near; or if he cannot accomplish this, he openly cringes to them, pays them attentions, and makes a great show of respect for them as for superiors, but secretly he is suggesting and spreading some sort of calumny; and when secret talk has caused an irritating sore, even though he be not entirely successful at the outset, yet he remembers and observes the precept of Medius. This Medius was, if I may call him so, leader and skilled master of the choir of flatterers that danced attendance on Alexander, and were banded together against all good men. Now he urged them not to be afraid to assail and sting with their calumnies, pointing out that, even if the man who is stung succeeds in healing the wound, the scar of the calumny will still remain. In fact it was by such scars, or rather such gangrenes and cancers, that Alexander was consumed so that he destroyed Callisthenes, Parmenio, and Philotas, and put himself without reserve into the hands of men like Hagno, Bagoas, Agesias, and Demetrius, to be brought low, by submitting to be worshipped, bedecked and fantastically tricked out by them, after the manner of a barbaric idol. So great is the power wielded by giving gratification, and it is greatest, apparently, with those who seem to be the greatest personages. For self-conceit regarding the noblest qualities, coupled with the wish to have them, gives both confidence and boldness to the flatterer. ⁵ It is true that lofty places are difficult of approach and access for those who propose to capture them, but loftiness or conceit, in a mind which lacks sense because of the favours of Fortune or Nature, lies at the mercy of the insignificant and mean.