Thus Antony's friends, when he was passionately in love with the Egyptian woman,59 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,
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,60 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,61 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 Bias62 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 and into the women's apartments with his curiosity and calumny and malignity, like the legs and arms of the polypus, is wild and savage and unmanageable.
§ xx. Now one kind of caution against his snares is to know and ever remember that, whereas the soul contains true and noble and reasoning elements, as also unreasoning and false and emotional ones, the friend is always a counsellor and adviser to the better instincts of the soul, as the physician improves and maintains health, whereas the flatterer works upon the emotional and unreasoning ones, and tickles and titillates them and seduces them from reason, employing sensuality as his bait. As then there are some kinds of food which neither benefit the blood or spirit, nor brace up the nerves and marrow, but stir the passions, excite