So much for the slave at Rome, whereas at Athens he will tell his master while digging
so great in all things is the force of habituation. To habituation let us now turn.
[Sidenote: F] We cannot check the babbler by taking, as it were, a grip on the reins. The malady can only be overcome by habit.
In the first place, therefore, when questions are asked of your neighbours, train yourself to keep silent until they have all failed to answer.
_Counsel hath other ends than running hath_,
says Sophocles, and so has speech or answer. In running, the victor is the man who comes in first, but here the case is different. If another makes a satisfactory reply, the proper course is to lend approval and a word of support, and so win credit for good [Sidenote: 512] feeling. If he fails, there is nothing invidious or inopportune in giving the information which he does not possess, or in supplementing his deficiencies. But above all things let us be on our guard, when a question is put to another person, that we do not anticipate him and take the answer out of his mouth. In any case in which a request is made of another it is, of course, improper for us to push him aside and offer our own services. By doing so we shall appear to be casting a slur on both parties; as if the one were incapable of performing what is asked, and as if the other did not know the right quarter from which to get what he asks for. But it is especially in connexion with answers to questions that such impudent forwardness is an outrage on [Sidenote: B] manners. To give the answer before the person questioned has time, implies the remark, ‘What do you want _him_ for?‘, or ‘What does _he_ know?‘, or, ‘When _I_ am present, nobody else should be asked that question.’
Yet we often put a question to a person, not because we need the information, but by way of eliciting from him a few words of a friendly nature, or from a wish to lead him on to converse, as Socrates did with Theaetetus and Charmides. To take the answer out of another’s mouth, to divert attention to yourself and wrest it from another, is as bad as if, when a person desired to be kissed by some one else, you ran forward and kissed him yourself, or as if, when he was looking at another, you twisted him round in your own direction. The right and proper [Sidenote: C] course, even if the person who is asked for information cannot give it, is to wait, to take your cue to answer from the wish of the questioner—his invitation not having been addressed to you—and then to meet the situation in a modest and mannerly way. If a person of whom a question is asked makes a mistake in answering it, he meets with a due measure of indulgence; but one who pushes himself forward and insists on answering first, receives no welcome if he is right, while, if he is wrong, he becomes an object of positive exultation and derision.