about himself;
and though his wife tried to prevent him, he none the less compelled the
old man that had been an eye-witness of the deed to tell him all the
circumstances of it, and though he long suspected how the story would
end, yet when the old man cried out,

"Alas! the dreadful tale I must then tell,"

so inflamed was he with curiosity and trembling with impatience, that he
replied,

"I too must hear, for hear it now I will."[632]

So bitter-sweet and uncontrollable is the itch of curiosity, like a
sore, shedding its blood when lanced. But he that is free from this
disease, and calm by nature, being ignorant of many unpleasant things,
may say,

"Holy oblivion of all human ills,
What wisdom dost thou bring!"[633]

Sec. XV. We ought therefore also to accustom ourselves, when we receive a
letter, not to be in a tremendous hurry about breaking the seal, as most
people are, even tearing it open with their teeth if their hands are
slow; nor to rise from our seat and run up to meet him, if a messenger
comes; and if a friend says, "I have some news to tell you," we ought to
say, "I had rather you had something useful or advantageous to tell me."
When I was on one occasion lecturing at Rome, one of my audience was the
well-known Rusticus, whom the Emperor Domitian afterwards had put to
death through envy of his glory, and a soldier came in in the middle and
brought him a letter from the Emperor, and silence ensuing, and I
stopping that he might have time to read his letter, he would not, and
did not open it till I had finished my lecture, and the audience had
dispersed; so that everybody marvelled at his self-control. But whenever
anyone who has power feeds his curiosity till it is strong and vehement,
he can no longer easily control it, when it hurries him on to illicit
acts, from force of habit; and such people open their friends' letters,
thrust themselves in at private meetings, become spectators of rites
they ought not to witness, enter holy grounds they ought not to, and pry
into the lives and conversations of kings.

Sec. XVI. Indeed tyrants themselves, who must know all things, are made
unpopular by no class more than by their spies[634] and talebearers.
Darius in his youth, when he mistrusted his own powers, and suspected
and feared everybody, was the first who employed spies; and the
Dionysiuses introduced them at Syracuse: but in a revolution they were
the first that the Syracusans took and tor