stage and don the mask and buskin? What else but praise from flatterers? Is not a king regularly called an Apollo if he warbles, a Dionysius if he gets drunk, a Hercules if he wrestles? And is he not so pleased with it, that there is no way of disgracing himself to which flattery will not lead him? It is therefore in the matter of praise that we should chiefly beware of the time-server. He is himself alive to the fact, and [Sidenote: 57] is deft at avoiding suspicion. If therefore he gets hold of some dull-witted and thick-skinned grandee, he fools him to the top of his bent. Remember how Strouthias makes a hobby-horse of Bias and dances his fling upon the man’s stupidity by praising him with: _You have drunk more than royal Alexander_, or: _I laugh to think o’ the quip you gave the Cyprian._ But with persons of more discernment he perceives that in this direction they are particularly on the alert, that in this quarter they keep a special watch. He does not therefore adopt a direct line of attack with his flattery, but fetches a circuitous course from a distance, and _Advances noiselessly, as when a beast_ [Sidenote: B] is tentatively approached and fingered. At one moment he will describe how you have been praised by some one else, using the public speaker’s device of putting the words in another person’s mouth. He will say, for instance, that he had the great pleasure of being present in the market-place when some ‘visitors’—or some ‘elderly people’—were relating a good many admiring and complimentary stories about you. At another time he will concoct a number of trivial and fictitious charges against you, which he purports to have heard from others, and he will say that he has hastened to find you and desires to know where you said such-and-such a thing or did so-and-so. If you deny them—as you naturally will—he at [Sidenote: C] once has you in the trap for his compliments: ‘It did surprise me that you should speak ill of a friend, seeing that it is not your nature to do so even of an enemy;’ or ‘that you should have designs on other people’s property, when you are so liberal with your own’.