apers and seals to slaves and strangers than to curious friends and
intimates. The famous Bellerophon,[622] though he carried letters
against his life, opened them not, but abstained from reading the letter
to the king, as he had refused to sell his honour to Proetus' wife, so
great was his continence.[623] For curiosity and adultery both come from
incontinence, and to the latter is added monstrous folly and insanity.
For to pass by so many common and public women, and to intrude oneself
on some married woman,[624] who is sure to be more costly, and possibly
less pretty to boot, is the acme of madness. Yet such is the conduct of
curious people. They neglect many gay sights, fail to hear much that
would be well worth hearing, lose much fine sport and pastime, to break
open private letters, to put their ears to their neighbour's walls, and
to whisper to their slaves and women-servants, practices always low, and
frequently dangerous.

Sec. X. It will be exceedingly useful, therefore, to deter the curious from
these propensities, for them to remember their past experience.
Simonides used to say that he occasionally opened two chests for rewards
and thanks that he had by him, and found the one full for rewards, but
the one for thanks always empty.[625] So if anyone were to open
occasionally the stores that curiosity had amassed, and observe what a
cargo there was of useless and idle and unlovely things, perhaps the
sight of all this poor stuff would inspire him with disgust. Suppose
someone, in studying the writings of the ancients, were to pick out only
their worst passages, and compile them into a volume, as Homer's
imperfect lines, and the solecisms of the tragedians, and Archilochus'
indecent and bitter railings against women, by which he so exposed
himself, would he not be worthy of the curse of the tragedian,

"Perish, compiler of thy neighbours' ills?"

And independently of such a curse, the piling up of other people's
misdoings is indecent and useless, and like the town which Philip
founded and filled with the vilest and most dissolute wretches, and
called _Rogue Town_. Curious persons, indeed, making a collection of the
faults and errors and solecisms, not of lines or poems but of people's
lives, render their memory a most inelegant and unlovely register of
dark deeds. Just as there are in Rome some people who care nothing for
pictures and statues, or even handsome boys or women exposed for sale,
but haunt the m