There is an unintentionally amusing passage in a letter Petrarch sent to his brother Gherardo in 1349.  In it, the harried scholar pours out his frustration at the antagonistic and insulting behavior of his servants:

I have tried everything and have lived intimately with my servants no less than Lucilius, and I have invited them into deliberation and conversation and dinner, and have entrusted myself and my affairs to their trust and hoped to make them trustworthy.  But I have achieved nothing by trust—on the contrary, all my effort has turned into its opposite.  None of my servants left my conversation without becoming more pert, no one got up from dinner without being more insulting, and as intimacy taught them to be insolent, so confidence taught them to be thieves; for as Seneca speaks about his own servants, so may I be allowed to tell the truth about mine and those of my friends—for somehow they are all the same:  I confess I suffer nothing more tiresome in my life than the perversity of servants. 

I myself have never had a servant or an assistant, nor would I want one.  I am not comfortable with the idea of someone hovering over me, intruding into my personal space, and attempting to do work I could easily do myself.  But Petrarch’s extreme irritation is something I believe I can understand.  A servant is an employee, not a friend or confidant, and Petrarch was very wrong to suppose he could invite his servants to a free exchange of ideas at his dinner table.  He should have known better. Relationships require boundaries and defined roles; and nothing so upends the order of things as the blurring of those lines of limitation.  It does not matter whether one’s intentions are noble; what matters is human nature, and the necessity of maintaining the correct professional distance. The human mind seeks predictability and the comfort of a calculable regimen; and when rules are neglected, secret resentments begin to fester, which inevitably percolate to the surface. 

It can take a great deal of time to learn this lesson, for good-hearted people tend to err on the side of intimacy.  I recently had a client for whom I had done a great deal of work.  His case had concluded successfully, and he repeatedly pressed me to join him for lunch.  I deflected his invitations once or twice, but when he continued to raise the subject, I politely explained that it was something I was unable to do.  I had accepted such offers once or twice many years ago, when I first became a lawyer, and had learned to be wary of them.  Such meetings were never quite the relaxing events I had expected; an awkward comment or story always seemed to escape the other party’s mouth, and intrude on what should have been a relaxing occasion.  I knew that the best approach with clients was to preserve a courteous, warm professional connection, and at the same time, to ensure that this connection never ventured beyond the walls of the office.  I suppose there may be rare exceptions to this rule; but if so, I have not yet encountered one.  Of course a client and a servant are entirely different things, and I do not mean to conflate them; but they do share something, which is that both involve a professional relationship. And that relationship can be kept intact only by the preservation of its appropriate boundaries.

Petrarch’s mistake was in believing he could simultaneously be the employer and the friend of his servants.  The result was that he became neither.  He seems to have been genuinely shocked at the impudence of those whom he invited to break bread with him; but this outcome is a predictable feature of human nature.  Even Odysseus, when he returned home in disguise, was harassed and abused by servants and maids.  Cicero himself makes this point in On Duties, when he says,

At home he [Odysseus] had to endure the insults of his male and female servants, so that he was eventually able to receive what he wanted. [I.31.113]

We should maintain a kind, courteous, and affable demeanor to all, no matter whom we are dealing with.  But dissolving the boundaries of professional relationships is not kindness; it is, in fact, a manifestation of a flabby lack of discipline.  Intimacies should be reserved for intimates.  We must not overdo things:  as Terence says in The Woman of Andros (61), “nothing in excess” (ne quid nimis).  A failure to observe this rule will always be bitterly regretted, I have found.  As Virgil says,

Easy is the descent into Avernus.  [Aen. VI.126]

It is very easy, in some moment of weakness or sentimentality, to choose the wrong path; and once we begin to travel down that path, we may rapidly find ourselves in dangerous and inescapable territory.  Man’s innate need for hierarchies and rules necessitates the preservation of relational boundaries.  He who carelessly seeks to stray across those boundaries can expect nothing but derision and abuse from those on the other side.  We must be mindful of the fact that not everyone can be granted access to our inner sanctum; for that is a privilege reserved only for the very few.  In the realms of leadership and professionalism, there is no place for effusive mawkishness.  There can be no doubt that the impudence of Petrarch’s servants was entirely expected and justified.    

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Check out the new volume of essays, Centuries, which contains all pieces from 2020 to 2023.