Quomodo adulator ab amico internoscatur
Plutarch
Plutarch. Moralia, Vol. I. Babbitt, Frank Cole, translator. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1927 (printing).
Least of all is it becoming to reply to admonition with admonition, and to counter frank speaking with frank speaking. For this provokes instant heat, and causes estrangement, and such altercation, as a rule, bewrays, not the man that merely rewards frankness with frankness, but the man that cannot tolerate frankness. It is better, therefore, to bear patiently with a friend who affects to offer admonition; for if later he errs himself, and requires admonition, this very fact, in a certain way, gives our frank speaking a chance to speak frankly. For if he be gently reminded, without any show of resentment, that he himself has not been wont to overlook the errors of his friends, but to take his friends to task and enlighten them, he will be much more inclined to yield and accept the correction, as being a way to requite a kindly and gracious feeling, and not fault-finding or anger.
Then again, as Thucydides [*](ii. 64.) says, Whoever incurs unpopularity over matters of the highest
importance, shows a right judgement; so it is the duty of a friend to accept the odium that comes from giving admonition when matters of importance and of great concern are at stake. But if he is for ever bickering over everything and about everything, and approaches his acquaintance in the manner not of a friend but of a schoolmaster, his admonitions will lose their edge and effectiveness in matters of the highest importance, since, like a physician who should dole out his supply of a pungent or bitter but necessary and costly medicine by prescribing it in a great number of slight cases where it is not necessary, he will have used up his supply of frankness without result. He will, therefore, be earnestly on his guard against continual censoriousness in himself; and if another person is apt to search narrowly into everything, and keeps up a continual comment of petty accusation, this will give him the key, as it were, in opening an attack on faults that are more important. The physician Philotimus, on an occasion, when a man with an ulcerated liver showed him his finger with a whitlow on it, said, My friend, you need not concern yourself about a sore finger. [*](Essentially the same story that is told supra, 43 B.) And so, too, the right occasion gives a friend a chance to say to the man whose accusations are based on trifles of no real import, Why dwell on playful sports and conviviality and nonsense? Let this man, my friend, but get rid of the woman he keeps, or cease gambling, and there we have a man in all else admirable. For the man who receives indulgence in small matters is not unready to grant to his friend the right to speak frankly in regard to the greater. But the inveterate nagger, everywhere sour and unpleasant, noticing everything and officiously making it his concern, is not only intolerable to children and brothers, but is unendurable even to slaves.