Thus Socrates would handsomely twit the young men with their ignorance
by professing his own, pretending for his part he had need with them
to study morality and make more accurate enquiries into the truth of
things. For a confession of the same guilt, and a seeming endeavor to
reform ourselves as well as our friends, gives credit to the reprimand
and recommends it to their affections. But he who gravely magnifies
himself, whilst he imperiously detracts from others, as being a man
forsooth of no imperfections, unless his age or a celebrated reputation
indeed commands our attention, is only impertinent and troublesome
to no purpose. And therefore it was not without reason that Phoenix,
checking Achilles for his intemperate anger, confessed his own
unhappiness in that particular, how he had like once to have slain his
own father through a transport of passion had not the scandalous name
of parricide held his hands;[130] that the hero might not imagine he
took that liberty with him because he had never offended in the like
kind himself. For such inoffensive reproofs leave a deeper impress
behind them, when they seem the result of sympathy rather than contempt.
But because a mind subject to the disorders of passion, like an
inflamed eye that cannot bear a great and glaring light, is impatient
of a rebuke, without some temperament to qualify and allay its
poignancy, therefore the best remedy in this case will be to dash it
with a little praise, as in the following:
Think, and subdue! on dastards dead to fame
I waste no anger, for they feel no shame;
But you, the pride, the flower of all our host,
My heart weeps blood to see your glory lost!
Where, Pandarus, are all thy honors now,
Thy winged arrows and unerring bow,
Thy matchless skill, thy yet unrivall’d fame
And boasted glory of the Lycian name![131]
And such rebukes as these are also most effectual in reclaiming those
that are ready to fall into gross enormities:
O where are Oedipus and all his riddles now?
and