Very close to this is the saying (something in Greek), A necessary evil. There are people whom you cannot throw over because their help is needed in some way, but you can hardly tolerate them because of their immorality. This seems to come from the remark of a certain Hybraeas, recalled by Strabo, book 14. Euthydamus was a man with a certain overbearing quality, but in many ways useful to the state, so that his vices and virtues seemed to break equal. The orator Hybraeas in some speech spoke of him thus, 'You are a necessary evil to the state; we can neither live with you nor without you.' The emperor Alexander Severus decreed the abolition of the public accountants, but when he reflected that they could not be abolished without damage to the state, he called them 'a necessary evil.' Publius Cornelius Ruffinus was another of this type, thievish and miserly but all the same an excellent commander; Fabricius Luscinus preferred to be plundered by him rather than be sold into slavery, as Gellius tells us in book 4, and Cicero in the De oratore, book 2. It can be turned round to apply to wives, who are uncomfortable to live with, yet without them the commonwealth cannot exist. It can also be applied to things, as when one may say that a medicine is a troublesome thing, but a necessary one. Euripides in the Orestes: 'A possession painful, but necessary.' Not unlike this in form is the response of an oracle recorded by Pliny, book 18 chapter 6: 'By what methods should the fields be cultivated? Saith the oracle, by bad, by good: this means, in its riddling way, that the fields should be cultivated with the least possible expense.'