the vessels they use in sacrificing,
and another for those they use at meals, one place for their farm
instruments, and another for their weapons of war, so your faults arise
from different causes, some from envy, some from jealousy, some from
cowardice, some from meanness. Review these, consider these; bar up the
curiosity that pries into your neighbours' windows and passages, and
open it on the men's apartments, and women's apartments, and servant's
attics, in your own house. There this inquisitiveness and curiosity will
find full vent, in inquiries that will not be useless or malicious, but
advantageous and serviceable, each one saying to himself,

"What have I done amiss? What have I done?
What that I ought to have done left undone?"

Sec. II. And now, as they say of Lamia that she is blind when she sleeps at
home, for she puts her eyes on her dressing-table, but when she goes out
she puts her eyes on again, and has good sight, so each of us turns,
like an eye, our malicious curiosity out of doors and on others, while
we are frequently blind and ignorant about our own faults and vices, not
applying to them our eyes and light. So that the curious man is more use
to his enemies than to himself, for he finds fault with and exposes
their shortcomings, and shows them what they ought to avoid and correct,
while he neglects most of his affairs at home, owing to his excitement
about things abroad. Odysseus indeed would not converse with his mother
till he had learnt from the seer Tiresias what he went to Hades to
learn; and after receiving that information, then he turned to her, and
asked questions about the other women, who Tyro was, and who the fair
Chloris, and why Epicaste[612] had died, "having fastened a noose with a
long drop to the lofty beam."[613] But we, while very remiss and
ignorant and careless about ourselves, know all about the pedigrees of
other people, that our neighbour's grandfather was a Syrian, and his
grandmother a Thracian woman, and that such a one owes three talents,
and has not paid the interest. We even inquire into such trifling
matters as where somebody's wife has been, and what those two are
talking in the corner about. But Socrates used to busy himself in
examining the secret of Pythagoras' persuasive oratory, and Aristippus,
meeting Ischomachus at the Olympian games, asked him how Socrates
conversed so as to have so much influence over the young men, and having
received from him a fe