adulator

“The people commonly intend the public good,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 71, “but their good sense would despise the adulator who should pretend that they always reason right about the means of promoting it.”

TV’s on-air adulator in chief, pressed her subjects with a request sure to be repeated throughout the night, from the ceremony through the after-parties: “Before I let you go, can we do a little selfie?”

The succession of beggars who infest this hill and stretch out their maimed limbs or kiss their hands to the passers-by will call to mind the lines of Juvenal: "C�cus adulator, dirusque a ponte satelles, Dignus Aricinos qui mendicaret ad axes, Blandaque devex� jactaret basia rhed�."

No base adulator, No slanderous traitor, Empoisons the plain.

I fear that Virgil was harmed by the Georgican success, and became more than ever an adulator of the ruling powers.