Plutarch, De curiositate
W. C. Helmbold, Ed.

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 [p. 495] up and asked, ‘Is there any news?’ they fined him. Just as cooks¹ 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,² 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.