Sycophants
group · 2 works · 4 mentions · 6 anchored passages
sycophants · accusers · authors of unjust complaints · intriguers · sycophant · these men · those who denounce · those who lay information · trouble-makers
in the texts
Antidosis
Malicious informers and extortionists whom the speaker contrasts with honorable teachers and citizens.
nay, I might have been a flagrant offender and yet lived secure—from the sycophants, at any rate.
you should strip the sycophants of their rewards, and counsel our young men to occupy themselves with this pursuit above all others.
Therefore, you must not let the sycophants have control of a thing so momentous, nor punish those who refuse to pay them money, while permitting those from whom they have received it to do whatever they please.
On the Peace
Litigious political operators blamed for disorder, false democratic claims, and exploitation of citizens.
The first way by which we can set right and improve the condition of our city is to select as our advisers on affairs of state the kind of men whose advice we should desire on our private affairs, and to stop thinking of the sycophants as friends of democracy and of the good men and true among us as friends of oligarchy, realizing that no man is by nature either the one or the other but that all m …
For, as if your other misfortunes were not enough, their chief desire is that you should be in want of your daily necessities, observing that those who are able to manage their affairs from their private incomes are on the side of the commonwealth and of our best counsellors, whereas those who live off the law-courts and the assemblies and the doles derived from them are constrained by their need …
and you do this albeit knowing full well that it is not alone in making the city prosperous that good leaders are superior to the base, but that our democracy itself under the leadership of the former remained unshaken and unchanged for many years, whereas under the guidance of these men it has already, within a short period of time, been twice overthrown, and that, furthermore, our people who wer …