I feel very conflicted when I hear some European leaders talking to, and about, the President of the United States in unctuous tones. Are they simply humiliating themselves with this transparent flattery? “Thank you so much Mr President for bringing peace to the world” (or as Mark Rutte, NATO Secretary General, put it, in what looked like a master class of sycophancy, “Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, that was truly extraordinary, and something no one else dared to do. It makes us all safer”.) Or is it simply the best way of getting their own way?
For me, the dilemma is neatly summed up in the different critical approaches over the past fifty years to the Panegyricus of the Younger Pliny. The Panegyricus, or Speech of Praise, isn’t one of the best known/most loved works of classical literature (full Latin text here; selected passages translated here). It was addressed to the emperor Trajan, in the senate 100 CE (and later circulated in written form), by the Pliny who is now much better known for his published Letters. He was thanking the emperor for making him consul (the traditional chief magistrate of Rome, and still prized under one-man rule, even though it had become more a bauble than a mark of power). The speech goes on for pages and pages – and if it was actually delivered in the form we have it, the whole senate would have been kept listening or snoozing for at least three hours.
When I was a student, we were taught that it was about the most nauseating example of self-abasement to survive from the Roman world, an indication of the depths to which senators could sink in the face of an autocrat. The basic message is that Trajan was a perfect ruler. He was an ideal combination of “lightness of touch, power and kindness”. He was single-handedly responsible for a rise in the birth-rate (because no one was any longer afraid to bring children into the world). He kept a safe and welcoming palace where he was a generous host to the senators (but not too lavishly generous: simple suppers were on the menu) and he was, of course, a distinguished military man, with a strong body to match a strong mind. And on, and on.
Ronald Syme deemed “the subject repulsive – an official theme with repetitive and ingenious praise of the head of the government”. Others have referred to the “universal contempt” into which it has fallen. This, in other words, is what the emasculated senate had sunk to!
Things have changed since. More recent commentators have pointed to the other side of what looks like mere flattery. The standard argument now is that a lot of the power lies with the flatterer. How do you best get someone (ruler or not) to do what you want them to do? You praise them for doing it, whether they have yet done it or not. When Pliny fulsomely thanks Trajan for being friendly and approachable, we should read that as an instruction to be so. Flattery is a useful weapon in the hands of the weak.
There is an important point here. If you want the President to use his power to make peace, it’s a better tactic to praise him for his peace-making capacity than to try and harangue him into doing it. Yet when I actually listen to it, my reactions tend more towards those of Ronald Syme (“repulsive”) than towards those of the more up-to-the-minute commentators. It’s easier to be dispassionate when it’s 2,000 years ago than when it’s happening in front of your eyes. And, to take it a step further, it was truly ghastly looking at all the stage sets/advertisements in Alaska, propped up behind Trump and Putin, reading “Pursuing Peace” (someone wasted their time constructing those).
But the bigger point here is that, good tactics or not, flattery of this sort harms everyone. It pollutes the speaker (however much he or she knows what they are doing, and has their fingers firmly crossed behind their back). And it also undermines those on the receiving end. The awful downside about being the Roman emperor was that, if you were smart, you knew that you were the one person in the palace to whom no one ever told the truth. It can’t be that different being President of the United States.
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