Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists
C. D. Yonge, B.A., Ed.

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But Theopompus, in the eighteenth book of his Histories, speaking of Nicostratus the Argive, and saying [p. 396] how he flattered the Persian king, writes as follows—"But how can we think Nicostratus the Argive anything but a wicked man? who, when he was president of the city of Argos, and when he had received all the distinctions of family, and riches, and large estates from his ancestors, surpassed all men in his flatteries and attentions to the king, outrunning not only those who bore a part in that expedition, but even all who had lived before; for in the first place, he was so anxious for honours from the barbarian, that, wishing to please him more and to be more trusted by him, he brought his son to the king, a thing which no one else will ever be found to have done. And then, every day when he was about to go to supper he had a table set apart, to which he gave the name of the Table of the King's Deity, loading it with meat and all other requisites; hearing that those who live at the doors of the royal palace among the Persians do the same thing, and thinking that by this courtier-like attention he should get more from the king. For he was exceedingly covetous, and not scrupulous as to the means he employed forgetting money, so that indeed no one was ever less so. And Lysimachus was a flatterer and the tutor of Attalus the king, a man whom Callimachus sets down as a Theodorean, but Hermippus sets him down in the list of the disciples of Theophrastus. And this man wrote books also about the education of Attalus, full of every kind of adulation imaginable. But Polybius, in the eighth book of his Histories, says, “Cavarus the Gaul, who was in other respects a good man, was depraved by Sostratus the flatterer, who was a Chalcedonian by birth.”