Then again, as Thucydides 1 says, ‘Whoever
incurs unpopularity over matters of the highest
[p. 387]
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.’
2 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
[p. 389]
everything and officiously making it his concern, is
not only intolerable to children and brothers, but is
unendurable even to slaves.