For this reason the most useful means possible
for turning the busybody from his vice is for him to
[p. 499]
remember what he has previously learned.
1 For, as
Simonides
2 used to say that when he opened his
boxes after some time, he always found the fee-box
full, but the thanks-box empty, so if one opens from
time to time the deposit-box of inquisitiveness and
examines it, full as it is of many useless, futile, and
unlovely things, perhaps this procedure would give
sufficient offence, so completely disagreeable and silly
would it appear. Suppose a man should run over the
works of the ancients and pick out the worst passages
in them and keep a book compiled from such things as
‘headless lines’ in Homer
3 and solecisms in the
tragedians and the unbecoming and licentious language applied to women by which Archilochus
4 makes
a sorry spectacle of himself, would he not deserve that
curse in the tragedy,
Be damned, compiler of men's miseries?5
And even without this curse, such a man's treasurehouse of other people's faults is unbecoming and useless. It is like the city populated by the vilest and
most intractable of men which Philip founded and
called Roguesborough.
6
Busybodies, however, by gleaning and gathering
the blunders and errors and solecisms, not of lines or
poems, but of lives, carry about with them a most
[p. 501]
inelegant and unlovely record-box of evils, their
own memory. Therefore just as at Rome there are
some who take no account of paintings or statues
or even, by Heaven, of the beauty of the boys
and women for sale, but haunt the monster-market,
examining those who have no calves, or are weasel-armed,
7 or have three eyes, or ostrich-heads, and
searching to learn whether there has been born
some
Commingled shape and misformed prodigy,8
yet if one continually conduct them to such sights,
they will soon experience satiety and nausea ; so let
those who are curious about life's failures, the blots
on the scutcheon, the delinquencies and errors in
other people's homes, remind themselves that their
former discoveries have brought them no favour or
profit.
