aise as much as censure on the proper occasion. Indeed
peevishness and querulousness are altogether alien to friendship and
social life: but when goodwill bestows praise ungrudgingly and readily
upon good actions, people endure also easily and without pain admonition
and plainspeaking, believing and continuing to love the person who took
such pleasure in praising, as if now he only blamed out of necessity.

Sec. III. It is difficult then, someone may say, to distinguish between the
flatterer and the friend, if they differ neither in the pleasure they
give nor in the praise they bestow; for as to services and attentions
you may often see friendship outstripped by flattery. Certainly it is
so, I should reply, if we are trying to find the genuine flatterer who
handles his craft with cleverness and art, but not if, like most people,
we consider those persons flatterers who are called their own
oil-flask-carriers and table-men, men who begin to talk, as one said,
the moment their hands have been washed for dinner,[356] whose
servility, ribaldry, and want of all decency, is apparent at the first
dish and glass. It did not of course require very much discrimination to
detect Melanthius the parasite of Alexander of Pherae of flattery, who,
to those who asked how Alexander was murdered, answered, "Through his
side into my belly": or those who formed a circle round a wealthy table,
"whom neither fire, nor sword, nor steel, would keep from running to a
feast":[357] or those female flatterers in Cyprus, who after they
crossed over into Syria were nicknamed "step-ladders,"[358] because they
lay down and let the kings' wives use their bodies as steps to mount
their carriages.

Sec. IV. What kind of flatterer then must we be on our guard against? The
one who neither seems to be nor acknowledges himself to be one: whom you
will not always find in the vicinity of your kitchen, who is not to be
caught watching the dial to see how near it is to dinner-time,[359] nor
gets so drunk as to throw himself down anyhow, but one who is generally
sober, and a busybody, and thinks he ought to have a hand in your
affairs, and wishes to share in your secrets, and as to friendship plays
rather a tragic than a satyric or comic part. For as Plato says, "it is
the height of injustice to appear to be just when you are not really
so,"[360] so we must deem the most dangerous kind of flattery not the
open but the secret, not the playful but the serious. For i