Plutarch · a new plain-English translation from the Greek
Philosophy takes on a difficult and stubborn cure when it treats talkativeness. For its remedy, reasoned speech, requires listeners, and the chatterers listen to no one, since they are always talking. And this is the first evil that unstoppable talk brings with it: an inability to listen. For it is a self-chosen deafness, on the part of people who, I think, find fault with nature because we have one tongue but two ears. If, then, Euripides
spoke well when he said to the unintelligent listener, "I could not fill a man who cannot hold it, pouring wise words into a man who is not wise," one might more justly say it to the chatterer: "I could not fill a man who will not receive it, pouring wise words into a man who is not wise" — or rather, pouring words all around a man who talks to those who are not listening, and does not listen to those who are talking. For
if he hears even a little, when talkativeness has, as it were, taken an ebb-tide, he immediately gives it back many times over. The portico at Olympia, which produces many echoes from a single sound, they call the "seven-voiced"; but let the slightest word touch talkativeness, and at once it re-echoes, setting in motion the unmoved strings of the mind. For it may be that in such people the sense of hearing has been pierced
through, not to the soul, but to the tongue. Hence for other people words remain lodged within, but with the chatterers they flow straight through, and then, like empty vessels, void of sense but full of noise, they go about. Well then, if it seems that no test has been left untried, let us say to the chatterer: "Boy, be silent; silence holds many good things" — and the first and greatest two are these: to listen and to be listened to. Neither of these falls to the lot of
the chatterers; rather, they grow despondent even about the very desire itself. For with the other diseases of the soul — love of money, love of glory, love of pleasure — at least the attaining of what they desire is possible; but for chatterers the hardest thing of all happens: though they desire listeners, they do not get them, but everyone flees headlong, and whether they are sitting in some half-circle or walking about, if people see the chatterer approaching them in the same place, they quickly pass the word to move off.
And just as, when a silence falls in some gathering, people say that Hermes has come in among them, so, when a talker enters a symposium or a council of acquaintances, everyone falls silent, not wishing to give him a handle; but if he himself begins to open his mouth, they rise up before the storm, as when the north wind blows off a stormy headland, foreseeing the swell and the seasickness to come. Hence it happens to them that they find neither dinner-companions
nor fellow-travelers who are eager for their company, whether on the road or at sea, but only unwilling ones; for he presses upon everyone everywhere, catching hold of their cloaks, their chins, knocking on their ribs with his hand. "Feet there are most honored," as Archilochus says — and, by Zeus, as the wise Aristotle too said. For he himself, when troubled by a chatterer and battered with strange stories, and the man kept saying repeatedly, "Isn't this amazing, Aristotle?" — replied, "No, this
is not the amazing thing," he said, "but that anyone with feet puts up with you." And to another such person, who after a long speech said, "I have talked your ear off, philosopher," he said, "No, by Zeus, for I was not paying attention." For even if chatterers force a person to listen, the soul hands over the ears to be drenched from outside, while it itself unfolds and works through other concerns within, addressed to itself; hence chatterers find no listeners who either pay attention
or trust them. For they say that the seed of those who are too easily inclined toward intercourse is unfruitful, and likewise the speech of chatterers is incomplete and fruitless. And yet nature has fenced in nothing within us so securely as the tongue, placing the teeth before it as a guard, so that, if it does not obey when reason draws in the "glossy reins" from within,
and is not held back, we may check its lack of restraint by biting it until it bleeds. For it is not of unbridled storerooms nor unbridled chambers, but of "unbridled mouths," Euripides says, that "the end is misfortune." But those who think there is no benefit to their owners in having unlocked, doorless storerooms and unfastened purses, yet who use mouths without locks or doors, flowing out continuously like the Black Sea, seem
to hold speech in the least honor of all things. Hence they also have no credibility, which every speech aims at; for this is its proper end, to produce belief in the hearers. But talkers are not believed, even when they speak the truth. For just as fire shut up in a vessel is found to be greater in quantity but worse in usefulness, so speech, falling into a talkative man, produces a great addition of falsehood,
by which it destroys credibility. Furthermore, every modest and well-ordered person would guard against drunkenness; for anger, in some people, shares a common wall with madness, but drunkenness lives in the same house with it — or rather, madness is lesser in duration but greater in cause, because the element of choice is present in it. Of drunkenness, nothing is so much condemned as the lack of restraint
and lack of limit in speech: "for wine sets loose even a very sensible man to sing, and moves him to laugh softly and to dance." And yet the most terrible thing — song, laughter, and dancing — none of this goes as far as speech. "And he uttered some word which had better been left unsaid" — this is already terrible and dangerous. And perhaps the poet, in resolving the question sought after by philosophers, has stated the difference between
being wine-flushed and being drunk: wine-flushing is relaxation, drunkenness is nonsense-talk. For "what is in the heart of the sober man is on the tongue of the drunken man," as the proverb-sayers say. Hence Bias, being silent at some drinking party and mocked for foolishness by a chatterer, said, "Who indeed could, being a fool, keep silent while drinking wine?" And a certain man in Athens who was hosting
royal ambassadors was eager to bring the philosophers together with them in the same place; and while the others engaged in conversation and contributed their share, Zeno kept quiet, and the guests, being friendly and drinking to his health, said, "And what should we say about you, Zeno, to the king?" And he said, "Nothing else than that there is an old man in Athens who can keep silent while drinking." Thus
silence has something deep and mysterious about it, and is sober, while drunkenness is talkative; for it is mindless and thoughtless, and for this reason also full of noise. And philosophers, defining drunkenness, say it is nonsense caused by wine; so drinking is not blamed, if silence attends the drinking; rather, it is foolish talk that turns wine-flushing into drunkenness. So the drunk man talks nonsense over
his wine, but the chatterer talks nonsense everywhere — in the marketplace, in the theater, on the walk, in his cups, by day, by night. He is heavier than the disease when he tries to nurse it, more unpleasant than seasickness to his fellow sailors, more burdensome when praising than another when finding fault. It is more pleasant, at any rate, to associate with clever rascals than with decent chatterers. For Sophocles' Nestor, gently soothing Ajax when he was harsh in speech, spoke this fittingly: "I do not
blame you; for though you act well, you speak ill." But we do not feel this way toward the chatterer; rather, the ill-timedness of his words spoils and destroys all the grace of his deed. Lysias composed a speech and gave it to a man who had a lawsuit; and the man, after reading it many times, came to Lysias downhearted, saying that the first time he went through it, the speech had seemed wonderful to him, but the second and
third time he took it up, it seemed altogether dull and ineffective. Lysias laughed and said, "Well then, are you not going to speak it just once, before the jurors?" And consider the persuasiveness and charm of Lysias: I too say of him that he has had good fortune with the violet-tressed Muses. And of the things said about the poet, the truest is that Homer alone has overcome the fickleness of men, always being fresh
and flourishing in charm; and yet, though he said and proclaimed of himself that famous line, "For that is hateful to me," saying things already made quite clear a second time, he avoids and fears the satiety that lies in wait for every discourse, leading the hearing from one story to another, and soothing its surfeit with novelty. But chatterers, I suppose, wear out the ears with their repetitions, defacing them like a palimpsest.
So let us first remind them of this: that just as wine, invented for the sake of pleasure and friendliness, is turned by those who force people to drink a great deal of it unmixed into a cause of unpleasantness and drunken misbehavior for some, so too speech, though it is the most pleasant and most humane of bonds, is made inhuman and unsociable by those who use it badly and carelessly, gratifying people by paining them, and being admired for things that only make them ridiculous, and
being loved for things that make them resented instead. Just as a man who repels and drives away those he consorts with, even though he wields Aphrodite's own girdle, is unlovable, so too the man who pains and alienates others with his speech is unmusical and unskilled. Of the other passions and diseases, some are dangerous, some are hateful, some are ridiculous; but talkativeness has all of these at once. For they are mocked in common conversations, they are hated because of
their reports of others' misdeeds, and they run into danger because they cannot keep secrets. Hence Anacharsis, being entertained at Solon's house and sleeping there, was seen with his left hand placed over his private parts and his right hand pressed to his mouth; for he thought that the tongue needed the stronger bridle, and rightly so. For one could not easily count as many men who have fallen through lack of restraint in matters of love as the number of cities and empires
that a secret word, once let out, has laid waste. Sulla was besieging Athens, having no leisure to spend much time there, "since another task pressed upon him" — Mithridates having seized Asia, and Marius's party again gaining power in Rome; but some old men chatting at a barber's shop said that the Heptachalcon was not being guarded and that the city was in danger of being taken at that point. His scouts, hearing this, reported it to
Sulla. And he immediately brought up his force and led his army in around midnight, and very nearly razed the city to the ground, and filled it with slaughter and corpses, so that the Ceramicus ran with blood. Yet he was harsher toward the Athenians because of their words than because of their deeds; for they spoke ill of him and of Metella, leaping up onto the walls
and jeering: "Sulla is a mulberry sprinkled with barley-meal," and babbling many such things, they brought upon themselves — for the lightest of things, words — as Plato says, "the heaviest penalty." And it was the talkativeness of a single man that prevented the city of Rome from becoming free again after it was rid of Nero. For there was one night, after which the tyrant was due to perish, everything having been prepared; but the man who was about to kill him, on his way to
the theater, saw one of the men in bonds at the doors, about to be brought before Nero, bewailing his own fortune, and came up close to him and whispered, "Pray, fellow, only that this day may pass; tomorrow you will thank me." The man, seizing on the riddle and understanding it, I suppose, that he was a fool who, leaving certainties, pursues uncertainties, chose the safer salvation over
the more just one. For he betrayed to Nero what the man had said; and the man was immediately seized, and tortures and fire and whips were brought against him, though he denied, under compulsion, what he had disclosed without compulsion. But Zeno the philosopher, so that his body, forced by torments, might not betray any of the secrets even against his will, bit through his own tongue and spat it at the tyrant. Fine too is the
prize for self-control that belongs to Leaena. She was a courtesan of the circle of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and shared in the conspiracy against the tyrants with the hopes proper to a woman; for she too had been caught up in Bacchic frenzy over that beautiful cup of love, and had been initiated by the god into the secrets. So when those men, having failed, were put to death, though she was interrogated and ordered to name those still undetected, she did not name them,
but held out, showing that the men had suffered nothing unworthy of themselves, if they had loved such a woman. And the Athenians, having made a bronze lioness without a tongue, dedicated it at the gates of the Acropolis, showing by the spirited nature of the animal her unconquerable courage, and by its tonguelessness her capacity for silence and mystery; for no speech, once spoken, ever helped as much as the many things kept silent have helped. For it is possible sometimes to speak what has been kept silent, but
it is not possible to keep silent what has once been spoken; it has already poured out and spread everywhere. Hence, I think, we have men as teachers of speaking, but the gods as teachers of keeping silent, since we receive silence in rites and mysteries. And the poet has made Odysseus, the most eloquent of men, also the most silent, and likewise his son, his wife, and his nurse; for you hear her saying, "I will hold out like tough oak or
iron." And he himself, sitting beside Penelope, pitied in his heart his wife who was weeping, yet his eyes stood as if of horn or iron, unmoving beneath his lids. So thoroughly was his body filled on every side with self-control, and reason, having everything obedient and in its power, gave orders to his eyes not to weep, to his tongue not to speak, to his heart not to tremble or bark.
"But his heart within him remained steadfast in its resolve," reason extending its rule even to the involuntary motions, and having made his breath and blood too submissive and tame to itself. Such also were most of his companions; for their being dragged along and dashed against the ground by the Cyclops, without denouncing Odysseus or revealing that fire-heated instrument prepared against
the eye, but rather being eaten raw than telling any of the secrets, has left no room for any greater degree of self-control and trust. Hence Pittacus spoke well when the king of the Egyptians sent him a sacrificial victim and bade him cut out the finest and the worst piece of meat; he sent it back having cut out the tongue, as being the instrument of good things and also the instrument of evils, the greatest of them. And the Euripidean Ino, claiming for herself the right to speak freely
about herself, says she knows both how to be silent where it is necessary and how to speak where it is safe. For those who have truly received a noble and royal education learn first to be silent, and only then to speak. King Antigonus, at any rate, when his son asked him when they intended to break camp, said, "Why are you afraid — that you alone will not hear the trumpet?" Did he not, then, refuse to entrust a secret word to the very one
to whom he was going to leave his kingdom? He was teaching him, then, to be self-controlled and guarded in such matters. Old Metellus, when asked something similar during a campaign, said, "If I thought my tunic knew this secret, I would take it off and put it on the fire." And Eumenes, on hearing that Craterus was approaching, told none of his friends, but lied that it was Neoptolemus; for it was
his soldiers despised, but they admired the man's reputation and loved his valor. No one else knew the truth; they engaged him in battle and overpowered and killed him without knowing who he was, and only recognized the corpse afterward. Thus did silence command the campaign and conceal so great an adversary — so that his friends, rather than blaming him for not warning them in advance, admired him all the more for it. And even if someone should blame him, it is better to be reproached for having saved yourself through distrust than to be accused of having been destroyed through misplaced trust.
Who, indeed, retains any right to complain against a man who kept silent? For if the report was meant to stay unknown, then it was ill spoken to anyone else at all; but if, having let it go from yourself, you keep it locked up in someone else, you have taken refuge in another person's fidelity, having thrown away your own. And if that person turns out to be like you, you are justly ruined; but if he proves better than you, you are saved beyond all expectation, having found someone more trustworthy than yourself. But, you say, "this man is my friend." Yet to this friend there is some other friend, whom he in turn will trust as I trusted him, and that man will trust another again; and so, as the intemperance winds on, the word takes on offspring and multiplies. For just as the monad does not step outside its own boundary but remains ever one — which is why it is called the "monad" — while the dyad is the unbounded starting point of division, since it immediately displaces itself through doubling and turns toward multitude, so too a word that stays with the first person is truly a secret; but once it passes to another, it has taken on the standing of a rumor.
For "winged words," as the poet says: just as it is not easy, once a bird has been let go from the hands, to catch it again, so it is not possible to seize and recapture a word once it has been released from the mouth. It flies off, circling swiftly on its wings, scattering from one person to the next. When a ship has been seized by the wind, men can still lay hold of it, blunting its speed with ropes and anchors; but once a word has, so to speak, run out of harbor, there is no roadstead or anchorage for it — carried along with a great roar and echo, it dashes the speaker against the rocks and plunges him into some great and terrible danger. From a small torch a man might set the whole peak of Ida ablaze; and having spoken to a single man, he may find that the whole town comes to know it.
The Roman senate was once deliberating some secret matter privately, over many days. Since the affair carried a good deal of obscurity and suspicion, one senator's wife — otherwise sensible, but still a woman — pressed her own husband, begging earnestly to learn the secret. Oaths and curses about her keeping silent were exchanged, along with tears, as she pleaded, since she felt she was not trusted. The Roman, wanting to expose her foolishness, said: "You win, wife — but listen to something terrible and monstrous. It has been reported to us by the priests that a lark has been seen flying about wearing a golden helmet and carrying a spear. We are considering whether the omen is favorable or bad, and we are puzzling over it together with the seers. But keep silent about it." Having said this, he went off to the forum.
She, however, immediately seized upon the first of her maidservants who came in, struck her own breast, tore her hair, and cried, "Oh, my husband, and my country! What is to become of us?" — wanting and prompting the servant to ask, "But what has happened?" And when the girl duly asked, she told her the whole story, and added the common refrain of all gossip: "Tell this to no one — keep silent." No sooner had the little servant left her mistress than she flung the story to the first of her fellow slaves she found free, and that one told it to her lover when he came to see her. In this way the tale rolled into the forum so quickly that it outran the very man who had invented it. One of his acquaintances, meeting him, said, "Are you just now coming down to the forum from home?" "Just now," he said. "Then you've heard nothing?" "Has something new happened?" "Why, a lark has been seen flying about wearing a golden helmet and carrying a spear, and the magistrates are about to hold a session of the senate over it." And he, laughing, said, "Good heavens, how fast — my own story has beaten me to the forum!"
So, having met the magistrates, he relieved them of their alarm; but to punish his wife, when he came home he said, "You have ruined me, wife — for the secret has been discovered to have leaked out of my own house and become public knowledge, so that I must now flee my country because of your incontinence." When she turned to denial, saying, "But did you not hear this together with three hundred others?" he replied, "What three hundred? Under your pressure I invented it, to test you." So this man, quite safely and with great caution, tested his wife as one might pour not wine or oil but water into a cracked vessel.
Fulvius, the companion of Caesar Augustus, when the latter was already an old man, heard him lamenting the desolation of his household — that of his two grandsons both were dead, and that Postumius, the one who still remained, was in exile on some slander, so that he was being forced to bring in his wife's son as successor to the principate, even though he pitied Postumius and was considering recalling his grandson from beyond the border. Fulvius, hearing this, reported it to his wife, she to Livia, and Livia bitterly reproached Caesar for having decided this long ago and yet not sending for his grandson, but instead setting her at enmity and war with the man chosen to succeed to power.
So when Fulvius came to him at dawn, as was his custom, and said, "Greetings, Caesar," Caesar replied, "Farewell, Fulvius." And Fulvius, understanding the meaning, went straight home, and summoning his wife, said, "Caesar has learned that I did not keep his secret — and for this reason I am about to kill myself." And his wife said, "That is only just, since after living with me for so long you did not know me, nor guard against my incontinence. But let me go first." And taking the sword, she killed herself before her husband could.
Rightly, then, did Philippides the comic poet, when King Lysimachus was being friendly toward him and said, "Which of my possessions shall I share with you?" reply, "Whatever you like, O king — except your secrets."
To garrulousness is attached an evil no less than officious curiosity, for such people want to hear many things so that they may have many things to say; and above all they go about tracking down and hunting out secret and hidden matters, laying them up as a kind of sacred kindling for their idle chatter. Then, like children with a piece of ice, they can neither hold onto it nor let it go; or rather, like men who have taken snakes into their bosom, having caught hold of secret words they cannot contain them but are eaten through by them instead. For they say that vipers burst open when giving birth; so too secret words, breaking out of those who cannot keep them, ruin and destroy them.
Seleucus Callinicus, having lost his entire army and forces in the battle against the Galatians, himself tore off his diadem and fled on horseback with three or four companions, wandering by trackless paths for a long stretch; and now, failing from want, he came to a farmhouse, and finding its master there by chance, asked for bread and water. The man gave him these, and generously offered besides whatever else the farm had to hand, and being friendly to him, recognized the king's face. Overjoyed at the chance to be of service, he did not restrain himself, nor did he go along with the king's wish to remain unknown, but escorted him all the way to the road; and as he took his leave he said, "Farewell, King Seleucus." And Seleucus, stretching out his right hand as if to draw the man close and kiss him, signaled to one of his companions to cut off the man's head with a sword — and while he was still speaking, "his head was mingled with the dust." Had he kept silent then, restraining himself for a little while, I think that once the king had later prospered and become great, he would have received far greater thanks for his silence than he ever did for his hospitality. This man, at least, had some pretext for his indiscretion — hope and goodwill. But most chatterers destroy themselves without even having a reason.
For example, in a certain barbershop, when talk turned to the tyranny of Dionysius and how adamant and unbreakable it was, the barber laughed and said, "Is this what you have to say about Dionysius, when I hold a razor to his neck every few days?" Hearing of this, Dionysius had him crucified. The barbers' trade tends to be rather talkative by nature, for the most incorrigible chatterers flock to them and sit down, so that the barbers themselves become infected with the habit. So it was that King Archelaus responded gracefully when a talkative barber, having thrown the cloth around him, asked, "How shall I cut your hair, O king?" — "In silence," he said.
A barber, too, was the one who reported the great disaster of the Athenians in Sicily, having heard it first in Piraeus from a slave who had escaped from there. He then left his shop and ran at full speed into the city, for fear that someone else might win the glory of bringing the news into the city first, and he arrive only second. When, as was to be expected, an uproar arose, the people gathered in assembly and went hunting for the source of the rumor. So the barber was brought in and questioned, though he did not even know the name of the man who had told him, but traced the story's origin back to some anonymous, unknown person. The crowd's anger and shouting rose: "Torture him, rack the accursed man — this has been made up and put together; who else heard it? who believed it?" A wheel was brought, and the man was stretched upon it. In the midst of this, those who brought the news of the actual disaster arrived, having themselves escaped from the very event. Everyone then scattered to their own private griefs, leaving the wretched man bound to the wheel. Late, toward evening, when he was finally released, he asked the public slave whether they had also heard how the general Nicias had died. So irresistible and incorrigible an evil does habit make of garrulousness.
And yet, just as those who have drunk bitter and foul-smelling medicines resent even the cups they drank from, so those who report bad news are resented and hated by the very people who hear them. Hence Sophocles neatly posed the dilemma: those who act and those who speak of it cause pain alike, and yet there is no restraining or punishing a tongue once it is flowing.
At Sparta the temple of Athena of the Bronze House was found to have been robbed, and an empty flask was discovered lying inside. Many people gathered, and there was much perplexity, until one of those present said, "If you wish, I will tell you what occurs to me about the flask. I believe that the temple-robbers, in undertaking so great a risk, first drank hemlock and then brought wine along with them, so that if they managed to escape unnoticed, they could drink the unmixed wine to quench and dissolve the poison and get away safely, but if they were caught, they could, before facing torture, die easily and painlessly from the poison." When he said this, the matter, involving as it did such an intricate and elaborate calculation, seemed to be the work not of a man who merely suspected it but of one who actually knew it. So they surrounded him and cross-examined him from every side — "Who are you?" "Who knows you?" "How do you know these things?" — until finally, thoroughly cross-examined, he confessed to being one of the temple-robbers himself.
Those who killed Ibycus were not caught in any such way. They were sitting in the theater when cranes appeared overhead, and they whispered to one another with a laugh, "Look — the avengers of Ibycus are here!" Those sitting nearby overheard this — since Ibycus had already been missing and searched for a long time — and, seizing on the remark, reported it to the magistrates. Thus convicted, the men were led off, punished not by the cranes but compelled, as if by a Fury or an avenging spirit, by the disease of their own tongues to confess the murder.
For just as in the body a flow and a drawing-together of the surrounding parts occurs toward whatever part has suffered and is in pain, so the tongue of chatterers, always inflamed and throbbing, draws and gathers to itself whatever is secret and hidden. For this reason it must be fenced in, and reasoning must be set, like a barrier, always in the tongue's path, to check its flow and its slipperiness, lest we seem more senseless than geese — which, they say, when they cross the Taurus range from Cilicia, a range full of eagles, take a sizable stone into their mouths, like a bolt or a bridle upon their own voice, and in this way pass over unnoticed by night.
If, then, one were to ask who is the very worst and most utterly ruined of men, no one, passing over the traitor, would name anyone else. Euthycrates, for instance, "roofed his house with timber from Macedonia," as Demosthenes says; Philocrates, having taken a great deal of gold, "bought whores and fish"; and to Euphorbus and Philagrus, who betrayed Eretria, the king gave land. But the chatterer is an unpaid traitor, and a self-appointed one — betraying not horses or city walls, but divulging secret matters in lawsuits, in factional strife, in the affairs of the state, with no one grateful to him for it. Indeed, if he himself is merely listened to, he counts himself the one who owes the favor. So the saying aimed at the man who pours out his own affairs at random and without discretion, doing favors no one asked for — "You are not being kind; you have a disease; you enjoy giving" — fits the babbler too: "You are no friend in telling me this, nor well-disposed toward me; you have a disease — you enjoy talking and babbling."
These things should be taken not as an accusation but as a treatment for garrulousness. For we overcome our passions through judgment and through practice, and judgment comes first. No one becomes accustomed to fleeing from and shaking off the soul what he does not already find distasteful, and we come to find our passions distasteful once we perceive, through reasoning, the harm and disgrace that follow from them — just as we are now perceiving in the case of chatterers: that wanting to be loved, they are hated; wanting to please, they are a nuisance; imagining they are admired, they are laughed at; gaining nothing, they spend themselves; they wrong their friends, benefit their enemies, and destroy themselves.
So this is the first cure and remedy for the affliction — reckoning up the shameful and painful things that result from it. A second line of reasoning should also be used, the opposite one: always hearing, remembering, and keeping ready to hand the praises of discretion, and the dignity, the sanctity, and the almost mystic quality of silence, and the fact that those who are terse and economical of speech are more admired, more loved, and thought wiser than these unbridled, headlong talkers — men in whom a great deal of sense is compressed into few words. Indeed Plato praises such men, comparing them to skilled javelin-throwers, uttering words that are compact, dense, and tightly wound. And Lycurgus, pressing his citizens toward this very skill by way of silence from childhood on, gathered and compacted them, just as the Celtiberians temper iron by burying it in the earth and purging away the great mass of earthy dross — so too Spartan speech has no husk to it, but goes straight to...
...by the removal of what is superfluous, is hardened into steel; for their gift of pithy speech, and the quickness combined with agility in meeting objections, come to them out of their long silence. It is with such men above all that these examples ought to be set before the chatterers, to show what charm and force they possess — for instance, the message "The Lacedaemonians to Philip: Dionysius at Corinth," and again, when Philip wrote to them, "If I invade Laconia, I will drive you from your homes," they wrote back: "If."
When King Demetrius was indignant and shouted, "The Spartans sent only one envoy to me," the envoy, quite unshaken, replied, "One man to one man." The men of old who spoke briefly are also admired. At the temple of Pythian Apollo the Amphictyons inscribed not the Iliad or the Odyssey, nor the paeans of Pindar, but
"know thyself" and "nothing in excess" and "a pledge, and ruin is at hand," admiring the compactness and plainness of the wording, which in brief compass held a hammered fullness of sense. The god himself is fond of conciseness and speaks briefly in his oracles, and is called Loxias because he shuns talkativeness more than obscurity. And are not those who convey what is needed symbolically, without speech, praised and admired all the more? So Heraclitus, when his fellow citizens asked him to say something about concord, mounted the platform, took a cup of cold water, sprinkled barley meal into it, stirred it with pennyroyal, drank it down, and departed — having shown them that being content with whatever is at hand, and not craving expensive things, keeps cities in peace and concord.
And Scilurus, the king of the Scythians, who left behind eighty sons, when he was dying asked for a bundle of spear-shafts, and had them take it and try to break and snap it while it was bound together in a mass; and when they gave up, he himself, drawing them out one by one, easily broke them all — thereby showing that their unity and concord made them strong and hard to overcome, but their dissolution, weak and unstable. If one were to
keep examining and calling to mind such things continually, he might perhaps cease taking pleasure in idle chatter. As for me, that household slave puts me to shame as well, when I consider how important it is to attend to what is said and to keep control of one's judgment. Pupius Piso the orator, not wishing to be bothered, instructed his slaves to speak only in answer to questions and nothing more. Then, wishing to entertain the magistrate Clodius, he ordered him to be invited,
and prepared, as was fitting, a splendid banquet. When the hour arrived, the other guests were present, but Clodius was still awaited; and Piso repeatedly sent the slave whose job it was to summon him, to see whether he was coming. When it was evening and hope was given up, he said to the slave, "Well then — did you invite him?" "I did," said the slave. "Then why hasn't he come?" And the slave said, "Because he refused." "Then why didn't you tell me at once?" "Because you didn't ask me that."
Such is the Roman slave; but the Attic slave, while digging, will tell his master the reasons the deal fell through. So great is the power of habit in everything — and it is about this that we should now speak. For it is not possible to check the chatterer by seizing him as with a bridle; rather, one must master the disease by habituation. First, then,
accustom yourself, when your neighbors are asked questions, to remain silent yourself until everyone else has declined to answer; for the goal of deliberation is not the same as that of a race, as Sophocles says, nor is that of speech the same as that of an answer — in the race, victory belongs to the one who arrives first, but here, if another answers adequately, it is well to join in approving and confirming, thereby gaining a reputation as a kindly person;
but if not, then to teach what was not known and to fill in what was lacking is neither invidious nor untimely. But above all let us be on our guard not to anticipate the answer ourselves when someone else has been asked a question, rushing ahead of him. For it is perhaps not becoming in any other case either, when one person has been asked, to push him aside and take the request upon ourselves; for we shall seem at once to reproach the one asked, as unable to supply what is requested,
and the one asking, as not knowing from whom he could get it. But most of all such rashness and forwardness in answering carries an insult with it; for the man who anticipates the person questioned in giving the answer as good as says, "What need is there of him?" and "What does this fellow know? When I am present, no one need ask anyone else about these matters." And yet we often ask certain people questions not because we need the
information, but because we want to draw out some sound of voice and friendliness from them, and wish to draw them into conversation, as Socrates did with Theaetetus and Charmides. So it is like the man who, wanting to be loved by another, runs ahead and kisses him first, or like turning toward oneself the gaze that another is directing elsewhere — this business of anticipating answers and diverting the ears, dragging and turning the mind's attention toward oneself. Whereas,
even if the person questioned declines to answer, it is proper for the one who anticipated him to hold back and, adapting himself to the wish of the questioner, to respond as though to a call not addressed to him, with modesty and good order. For those who are questioned, if they go wrong in answering, meet with fair indulgence; but the one who volunteers and takes over the question uninvited is unpleasant even when he succeeds, and when he fails altogether
becomes an object of ridicule and mockery. A second exercise, then, concerns one's own answers, to which the chatterer must pay no less attention — first, so that he does not, without noticing, respond in earnest to questions posed only for the sake of mockery and insult. For some people, having no real need of conversation but only wanting pastime and amusement, compose certain questions and put them to such men, stirring up their
nonsense — against which one must be on guard, and not leap eagerly at speech as though grateful for the chance, but consider both the character and the purpose of the questioner. When it is apparent that he genuinely wishes to learn, one should habituate oneself to pause and make some interval between the question and the answer, during which the questioner, if he wishes to add anything, may do so, while the respondent may
himself reflect on what he is going to answer, and not run ahead of the question or bury it, often, in his eagerness, giving one answer instead of another to those still inquiring. For the Pythia is accustomed to deliver certain oracles on the spot even before the question is asked, since the god she serves both understands the mute and hears the one who does not speak. But the man who wishes to answer fittingly must wait for the intention
and carefully learn the purpose of the questioner, lest what happens in the proverb happen to him: "they asked for shovels, and the others refused them mattocks." Besides, this greedy eagerness, this keen appetite for talk, must be curbed, so that it does not seem — like a stream long pent up against the tongue — to be gladly discharged at the mere occasion of a question. Indeed Socrates used to restrain his thirst in just this way, not allowing himself
to drink after exercise until he had drawn the first bucket and poured it out, so as to accustom the irrational part of himself to wait for the proper time for drinking. Now there are three kinds of answers to questions: the necessary, the courteous, and the superfluous. For instance, if someone asks whether Socrates is within, the man who answers reluctantly and as if unwillingly says simply, "Not within"; and if
he wishes to be laconic, he will even drop the word "within" and utter only the negative — as the Spartans did when Philip wrote asking whether they would receive him into their city: they wrote back on a small piece of paper simply "No" and sent it off. The more courteous man answers, "He is not within, but at the tables"; and if he wishes to add a bit more, "waiting there for some guests." But the superfluous man, the chatterer, if he happens to
have been reading Antimachus of Colophon, will say, "He is not within, but at the tables, awaiting some Ionian guests, on whose behalf Alcibiades has written to him from near Miletus, where he is staying with Tissaphernes, the Great King's satrap, who formerly used to aid the Lacedaemonians but is now, because of Alcibiades, coming over to the Athenians; for Alcibiades, eager to return to his homeland, is winning Tissaphernes over" — and in general
he will stretch out and pour over the man the whole eighth book of Thucydides, and drown him in it, until Miletus is embroiled in war and Alcibiades exiled a second time before he finishes. It is above all in such cases that one must rein in one's talkativeness, keeping the answer, as it were, treading in the footprints of the question, and circumscribing it, as with a compass point and a fixed radius, by the need of the questioner. When Carneades, before he had yet won great fame, was disputing in the gymnasium,
the gymnasiarch sent word ordering him to lower the volume of his voice (for he had a most powerful voice); and when he said, "Give me a measure for my voice," the man cleverly retorted, "I give you the person you are conversing with as your measure." Let the wish of the questioner, then, be the measure for the one who answers. And just as Socrates used to bid people beware of those foods which persuade one to eat without hunger, and those drinks which persuade one to drink
without thirst, so the chatterer must fear and resist those subjects of talk in which he takes the greatest delight and indulges to excess, standing firm against the flow toward them. For instance, military men are given to telling stories of their wars — and the poet portrays Nestor as just such a man, often narrating his own feats of valor and exploits. In much the same way it happens to those who have had success in lawsuits, or who have unexpectedly distinguished themselves before rulers and kings —
a kind of disease befalls them and clings to them, of remembering and repeatedly recounting how they entered, were brought forward, contended, spoke, refuted certain opponents or accusers, and were praised. For joy is far more talkative than that proverbial comic sleeplessness, constantly fanning itself back to life and making itself fresh again through the telling. Hence men are prone to slip into such talk on every pretext; for it is not only true that
one puts one's hand where it hurts, but pleasure too draws the voice toward itself and turns the tongue, since it always wants to fix itself in memory. So it is that lovers spend most of their time in conversations that yield some memory of their beloveds; indeed, even if not to people, they talk about them to inanimate objects — "O dearest bed,"
"and Bacchis considered you a god" — "Happy lamp, you seem the greatest of gods to her." The chatterer, then, is quite literally the white chalk-line by which such talk is measured; nevertheless, whoever is more attached than others to particular subjects ought to guard against them, restraining and checking himself, since it is precisely such subjects that can carry one furthest away and draw things out at greatest length through the pleasure they give. The very same
thing happens to people regarding those subjects in which, through experience or some acquired skill, they believe themselves to surpass others. For being self-loving and fond of reputation, such a person devotes the greater part of his day to that in which he happens to be most accomplished — the well-read man to history, the grammarian to points of grammar, and the man who has traveled and wandered widely, to stories of foreign lands.
So these too must be guarded against; for talkativeness, lured on by them, advances like an animal toward its accustomed pastures. Cyrus is admired for this reason, that he used to compete with his companions not in the things at which he excelled, but in those at which he was less skilled than they, challenging them to these, so that he would neither cause pain by outdoing them nor fail to profit by learning. The chatterer does the opposite: if
some topic arises from which he might learn something and inquire into matters he does not know, he pushes it aside and rejects it, unable even to pay so small a price as silence; but he goes round and round, forcing into the conversation stale and well-trodden recitations. So it was that one of our acquaintances, who happened to have read two or three of Ephorus's books, wore out everyone and turned every
symposium upside down, endlessly narrating the battle of Leuctra and all that followed — from which he got his nickname, "Epaminondas." Yet this, at least, is the least of the evils, and one ought to divert one's talkativeness toward such subjects; for garrulity will be less unpleasant when it abounds in someone devoted to learning. Such people should also be trained to write something and to converse privately with themselves. For
the Stoic Antipater, it seems, being unable or unwilling to engage directly with Carneades, who was sweeping toward the Stoa with a great torrent of argument, wrote and filled his books with rebuttals against him, and so was nicknamed "Reed-Shouter." Perhaps, then, the chatterer too might be made lighter company for his associates each day by shadow-boxing in writing and warding off the shouting of the crowd — just as
dogs, venting their fury on stones and sticks, become less savage toward men. It will also suit them very well always to associate with their betters and elders; for out of shame before their reputation, they will grow accustomed to silence. And these habits must always be mixed and interwoven with that attentiveness and that inward reckoning, whenever we are about to
speak and the words are rushing to the mouth: "What is this speech that stands over me and forces its way out? To what end does the tongue quiver? What good comes to one who speaks it, or what hardship to one who keeps silent?" For it is not as though one must set down speech as a burden weighing one down, since it remains just as available even after it has been spoken; rather, people speak either because they themselves need something, or because
they are helping their hearers, or because they are providing some pleasure for one another, seasoning, as it were with salt, their pastime and whatever activity they happen to be engaged in with their words. But if what is said is neither useful to the speaker nor necessary for the hearers, and neither pleasure nor charm attends it, why is it said? For emptiness and futility are no less present in words than in
deeds. Above all, and beyond all this, one must keep ready at hand and remember the saying of Simonides, that he often regretted having spoken, but never regretted having kept silent; and one must remember that training overcomes and is stronger than everything — since even hiccups and coughs, when men forcibly restrain them by paying attention, they manage to suppress, though with effort and pain. And silence not only causes no thirst, as Hippocrates says,
but also causes no pain and no distress.