The learned Peter Jones, who always surprises me by how young he is, considering his almost first-hand knowledge of the ancient world, invited or challenged me to explain how sycophant, which to the Greeks of old meant an informer and false witness, came to mean a flatterer. I foolishly thought I’d found out after a few minutes’ rooting around. Deeper spadework showed how wrong I was.
The Greek sukophantes, literally ‘fig-revealer’, had a picturesque derivation thrust upon it, sceptically retailed by Plutarch in his life of Solon. The translation by Thomas North (1579), used by Shakespeare, says: ‘Wee may not altogether discredite those which say, they did forbid in the olde time that men should carie figs out of the countrie of Attica, and that from thence it came that these pickthankes, which bewray and accuse them that transported figges, were called Sycophantes.’
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