est!" This fellow tested his wife warily
and cunningly, as one pours water, and not wine or oil, into a leaky
vessel. And Fabius,[573] the friend of Augustus, hearing the Emperor in
his old age mourning over the extinction of his family, how two of his
daughter Julia's sons were dead, and how Posthumus Agrippa, the only
remaining one, was in exile through false accusation,[574] and how he
was compelled to put his wife's son[575] into the succession to the
Empire, though he pitied Agrippa and had half a mind to recall him from
banishment, repeated the Emperor's words to his wife, and she to
Livia.[576] And Livia bitterly upbraided Augustus, if he meant recalling
his grandson, for not having done so long ago, instead of bringing her
into hatred and hostility with the heir to the Empire. When Fabius came
in the morning as usual into the Emperor's presence, and said, "Hail,
Caesar!" the Emperor replied, "Farewell,[577] Fabius." And he
understanding the meaning of this straightway went home, and sent for
his wife, and said, "The Emperor knows that I have not kept his secret,
so I shall kill myself." And his wife replied, "You have deserved your
fate, since having been married to me so long you did not remember and
guard against my incontinence of speech, but suffer me to kill myself
first." So saying she took his sword, and slew herself first.

Sec. XII. That was a good answer therefore that the comic poet Philippides
made to king Lysimachus, who greeted him kindly, and said to him,[578]
"What shall I give you of all my possessions?" "Whatever you like, O
king, except your secrets." And talkativeness has another plague
attached to it, even curiosity: for praters wish to hear much that they
may have much to say, and most of all do they gad about to investigate
and pry into secrets and hidden things, providing as it were an
antiquated stock of rubbish[579] for their twaddle, in fine like
children who cannot[580] hold ice in their hands, and yet are unwilling
to let it go,[581] or rather taking secrets to their bosoms and
embracing them as if they were so many serpents, that they cannot
control, but are sure to be gnawed to death by. They say that garfish
and vipers burst in giving life to their young, so secrets by coming out
ruin and destroy those who cannot keep them. Seleucus Callinicus having
lost his army and all his forces in a battle against the Galati, threw
off his diadem, and fled on a swift horse with an escort of th