t is unworthy of a free-born man, to say nothing of a friend. It is
one thing to live with a tyrant, another with a friend. But if a man's
ears are so closed to plain speaking that he cannot hear to hear the
truth from a friend, we may give him up in despair. This remark of
Cato's, as so many of his did, shews great acuteness: "There are people
who owe more to bitter enemies than to apparently pleasant friends:
the former often speak the truth, the latter never." Besides, it is a
strange paradox that the recipients of advice should feel no annoyance
where they ought to feel it, and yet feel so much where they ought not.
They are not at all vexed at having committed a fault, but very angry at
being reproved for it. On the contrary, they ought to be grieved at the
crime and glad of the correction.

25. Well, then, if it is true that to give and receive advice--the
former with freedom and yet without bitterness, the latter with patience
and without irritation--is peculiarly appropriate to genuine friendship,
it is no less true that there can be nothing more utterly subversive of
friendship than flattery, adulation, and base compliance. I use as many
terms as possible to brand this vice of light-minded, untrustworthy men,
whose sole object in speaking is to please without any regard to truth.
In everything false pretence is bad, for it suspends and vitiates our
power of discerning the truth. But to nothing it is so hostile as to
friendship; for it destroys that frankness without which friendship is
an empty name. For the essence of friendship being that two minds become
as one, how can that ever take place if the mind of each of the separate
parties to it is not single and uniform, but variable, changeable, and
complex? Can anything be so pliable, so wavering, as the mind of a man
whose attitude depends not only on another's feeling and wish, but on
his very looks and nods?

If one says "No," I answer "No"; if "Yes," I answer "Yes." In fine,
I've laid this task upon myself To echo all that's said--to quote my
old friend Terence again. But he puts these words into the mouth of
a Gnatho. To admit such a man into one's intimacy at all is a sign of
folly. But there are many people like Gnatho, and it is when they
are superior either in position or fortune or reputation that their
flatteries become mischievous, the weight of their position making up
for the lightness of their character. But if we only take reasonable
care, it i