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.
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.
nay, I might have been a flagrant offender and yet lived secure—from the sycophants, at any rate.
On the Peace
Litigious political operators blamed for disorder, false democratic claims, and exploitation of citizens.
Nevertheless, in spite of the many things which remind us how the city fared under both kinds of leadership, we are so pleased with the depravity of our orators that, although we see that many of our other citizens have been stripped of their patrimony because of the war and of the disorders which these sycophants have caused, while the latter, from being penniless, have become rich, yet we are no …
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 …