Of Garrulity, or Talkativeness (14)

And yet we find that people have the same antipathy against divulgers of bad tidings, as they that drink bitter and distasteful potions have against the cups wherein they drank them. Elegant therefore is the dispute in Sophocles between the messenger and Creon:

MESSENGER. By what I tell and what you hear,

Do I offend your heart or ear?

CREON. Why so inquisitive to sound

My grief, and search the painful wound?

MESSENGER. My news afflicts thy ears, I find,

But ’tis the fact torments thy mind.

[*]

Thus they that bring us bad tidings are as bad as they who are the authors of our misery; and yet there is no restraining or correcting the tongue that will run at random.

It happened that the temple of Minerva in Lacedaemon called Chalcioecus was robbed, and nothing but an earthen pitcher left behind; which caused a great concourse of people, where every one spent his verdict about the empty

pitcher. Gentlemen, says one, pray give me leave to tell ye my opinion concerning this pitcher. I am apt to believe, that these sacrilegious villains, before they ventured upon so dangerous an attempt, drank each of them a draught of hemlock juice, and then brought wine along with them in this pitcher; to the end that, if it were their good hap to escape without being apprehended, they might soon dissolve and extinguish the strength and vigor of the venom by the force of the wine unmixed and pure; but if they should be surprised and taken in the fact, that then they might die without feeling any pain under the torture of the rack. Having thus said, the people, observing so much forecast and contrivance in the thing, would not be persuaded that any man could have such ready thoughts upon a bare conjecture, but that he must know it to be so. Thereupon, immediately gathering about him, one asked who he was; another, who knew him; a third, how he came to be so much a philosopher. And at length, they did so sift and canvass and fetch him about, that the fellow confessed himself to be one of those that committed the sacrilege.

And were not they who murdered the poet Ibycus discovered after the same manner, as they sat in the theatre? For as they were sitting there under the open sky to behold the public pastimes, they observed a flock of cranes flying over their heads; upon which they whispered merrily one to another, Look, yonder are the revengers of Ibycus’s death. Which words being overheard by some that sat next them,—in regard that Ibycus had been long missing but could not be found, though diligent search had been made after him,—they presently gave information of what they had heard to the magistrates. By whom being examined and convicted, they suffered condign punishment, though not betrayed by the cranes, but by the incontinency of their own tongues, and by an avenging

Erinnys hovering over their heads and constraining them to confess the murder. For as in the body, wounded and diseased members draw to themselves the vicious humors of the neighboring parts; in like manner, the unruly tongues of babblers, infested (as it were) with inflammations where a sort of feverish pulses continually lie beating, will be always drawing to themselves something of the secret and private concerns of other men. And therefore the tongue ought to be environed with reason, as with a rampart perpetually lying before it, like a mound, to stop the overflowing and slippery exuberance of impertinent talk; that we may not seem to be more silly than geese, which, when they take their flight out of Cilicia over the mountain Taurus, which abounds with eagles, are reported to carry every one a good big stone in their bills, instead of a bridle or barricade, to restrain their gaggling. By which means they cross those hideous forests in the night-time undiscovered.