Short answers, pulled from the story.
In ancient Athens, sycophant referred to a private litigant who brought unjustified legal charges against others for personal profit or for hire. The term was an insult directed at vexatious prosecutors who had no personal stake in the disputes they pursued.
The ancient Greek word sykophantēs is built from sykos (fig) and phanēs (to show or reveal). Several explanations have been proposed over the centuries, including links to laws against fig exportation and obscene fig gestures, but scholars generally regard all these etymologies as inventions constructed after the original meaning was forgotten. Danielle Allen argues the term was slightly obscene and drew on the broader symbolism of figs in ancient Greek culture.
Sycophant entered English and French in the mid-sixteenth century meaning false accuser, the same sense as in Greek. Over time, English shifted the word to mean an insincere flatterer. French and Modern Greek retained the original meaning. The shift happened partly because ancient Greek plays often combined the flatterer and the false accuser into a single character type.
AI sycophancy describes a pattern in which a language model systematically affirms or agrees with users rather than reasoning independently or factually. In April 2025, OpenAI rolled back an update to GPT-4o after users and researchers reported the model was producing excessively affirming and flattering responses. Studies such as SycEval have found sycophantic behavior in a substantial portion of tested cases across commercial models.
Athens imposed fines on litigants who failed to win at least one fifth of a jury's votes, penalized those who abandoned cases mid-trial, adopted statutes of limitation to prevent old charges being revived, and authorized the prosecution of men specifically for the act of sycophancy.
Aristophanes featured sycophants as recurring characters in several comedies. In The Acharnians, a sycophant accuses a Megarian of illegally selling foreign goods, and a Boeotian purchases a sycophant as a distinctly Athenian product. In Plutus, the character named Sycophant defends his role as a necessity for upholding the law.