e. But the difference is that while in perfume
pleasure and nothing else is designed, in medicine either purging, or
warming, or adding flesh to the system, is the primary object, and the
sweet smell is only a secondary consideration. Again painters mix gay
colours and dyes: there are also some drugs which are gay in appearance
and not unpleasing in colour. What then is the difference between these?
Manifestly we distinguish by the end each aims at. So too the social
life of friends employs mirth to add a charm to some good and useful
end,[385] and sometimes makes joking and a good table and wine, aye, and
even chaff and banter, the seasoning to noble and serious matters, as
in the line,

"Much they enjoyed talking to one another,"[386]

and again,

"Never did ought else
Disturb our love or joy in one another."[387]

But the flatterer's whole aim and end is to cook up and season his joke
or word or action, so as to produce pleasure. And to speak concisely,
the flatterer's object is to please in everything he does, whereas the
true friend always does what is right, and so often gives pleasure,
often pain, not wishing the latter, but not shunning it either, if he
deems it best. For as the physician, if it be expedient, infuses saffron
or spikenard, aye, or uses some soothing fomentation or feeds his
patient up liberally, and sometimes orders castor,

"Or poley,[388] that so strong and foully smells,"

or pounds hellebore and compels him to drink it,--neither in the one
case making unpleasantness, nor in the other pleasantness, his end and
aim, but in both studying only the interest of his patient,--so the
friend sometimes by praise and kindness, extolling him and gladdening
his heart, leads him to what is noble, as Agamemnon,

"Teucer, dear head, thou son of Telamon,
Go on thus shooting, captain of thy men;"[389]

or Diomede,

"How could I e'er forget divine Odysseus?"[390]

But where on the other hand there is need of correction, then he rebukes
with biting words and with the freedom worthy of a friend,

"Zeus-cherished Menelaus, art thou mad,
And in thy folly tak'st no heed of safety?"[391]

Sometimes also he joins action to word, as Menedemus sobered the
profligate and disorderly son of his friend Asclepiades, by shutting him
out of his house, and not speaking to him. And Arcesilaus forbade Bato
his school, when he wrote a line in one of his plays against Cleanth