On Being a Busybody (1-2)

It is perhaps best to avoid a house which has no ventilation, or is gloomy, or cold in winter, or unhealthy; yet if familiarity has made you fond of the place, it is possible to make it brighter, better ventilated, and healthier by altering the lights, shifting the stairs, and opening some doors and closing others. Even some cities have gained by such changes. So in the case of my own town,[*] which used to face the west and receive the full force of the sun in the late afternoon from Parnassus, they say that it was turned by Chaeron to face the east. And Empedocles,[*] the natural philosopher, by blocking up a certain mountain gorge, which permitted the south wind to blow a dire and pestilential draught down upon the plains, was thought to have shut plague out of his country.

Since, then, there are certain unhealthy and injurious states of mind which allow winter and darkness to enter the soul, it is better to thrust these out and to make a clean sweep to the foundations, thus giving to ourselves a clear sky and light and pure air; but if that is impossible, it is best at least to interchange and readjust them in some way or other, turning or shifting them about.

Such a malady of the mind, to take the first instance, is curiosity, which is a desire to learn the troubles of others,[*] a disease which is thought to be free from neither envy nor malice:

Why do you look so sharp on others’ ills,

Malignant man, yet overlook your own?[*]

Shift your curiosity from things without and turn it inwards; if you enjoy dealing with the recital of troubles, you have much occupation at home:

Great as the water flowing down Alizon,

Many as the leaves around the oak,[*]

so great a quantity of transgressions will you find in your own life, of afflictions in your own soul, of oversights in the performance of your own obligations.

For as Xenophon[*] says that good householders have a special place for sacrificial utensils, and a special place for dinner-ware, and that farming implements should be stored elsewhere, and apart from them the weapons of war; even so in your own case you have one store of faults arising from envy, another from jealousy, another from cowardice, another from pettiness. Assault these, examine these! Block up the windows and the side-doors of your curiosity that open on your neighbours’ property, and open up others leading to your own-to the men’s quarters, to the women’s quarters, to the living-rooms of your servants! Here this curiosity and meddlesomeness of yours will have an occupation not unhelpful or

malicious, but useful and salutary if each one will but say to himself,

Where did I err? And what deed have I done? What duty neglected?[*]

But as it is, like the Lamia in the fable, who, they say, when at home sleeps in blindness with her eyes stored away in a jar, but when she goes abroad puts in her eyes and can see, so each one of us, in our dealings with others abroad, puts his meddlesomeness, like an eye, into his maliciousness; but we are often tripped up by our own faults and vices by reason of our ignorance of them, since we provide ourselves with no sight or light by which to inspect them. Therefore the busybody is also more useful to his enemies than to himself,[*] for he rebukes and drags out their faults and demonstrates to them what they should avoid or correct, but he neglects the greater part of his own domestic errors through his passionate interest in those abroad. So Odysseus[*] refused to converse even with his mother until he had learned from the seer[*] the matters by reason of which he had come to the House of Hades; and when he had his answer, he both turned to his mother and also made inquiries of the other women,[*] asking who was Tyro, who the beautiful Chloris, why Epicaste met her death

Tying a noose, sheer-hung, from the high roof.[*]

But we, while treating our own affairs with considerable laxity and ignorance and neglect, pry into the pedigrees of the rest of the world: our neighbour’s grandfather was a Syrian and his grandmother a Thracian[*]; so-and-so owes three talents and has not paid the interest. We inquire also into such matters as where so-and-so’s wife was coming back from,[*] and what A and B’s private conversation in the corner was about. Yet Socrates went about seeking to solve the question of what arguments Pythagoras used to carry conviction; and Aristippus, when he met Ischomachus at Olympia, asked him by what manner of conversation Socrates succeeded in so affecting the young men. And when Aristippus had gleaned a few odd seeds and samples of Socrates’ talk, he was so moved that he suffered a physical collapse and became quite pale and thin. Finally he sailed for Athens and slaked his burning thirst with draughts from the fountain-head, and engaged in a study of the man and his words and his philosophy, of which the end and aim was to come to recognize one’s own vices and so rid oneself of them.