the name of modesty. Cato used to say he was better pleased with those
lads that blushed than with those that turned pale, rightly teaching us
to fear censure more than labour,[639] and suspicion than danger.
However we must avoid too much timidity and fear of censure, since many
have played the coward, and abandoned noble ventures, more from fear of
a bad name than of the dangers to be undergone, not being able to bear a
bad reputation.

Sec. II. As we must not disregard their weakness, so neither again must we
praise that rigid and stubborn insensibility, "that recklessness and
frantic energy to rush anywhere, that seemed like a dog's courage in
Anaxarchus."[640] But we must contrive a harmonious blending of the two,
that shall remove the shamelessness of pertinacity, and the weakness of
excessive modesty; seeing its cure is difficult, and the correction of
such excesses not without danger. For as the husbandman, in rooting up
some wild and useless weed, at once plunges his spade vigorously into
the ground, and digs it up by the root, or burns it with fire, but if he
has to do with a vine that needs pruning, or some apple-tree, or olive,
he puts his hand to it very carefully, being afraid of injuring any
sound part; so the philosopher, eradicating from the soul of the young
man that ignoble and untractable weed, envy, or unseasonable avarice, or
amputating the excessive love of pleasure, may bandage and draw blood,
make deep incision, and leave scars: but if he has to apply reason as a
corrective to a tender and delicate part of the soul, such as shyness
and bashfulness, he is careful that he may not inadvertently root up
modesty as well. For nurses who are often rubbing the dirt off their
infants sometimes tear their flesh and put them to torture. We ought not
therefore, by rubbing off the shyness of youths too much, to make them
too careless and contemptuous; but as those that pull down houses close
to temples prop up the adjacent parts, so in trying to get rid of
shyness we must not eradicate with it the virtues akin to it, as modesty
and meekness and mildness, by which it insinuates itself and becomes
part of a man's character, flattering the bashful man that he has a
nature courteous and civil and affable, and not hard as flint or
self-willed. And so the Stoics from the outset verbally distinguished
shame and shyness from modesty, that they might not by identity of name
give the vice opportunity to inflict harm.