So also I think the gods do often perform benefits secretly, taking a natural delight in bestowing their favours and bounties.68 But the good service of the flatterer has no justice, or genuineness, or simplicity, or liberality about it; but is accompanied with sweat, and running about, and noise, and knitting of the brow, creating an impression and appearance of toilsome and bustling service, like a painting over-curiously wrought in bold colours, and with bent folds wrinkles and angles, to make the closer resemblance to life. Moreover he tires one by relating what journeys and anxieties he has had over the matter, how many enemies he has made over it, the thousand bothers and annoyances he has gone through, so that you say, "The affair was not worth all this trouble." For being reminded of any favour done to one is always unpleasant and disagreeable and insufferable:69 but the flatterer not only reminds us of his services afterwards, but even during the very moment of doing them upbraids us with them and is importunate. But the friend, if he is obliged to mention the matter, relates it modestly, and says not a word about himself. And so, when the Lacedæmonians sent corn to the people of Smyrna that needed it, and the people of Smyrna wondered at their kindness, the Lacedæmonians said, "It was no great matter, we only voted that we and our beasts of burden should go without our dinner one day, and sent what was so saved to you."70 Not only is it handsome to do a favour in that way, but it is more pleasant to the receivers of it, because they think those who have done them the service have done it at no great loss to themselves.
§ xxiii. But it is not so much by the importunity of the flatterer in regard to services, nor by his facility in making promises, that one can recognize his nature, as by the honourable or dishonourable kind of service, and by the regard to please or to be of real use. For the friend is not as Gorgias defined him, one who will ask his friend to help him in what is right, while he will himself do many services for his friend that are not right.