_How much more apt to reach the ear of man
An ill thing than a happy!_
are a true saying. As a cupping-glass sucks from the flesh what
[Sidenote: B] is worst in it, so the inquisitive ear draws to itself the
most undesirable topics. To vary the figure: cities have certain
‘Accursed’ or ‘Dismal’ gates, through which they take out criminals on
their way to death and throw the refuse and offscourings of
purification, while nothing sacred or undefiled goes in or out through
them. So with the ears of the busybody. They give passage to nothing
fine or useful, but serve only as the pathway of gruesome
communications, with their load of foul and polluted gossip.
_No chance brings other minstrel to my roof,
But always Lamentation._
[Sidenote: C] That is the one Muse and Siren of the busybody, the most
pleasant of all music to his ear. For his vice is a love of finding out
whatever is secret and concealed, and no one conceals a good thing when
he has one; on the contrary, he will pretend to one which has no
existence. Since therefore it is troubles that the busybody is eager to
discover, the disease from which he suffers is malignant gloating—own
brother to envy and spite. For envy is pain at another’s good; malignity
is pleasure at another’s harm; and the parent of both is ill-nature—the
[Sidenote: D] feeling of a savage or a brute beast.
So painful do we all find it to have our troubles revealed, that there
are many who would rather die than tell a physician of a secret disease.
Imagine Herophilus or Erasistratus, or Asclepius himself—when he was a
mortal man—calling from house to house with his drugs and his
instruments, and asking whether a man had a fistula or a woman a cancer
in the womb! Inquisitiveness in their profession may, it is true, save a
life. None the less, I presume, every one would have scouted such a
person, [Sidenote: E] for coming to investigate other people’s ailments
without waiting till he was required and sent for. Yet our busybody
searches out precisely these, or even worse, ailments; and, since he
does so not by way of curing them, but merely of disclosing them, he
deserves the hatred he gets.
We are annoyed and indignant with the collector of customs,[42] not when
he picks out and levies on those articles which we import openly, but
when, in the search for hidden goods, he ransacks among baggage and
merchandise which are not in [Sidenote: F] question. Yet the law permits
him to do so, and he is the loser if he does not. On the other hand, the
busybody lets his own concerns go to ruin, while he is occupying himself
with those of other people. He rarely takes a walk to the farm; it is
too lonely, and he cannot bear the quiet and silence. And if, after a
time, he does chance along, he has a keener eye for his neighbour’s
vines than for his own. He proceeds to ask how many of his neighbour’s
cattle have died, or how much of his wine turned sour. After a good meal
of such news he is quickly off and away.
Your true and genuine type of farmer has no desire to hear even the news
which finds its own way from the city. Says he:
_Then, while he digs, he’ll tell
The terms o’the treaty. He must now, confound him,
Go round and poke his nose in things like that!_
[Sidenote: 519] But to your busybody country life is a stale and
uninteresting thing with nothing to fuss about. He therefore flees from
it, and pushes into the Exchange, the Market, or the Harbour. ‘Is there
any news?’ ‘Why, weren’t you at market early this morning? Do you
imagine there has been a revolution in three hours?’ If, however, any
one has a piece of news to tell, down he gets from his horse, grasps the
man’s hand, kisses him, and stands there listening. But if some one
meets him and says there is nothing fresh, he exclaims, as if he were
annoyed: ‘What? Haven’t you been at market? Haven’t you been near the
Board-Room? And haven’t you met the new arrivals from [Sidenote: B]
Italy?’
The Locrian magistrates therefore did right in fining any one who, after
being out of town, came up and asked, ‘Is there any news?’ As the
butchers pray for a good supply of animals, and fishermen for a good
supply of fish, so busybodies pray for a good supply of calamities, for
plenty of troubles, for novelties and changes. They must always have
their fish to catch or carcass to cut up.
Another good rule was that of the legislator of Thurii, who forbade the
lampooning of citizens on the stage, with the exception of adulterers
and busybodies. The one class bears a resemblance to the other, adultery
being a sort of inquisitiveness into [Sidenote: C] another’s pleasure,
and a prying search into matters protected from the general eye, while
inquisitiveness is the illicit denuding and corrupting of a secret.
While a natural consequence of much learning is having much to say, and
therefore Pythagoras enjoined upon the young a five years’ silence,
which he called ‘Truce to Speech’, the necessary concomitant of
curiosity is speaking evil. What the curious delight to hear, they
delight to talk about; what they take pains to gather from others, they
joy in giving out to new hearers. It follows that, besides its
[Sidenote: D] other drawbacks, their disease actually stands in the way
of its own desires. For every one is on his guard to hide things from
them, and is reluctant to do anything when the busybody is looking, or
to say anything when he is listening. People put off a consultation and
postpone the consideration of business until such persons are out of the
way. If, when a secret matter is towards, or an important action is in
the doing, a busybody appears upon the scene, they take it away and hide
it, as they [Sidenote: E] would a piece of victuals when the cat comes
past. Often, therefore, he is the only person not permitted to hear or
see what others may see and hear.
For the same reason the busybody can find no one to trust him. We would
rather trust our letters, papers, or seals to a slave or a stranger than
to an inquisitive relation or friend. Bellerophon, though the writing
which he carried was about himself, would not broach it, but showed the
same continence in keeping his hands off the king’s letter as in keeping
them off his wife.
Yes, inquisitiveness is as incontinent as adultery, and not only
incontinent, but terribly silly and foolish. To pass by so many women
who are public property, and to struggle to get at one [Sidenote: F] who
is kept under lock and key, who is expensive, and perhaps ugly to boot,
is the very height of insanity. The busybody is just as bad. He passes
by much that is admirable to see and hear, many an excellent discourse
or discussion, to dig into another man’s poor little letter or clap his
ear to his neighbour’s wall, listening to slaves and womenfolk
whispering together, and incurring danger often, and discredit always.
[Sidenote: 520] Well, if he wishes to get rid of his vice, the busybody
will find nothing so helpful as to think over the discoveries he has
hitherto made. Simonides used to say that, in opening his boxes after a
lapse of time, he found the fee-box always full and the thanks-box
always empty. So, if one were to open the store-room of inquisitiveness
after an interval, and to contemplate all the useless, futile, and
uninviting things with which it is filled, he would probably become sick
of the business, so nauseating and senseless would it appear.
Suppose a person to run over the works of our old writers and pick out
their faultiest passages, compiling and keeping a book full of such
things as ‘headless’ lines of Homer, solecisms [Sidenote: B] in the
tragedians, the indecent and licentious language to women by which
Archilochus makes a sorry show of himself. Does he not deserve the
execration in the tragedy:
_Perish, thou picker-up of miseries!_
Execration apart, his treasury, filled with other men’s faults,
possesses neither beauty nor use. It is like the town which Philip
founded with the rudest riff-raff, and which he called Knaveborough.
With the busybody, however, it is not from lines of poetry, but from
lives, that he goes gleaning and gathering blunders and slips and
solecisms, till the memory which he carries about is the dullest and
dreariest record-box, crammed with ugly things. [Sidenote: C]
At Rome there are those who set no store by the paintings, the statues,
or—failing these—the handsome children or women on sale, but who haunt
the monster-market, examining specimens with no calves to their legs, or
with weasel-elbows, three eyes, or ostrich-heads, and looking out for
the appearance of any
_Commingled shape and misformed prodigy._
Yet if you keep on showing them such sights, they will soon become
surfeited and sick of it all. In the same way those who make it their
business to pry into other people’s failures in their affairs, blots on
their pedigree, disturbances and delinquencies in their homes, will do
well to remind themselves how thankless [Sidenote: D] and unprofitable
their previous discoveries have proved.
The most effective way, however, of preventing this weakness is to form
a habit—to begin at an early stage and train ourselves systematically to
acquire the necessary self-control. It is by habit that the vice
increases, the advance of the disease being gradual. How this is, we
shall see, in discussing the proper method of practice.
Let us make a beginning with comparatively trifling and insignificant
matters.
On the roads it can be no difficult matter to abstain from reading
[Sidenote: E] the inscriptions on the tombs. Nor in the promenades can
there be any hardship in refusing to let the eye linger upon the
writings on the walls. You have only to tell yourself that they contain
nothing useful or entertaining. There is A expressing his ‘kind
sentiments’ towards B; So-and-So described as ‘the best of friends’; and
much mere twaddle of the same kind. No doubt it seems as if the reading
of them does you no harm; but harm you it does, without your knowing it,
by inducing a habit of inquiring into things which do not concern you.
Hunters do not permit young hounds to turn aside and [Sidenote: F]
follow up every scent, but pull them sharply back with the leash, so as
to keep their power of smell in perfectly clean condition for their
proper work, and make it stick more keenly to the tracks:
_With nostril a-search for the trail that the beast gives forth from
its body_.
The same watchfulness must be shown in suppressing, or in diverting to
useful ends, the tendency of an inquisitive person to run off the track
and wander after everything that he can see or hear. An eagle or a lion
gathers its talons in when it [Sidenote: 521] walks, so as not to wear
the sharp edge from their tips. Similarly let us treat the inquiring
spirit as the keen edge to our love of learning, and refrain from
wasting or blunting it upon objects of no value.
In the next place let us train ourselves, when passing another’s door,
to refrain from looking in, or from letting our inquisitive gaze clutch
at what is passing inside. Xenocrates said—and we shall do well to keep
the remark in mind—that whether we set foot or set eyes in another man’s
house makes no difference. Not only is such prying unfair and improper;
we get no pleasure from the spectacle.
_Unsightly, stranger, are the sights within_,
is a saying which is generally true of what we see inside—a litter of
pots and pans, or servant-girls sitting about, but nothing of [Sidenote:
B] any importance or interest. This furtive throwing of sidelong
glances, which at the same time gives a kind of squint to the mind, is
ugly, and the habit is demoralizing. When the Olympian victor Dioxippus
was making a triumphal entry in a chariot, and could not drag his eyes
from a beautiful woman among the spectators, but kept turning half round
and throwing side glances in her direction, Diogenes—who saw it
all—remarked, ‘See how a bit of a girl gets the neck-grip on our great
athlete!’ Inquisitive people, however, are to be seen gripped by the
neck and twisted about by any kind of sight, when they once develop a
habit of squandering their glances in all directions.
This is assuredly no right use of the faculty of vision. It should
[Sidenote: C] not go gadding about like some ill-trained maidservant;
but when the mind sends it upon an errand, it should make haste to reach
its destination, deliver its message, and then come quietly home again
to wait upon the commands of the reason. Instead of this, the case is as
in Sophocles:
_Thereon the Aenean driver’s hard-mouthed colts
Break from control._
When the faculty of vision has not been tutored and trained in the
proper manner as above described, it runs away, drags [Sidenote: D] the
mind with it, and often brings it into disastrous collisions.
There is a story that Democritus deliberately destroyed his sight by
fixing his eyes upon a red-hot mirror and allowing its heat to be
focussed upon them. His object, it is said, was to block up the windows
toward the street, and thus prevent the disturbance of his intellect by
repeated calls from outside, enabling it to stay at home and devote
itself to pure thinking. Though the story is a fiction, nothing is more
true than that those who make most use of their mind make few calls upon
the senses. Note how our halls of learning are built far out from the
towns, and how night has been styled the ‘_well-minded_‘, from a belief
[Sidenote: E] that quiet and the absence of distraction are a powerful
aid to intellectual discovery and research.
Suppose, again, that people are quarrelling and abusing each other in
the market-place. It requires no great effort of self-denial to keep at
a distance. When a crowd is running towards a certain spot, it is easy
for you to remain seated, or else, if you lack the necessary strength of
mind, to get up and go away. There is no advantage to be got from mixing
yourself with busybodies, whereas you will derive great benefit from
putting a forcible check upon your curiosity and training it to obey the
commands of the reason.
[Sidenote: F] We may now go a step further, and tax ourselves more
severely. It is good practice, when a successful entertainment is going
on in a public hall, to pass it by; when our friends invite us to a
performance by a dancer or comedian, to decline; when there is a roar in
the race-ground or the circus, to take no notice. Socrates used to urge
the avoidance of all foods and drinks which tempt one to eat when he is
not hungry or to drink when he is not thirsty. In the same way we shall
do well to shun carefully all appeals to eye or ear, when, though they
are no business of ours, their attractions prove too much for us.
Cyrus refused to see Panthea, and when Araspes talked of her [Sidenote:
522] remarkable beauty, his answer was: ‘All the more reason for keeping
away from her. If I took your advice and went to see her, she might
perhaps tempt me to be visiting her again when I could not spare the
time, and to be sitting and looking at her to the neglect of much
important business.’ In the same way Alexander refused to set eyes on
Darius’ wife, who was said to be strikingly handsome. Though he visited
the mother—an elderly woman—he would not bring himself to see her young
and beautiful daughter. But what we do is to peep into women’s litters
and hang about their windows, finding nothing improper in encouraging
our curiosity and allowing it such dangerous [Sidenote: B] and unchecked
play.
Note how you may train yourself for other virtues. To learn justice you
should sometimes forgo an honest gain, and so accustom yourself to keep
aloof from dishonest ones. Similarly, to learn continence, you should
sometimes hold aloof from your own wife, and so secure yourself against
temptation from another’s. Apply this habit to inquisitiveness.
Endeavour occasionally to miss hearing or seeing things which concern
yourself. When something happens at home, and a person wishes to tell
you of it, put the matter off; and when things have been said which
appear to affect yourself, refuse to hear them. Remember how Oedipus was
brought into the direst disasters by over-curiosity. Finding he was no
Corinthian, but an alien, he set to work [Sidenote: C] to discover who
he was, and so he met with Laius. He killed him, married his own mother,
with the throne for dowry, and then, while apparently blessed by
fortune, began his search once more. The endeavours of his wife to
prevent him only made him question still more closely, and in the most
peremptory way, the old man who was in the secret. And at last, when
circumstances are already bringing him to suspect, and the old man
cries:
_Alas! I stand on the dread brink of speech!_
he is nevertheless in such a blaze or spasm of passion that he replies:
_And I of hearing; and yet hear I must._
[Sidenote: D] So bitter-sweet, so uncontrollable, is the excitement of
curiosity—like the tickling of a wound, at which one tears till he makes
it bleed. Meanwhile if we are free from that malady, and mild by nature,
we shall ignore a disagreeable thing and say:
_Sovran Oblivion, how wise art thou!_
We must therefore train ourselves to this end. If a letter is brought to
us, we must not show all that hurry and eagerness to open it which most
people display, when they bite the fastenings through with their teeth,
if their hands are too slow. When a messenger arrives from somewhere or
other, we must not run to meet him, nor get up from our seats. If a
friend [Sidenote: E] says, ‘I have something new to tell you,’ let us
reply: ‘Better, if you have something useful or profitable.’ When I was
once lecturing at Rome, the famous Rusticus—who was afterwards put to
death by Domitian out of jealousy at his reputation—was among my
hearers. A soldier came through the audience and handed him a note from
the emperor. There was a hush, and I made a pause, to allow of his
reading the letter. This, however, he refused to do, nor would he open
it, until I had finished my discourse and the audience broke up. The
incident caused universal admiration at his dignified behaviour.
But when one feeds his inquisitiveness upon permissible material until
he makes it robust and headstrong, he no longer [Sidenote: F] finds it
easy to master, when force of habit urges it towards forbidden ground.
Such persons will stealthily open their friends’ missives, will push
their way into a confidential meeting, will get a view of rites which it
is an impiety to see, will tread in hallowed places, and will pry into
the doings and sayings of a king.
Now with a despot—who is compelled to know everything—there is nothing
that makes him so detested as the crew known as his ‘ears’ and
‘jackals’. ‘Listeners’ were first instituted by Darius the Younger, who
had no confidence in himself and looked upon every one with fear and
suspicion. ‘Jackals’ were [Sidenote: 523] the creation of the Dionysii,
who distributed them among the people of Syracuse. Naturally, when the
revolution came, these were the first to be seized and cudgelled to
death by the Syracusans.
Blackmailers and informers are a breed belonging to the Busybody clan;
they are members of the family. But, whereas the informer looks to see
if his neighbours have done or plotted any mischief, the busybody brings
to book and drags into public even the misfortunes for which they are
not responsible. It is said that the outcast derived his name of
_aliterios_ in the first instance from being a busybody. It appears that
when a severe famine once occurred at Athens, and when those who were in
possession of wheat, instead of bringing it in to the public [Sidenote:
B] stock, used to grind it (_alein_) secretly by night in their houses,
certain persons, who went round watching for the noise of the mills,
were in consequence called _aliterioi_. It was in the same way, we are
told, that the informer won his name of _sukophantes_. The export of
figs (_suka_) being prohibited, those who gave information (_phainein_)
and impeached the offenders were called _sukophantai_. Busybodies would
do well to reflect upon this fact. It may make them ashamed of the
family likeness between their own practices and those of a class which
is a special object of loathing and anger.
Footnote 42:
These were farmed.