Divus Julius," 75: "Sed et statuas
L. Sullae atque Pompeii a plebe disjectas reposuit."

[531] Compare our author, "Quaestiones Convivalium,"
viii. p. 729 E.

[532] No doubt in the interest of the defendant. See our
author, "Cato Minor," p. 769 B.

[533] A Greek proverb, see Erasmus, "Adagia," p. 921.

[534] So Cicero, "Nat. Deor." ii. 56: "In aedibus
architecti avertunt ab oculis naribusque dominorum ea
quae profluentia necessario taetri essent aliquid
habitura."

[535] "Works and Days," 23-26. Our "Two of a trade
seldom agree."

[536] Compare "How One may be aware of one's Progress in
Virtue," Sec. xiv.

[537] For as the English proverb says, "Hatred is blind
as well as love."

[538] "Laws," v. p. 728 A.

[539] Quoted more fully "How One may be aware of one's
Progress in Virtue," Sec. vi.

[540] "Laws," v. p. 731 E. See also above, Sec. vii.

ON TALKATIVENESS.[541]

Sec. I. Philosophy finds talkativeness a disease very difficult and hard to
cure. For its remedy, conversation, requires hearers: but talkative
people hear nobody, for they are ever prating. And the first evil this
inability to keep silence produces is an inability to listen. It is a
self-chosen deafness of people who, I take it, blame nature for giving
us one tongue and two ears. If then the following advice of Euripides to
a foolish hearer was good,

"I cannot fill one that can nought retain,
Pumping up wise words for an unwise man;"

one might more justly say to a talkative man, or rather about a
talkative man,

"I cannot fill one that will nothing take,
Pumping up wise words for an unwise man;"

or rather deluging with words one that talks to those who don't listen,
and listens not to those who talk. Even if he does listen for a short
time, talkativeness hurries off what is said like the retiring sea, and
anon brings it up again multiplied with the approaching tide. The
portico at Olympia that returns many echoes to one utterance is called
seven-voiced,[542] and if the slightest utterance catches the ear of
talkativeness, it at once echoes it all round,

"Moving the mind's chords all unmoved before."[543]

For their ears can certainly have no passages leading to the brain but
only to the tongue. And so while other people retain what they hear,
talkative people lose it altogether, and, being empty-headed, they
resemble empty ves