ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the oligarchic elements of civic governance. Plutarch’s How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend is concerned with relationships among the bouleutic class, the people on whom Roman authorities relied to maintain stability in the empire’s eastern cities. It addresses the delicacy necessary for frank critique in a milieu where friendship and politics were inseparable, given the Greek cities’ entrenched oligarchies and growing social stratification during the imperial era, even among elites. Because of social inequality, some of the same techniques suitable for the education of monarchs are useful in dealing with other social superiors. However, unlike in interactions with monarchs, such roles are not fixed in elite society, and the same person will have to renegotiate his relative social position from one interaction to the next, depending on his company. Yet here too, flattery seems an inevitable outcome of personal interaction between unequal parties, and, just as in the king’s court, it is the opposite of didactic frankness because it makes its target worse rather than better. For elites, as for anyone else, confronting a more powerful and preeminent man is dangerous, hence Plutarch’s advice to find a middle path between obnoxiousness and obsequiousness.
