you not in the market in the forenoon?" and sometimes
receiving for answer, "What then? Do you think things in the town change
every three hours?" Notwithstanding if anyone brings any news, he'll get
off his horse, and embrace him, and kiss him, and stand to listen. If
however the person who meets him says he has no news, he will say
somewhat peevishly, "No news, Sir? Have you not been in the market? Did
you not pass by the officers' quarters? Did you exchange no words with
those that have just arrived from Italy?" To stop such people the
Locrian authorities had an excellent rule; they fined everyone coming
from abroad who asked what the news was. For as cooks pray for plenty of
meat, and fishmongers for shoals of fish, so curious people pray for
shoals of trouble, and plenty of business, and innovations and changes,
that they may have something to hunt after and tittle-tattle about. Well
also was it in _Charondas_, the legislator of the people of Thurii,[619]
to forbid any of the citizens but adulterers and curious persons to be
ridiculed on the stage. Adultery itself indeed seems to be only the
fruit of curiosity about another man's pleasures, and an inquiring and
prying into things kept close and hidden from the world; while curiosity
is a tampering with and seduction of and revealing the nakedness of
secrets.[620]

Sec. IX. As it is likely that much learning will produce wordiness, and so
Pythagoras enjoined five years' silence on his scholars, calling it a
truce from words,[621] so defamation of character is sure to go with
curiosity. For what people are glad to hear they are glad to talk about,
and what they eagerly pick up from others they joyfully retail to
others. And so, amongst the other mischiefs of curiosity, the disease
runs counter to their desires; for all people fight shy of them, and
conceal their affairs from them, and neither care to do or say anything
in their presence, but defer consultations, and put off investigations,
till such people are out of the way; and if, when some secret is just
about to be uttered, or some important business is just about to be
arranged, some curious man happen to pop in, they are mum at once and
reserved, as one puts away fish if the cat is about; and so frequently
things seen and talked about by all the rest of the world are unknown
only to them. For the same reason the curious person never gets the
confidence of anybody. For we would rather entrust our letters and
p