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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: 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 [Sidenote: F] of even quite insignificant people. What remarkable thing has he ever said or done?’