leges against him that he has an itch for praising people. "You
are always extolling people of no merit: for who is this fellow, or what
has he said or done out of the common?" But it is in regard to the
objects of their love that they mostly attack those they flatter, and
additionally inflame them. For if they see people at variance with their
brothers, or despising their parents, or treating their wives
contemptuously, they neither take them to task nor scold them, but fan
the flame of their anger still more. "You don't sufficiently appreciate
yourself," they say, "you are yourself the cause of your being put upon
in this way, through your constant submissiveness and humility." And if
there is any tiff or fit of jealousy in regard to some courtesan or
adulteress, the flatterer is at hand with remarkable outspokenness,
adding fuel to flame,[418] and taking the lady's part, and accusing her
lover of acting in a very unkind harsh and shameful manner to her,

"O ingrate, after all those frequent kisses!"[419]

Thus Antony's friends, when he was passionately in love with the
Egyptian woman,[420] persuaded him that he was loved by her, and twitted
him with being cold and haughty to her. "She," they said, "has left her
mighty kingdom and happy mode of life, and is wasting her beauty, taking
the field with you like some camp-follower,

"The while your heart is proof 'gainst all her charms,"[421]

as you neglect her love-lorn as she is." But he that is pleased at being
reproached with his wrong-doing, and delights in those that censure him,
as he never did in those that praised him, is unconscious that he is
really perverted also by what seems to be rebuke. For such outspokenness
is like the bites of wanton women,[422] that while seeming to hurt
really tickle and excite pleasure. And just as if people mix pure wine,
which is by itself an antidote against hemlock, with it and so offer it,
they make the poison quite deadly, being rapidly carried to the heart by
the warmth,[423] so ill-disposed men, knowing that outspokenness is a
great antidote to flattery, make it a means of flattering. And so it was
rather a bad answer Bias[424] made, to the person who inquired what was
the most formidable animal, "Of wild animals the tyrant, and of tame the
flatterer." For it would have been truer to observe that tame flatterers
are those that are found round the baths and table, but the one that
intrudes into the interior of the house