On Being a Busybody (7-8)

So painful for all of us is the revelation of our own troubles that many die rather than reveal to physicians some hidden malady. Just imagine Herophilus[*] or Erasistratus[*] or Asclepius himself, when he was a mortal man,[*] carrying about their drugs and instruments, calling at one house after another, and inquiring whether a man had an abscess in the anus or a woman a cancer in the womb! And yet the inquisitiveness of this profession is a salutary thing. Yet everyone, I imagine, would have driven such a man away, because he does not wait to be sent for, but comes unsummoned to investigate others’ infirmities. And busybodies search out these very matters and others still worse, not to cure, but merely to expose them. For this reason they are hated deservedly. For example, we are annoyed and displeased with customs-officials, not when they pick up those articles which we are importing openly, but when in the search for concealed goods they pry into baggage and merchandize which are another’s property. And yet the law allows them to do this and they would lose[*] by not doing so. But busybodies ruin and abandon

their own interests in their excessive occupation with those of others. Only rarely do they visit the farm, for they cannot endure the quiet and silence of being alone. But if, after a long absence, they do chance to put in there, they have more of an eye for their neighbours’ vines than for their own, and they ask how many of their neighbours’ cattle have died, or how much of his wine has turned sour. But they are soon sated with such news and run away. Yet the true and genuine farmer does not care to hear even news that makes its own way from the city; he says[*]

Then he will tell me while he digs

On what terms peace was made. The cursed scamp

Now strolls around and meddles with these things.

And the busybody, shunning the country as something stale and uninteresting and undramatie, pushes into the bazaar and the market-place and the harbours: Is there any news? Weren’t you at market early this morning? Well then, do you suppose the city has changed its constitution in three hours? If, however, someone really does have something of that nature to tell him, he dismounts from his horse, grasps his informant’s hand, kisses him, and stands there listening. But if someone meets him and tells him that there is no news, he exclaims as though he were annoyed, What do you mean? Haven’t you been at market? Didn’t you pass the War Office? Didn’t you interview the new arrivals from Italy either? It is for this reason that the legislation of the Locrian magistrates was excellent. For if anyone who had been out of town came

up and asked, Is there any news? they fined him. Just as cooks[*] pray for a good crop of young animals and fishermen for a good haul of fish, in the same way busybodies pray for a good crop of calamities, a good haul of difficulties, for novelties, and changes, that they, like cooks and fishermen, may always have something to fish out or butcher.

Another good law was that of the legislator of Thurii,[*] for he forbade the lampooning on the comic stage of all citizens except adulterers and busybodies. And indeed adultery does seem to be a sort of curiosity about another’s pleasure and a searching out and examination of matters which are closely guarded and escape general observation, while curiosity is an encroaching, a debauching and denuding of secret things.