Concerning Talkativeness (10-14)

Yet, speaking generally, who has left himself the right to speak out boldly against one who has not kept silent? If the story ought not to have been known, it was wrong for it to be told to another; and if you have let the secret slip from yourself and yet seek to confine it to another, you have taken refuge in another’s good faith when you have already abandoned your own. And if he turns out to be no better than yourself, you are deservedly ruined; if better, you are saved beyond all expectation, since you have found another more faithful on your own behalf than you yourself are. But this man is my friend. Yet he has another friend, whom he will likewise trust as I trust him; and his friend, again, will trust another friend. Thus, then, the story goes on increasing and multiplying by link after link of incontinent betrayal. For just as the monad[*] does not pass out of its own boundaries, but remains once and for all one (for which reason it is called a monad), and as the dyad is the indeterminate beginning of difference (for by doubling it at once shifts from unity to plurality), so a story confined to its first possessor is truly secret; but if it passes to another, it has acquired the status of rumour. The Poet,[*] in fact, says that words are winged: neither when you let go from your hands a winged thing is it easy to get

it back again,[*] nor when a word is let slip from the mouth is it possible to arrest and control it, but it is borne away

Circling on swift wings,[*]

and is scattered abroad from one to another. So when a ship has been caught by a wind, they try to check it, deadening its speed with cables and anchors, but if a story runs out of harbour, so to speak, there is no roadstead or anchorage for it, but, carried away with a great noise and reverberation, it dashes upon the man who uttered it and submerges him in some great and terrible danger.

With but a little torch one might set fire

To Ida’s rock; and tell one man a tale,

Soon all the town will know.[*]

The Roman Senate[*] was once for many days debating in strict privacy a certain secret policy; and since the matter gave rise to much uncertainty and suspicion, a woman prudent in other respects, but yet a woman, kept pestering her husband and persistently begging to learn the secret. She vowed with imprecations upon herself that she would keep silent, and wept and moaned because she was not trusted. And the Roman, wishing to bring home her folly by proof, said, Wife, you have won; listen to a terrible and portentous matter. We have been informed by the priests that a lark has been seen flying about with a golden helmet and a spear; we

are therefore examining the portent whether it be good or bad, and are in constant consultation with the augurs. But do you hold your tongue. So saying he went off to the Forum. But his wife at once seized the first maid to come into the room and beat her own breast and tore her hair. Alas, she cried, for my husband and my country! What will become of us? wishing, and in fact instructing, the maid to ask, Why, what has happened? So when the maid asked the question, she told the tale and added that refrain common to every babbler, Keep this quiet and tell it to no one! The little maid had scarcely left her when she herself tells the tale to that fellow servant who, she saw,had least to do; and this servant, in turn, told it to her lover who was paying a visit. WTith such speed was the story rolled out[*] into the Forum that it preceded its inventor: he was met by an acquaintance who said, Have you just now come down to the Forum from home? This very moment, said he. Then you have heard nothing? Why, is there any news? A lark has been seen flying about with a gold helmet and a spear and the magistrates are going to convene the senate about the matter. And the husband laughed and said, All praise to your speed, my wife! The story has even reached the Forum before me! So he interviewed the magistrates and relieved them of their anxiety; but, by way of punishing his wife, as soon as he entered home, he said, Wife, you have ruined me! The secret has been discovered to have been made public from my house; consequently I am to be exiled from my native land because you lack self-control. When she denied it and said, What, didn’t you hear it in company with three hundred others? Three hundred, nonsense! said he. You made such a fuss that I had to invent the whole story to try you out. Thus this man made trial of his wife cautiously and in complete safety, pouring, as it were into a leaky vessel, not wine or oil, but water.[*]

But Fuivius,[*] the friend of Caesar Augustus, heard the emperor, now an old man, lamenting the desolation of his house: two of his grandsons[*] were dead, and Postumius,[*] the only one surviving, was in exile because of some false accusation, and thus he was forced to import his wife’s son[*] into the imperial succession; yet he pitied his grandson and was planning to recall him from abroad. Fulvius divulged what he had heard to his own wife, and she to Livia; and Livia bitterly rebuked Caesar: if he had formed this design long ago, why did he not send for his grandson, instead of making her an object of enmity and strife to the successor to the empire. Accordingly, when Fulvius came to him in the morning, as was his custom, and said, Hail, Caesar, Caesar replied, Farewell, Fulvius.[*] And Fulvius took his meaning and went away; going home at once, he sent for his wife, Caesar has found out, he said, that I have not kept his secret, and therefore

I intend to kill myself. It is right that you should, said his wife, since, after living with me for so long a time, you have not learned to guard against my incontinent tongue. But let me die first. And, taking the sword, she dispatched herself before her husband.

Philippides,[*] the comic poet, therefore, made the right answer when King Lysimachus courteously asked him, What is there of mine that I may share with you? and he replied, Anything you like, Sire, except your secrets. And to garrulousness is attached also a vice no less serious than itself, inquisitiveness.[*] For babblers wish to hear many things so that they may have many things to tell. And they go about tracking down and searching out especially those stories that have been kept hidden and are not to be revealed, storing up for their foolish gossip, as it were, a second-hand stock of hucksters’ wares; then, like children with a piece of ice,[*] they are neither able to hold it nor willing to let it go. Or rather, the secrets are like reptiles[*] which they catch and place in their bosoms, yet cannot confine them there, but are devoured by them; for pipefish[*] and vipers, they say, burst in giving birth, and secrets, when they escape, destroy and ruin those who cannot keep them.

Seleucus[*] the Victorious lost his entire army and power in the battle against the Gauls; he tore off his

crown with his own hands and fled on horseback with three or four companions. When he had travelled a long journey through winding ways and trackless wilds, at length becoming desperate from lack of food he approached a certain farmhouse. By chance he found the master himself and begged bread and water from him. And the farmer gave him lavishly both these and whatever else there was in a farmstead, and, while entertaining him hospitably, recognized the face of the king. In his joy at the fortunate chance of rendering service he could not restrain himself or dissemble as did the king, who wished to remain unknown, but he escorted the king to the highway and, on taking leave, said, Fare well, King Seleucus. And Seleucus, stretching out his right hand to him and drawing him towards himself as though to kiss him, gave a sign to one of his companions to cut off the man’s head with a sword s

Still speaking his head was mingled with the dust.[*]

But if the man had remained silent at that time and had mastered himself for a little while, when the king later won success and regained power, he would have earned, I fancy, an even larger reward for his silence than for his hospitality.

This man, it is true, had as something of an excuse for his incontinence his hopes and the friendly service he had rendered;

but most talkers do not even have a reason for destroying themselves. For example, people were once talking in a barber’s shop about how adamantine[*] and unbreakable the despotism of Dionysius was. The barber laughed and said, Fancy your saying that about Dionysius, when I

have my razor at his throat every few days or so! When Dionysius heard this, he crucified the barber.

It is not strange that barbers are a talkative clan, for the greatest chatterboxes stream in and sit in their chairs, so that they are themselves infected with the habit. It was a witty answer, for instance, that King Archelaü;s[*] gave to a loquacious barber, who, as he wrapped his towel around him, asked, How shall I cut your hair, Sire? In silence, said Archelaüs. And it was a barber[*] also who first announced the great disaster of the Athenians in Sicily, having learned it in the Peiraeus from a slave, one of those who had escaped from the island. Then the barber left his shop and hurried at full speed to the city,

Lest another might win the glory

of imparting the news to the city,

and he come second.[*]

A panic naturally arose and the people gathered in assembly and tried to come at the origin of the rumour. So the barber was brought forward and questioned; yet he did not even know the name of his informant, but referred the origin to a nameless and unknown person. The assembly was enraged and cried out, Torture the cursed fellow! Put him on the rack! He has fabricated and concocted this tale! Who else heard it? Who believed it? The wheel was brought and the man was stretched upon it. Meanwhile there arrived bearers of the disastrous news, men who had escaped from the slaughter itself. All, therefore, dispersed, each to his private mourning, leaving the wretched fellow bound on the wheel. But when he was set free late in the day when it was already nearly evening, he asked the executioner if they had also heard how the general, Nicias, had died. Such an unconquerable and incorrigible evil does habit make garrulity.

And yet, just as those who have drunk bitter and evil-smelling drugs are disgusted with the cups as well, so those who bear ill tidings cause disgust and hatred in those who hear them. Therefore Sophocles[*] has very neatly raised the question:

Gu. Is it in ear or soul that you are stung?-

Cr. But why seek to define where lies my pain?-

Gu. The doer grieves your heart, I but your ears.

Be that as it may, speakers also cause pain, just as doers do, but none the less there is no checking or chastening a loose tongue.

The temple of Athena of the Brazen House at Sparta was discovered to have been plundered, and an empty flask was found lying inside. The large crowd which had quickly formed was quite at a loss, when one of the bystanders said, If you wish, I shall tell you what occurs to me about that flask. I think that the robbers, before undertaking so dangerous a task, drank hemlock and brought along wine, so that, if they should escape detection, by drinking the unmixed wine they might quench the poison and rid themselves of its evil effects,[*] and so might get away safely; but if they should be caught, that they might

die an easy and painless death from the poison before they should be put to the torture. When he had said this, the explanation appeared so very complicated and subtle that it did not seem to come from fancy, but from knowledge; and the people surrounded him and questioned him one after another, Who are you? Who knows you? How did you come to know this? and at last he was put through so thorough an examination that he confessed to being one of the robbers.

Were not the murderers of Ibycus[*] caught in the same way? They were sitting in a theatre, and when cranes came in sight, they laughed and whispered to each other that the avengers of Ibycus were come. Persons sitting near overheard them, and since Ibycus had disappeared and now for a long time had been sought, they caught at this remark and reported it to the magistrates. And thus the slayers were convicted and led off to prison, not punished by the cranes, but compelled to confess the murder by the infirmity of their own tongues, as it were some Fury or spirit of vengeance. For as in the body the neighbouring parts are borne by attraction toward diseased and suffering parts, so the tongue of babblers, ever inflamed and throbbing, draws and gathers to itself some portion of what has been kept concealed and should not be revealed. Therefore the tongue must be fenced in, and reason must ever lie, like a barrier, in the tongue’s way, checking its flow and keeping it from slipping, in order that we may not be thought to be less sensible than geese,[*] of whom they relate that when from

Cilicia they cross Mt. Taurus, which is full of eagles, they take a great stone in their mouths to serve as a bolt or bridle for their scream, and pass over at night unobserved.