[608] Jeremy Taylor has largely borrowed from this Treatise in his "Holy Living," chap. ii. § v. Of Modesty.
[610] Lines from some comic poet, no doubt.
[612] The mother of Oedipus, better known as "Jocasta."
[613] Homer, "Odyssey," xi. 278. Epicaste hung herself.
[614] "[Greek: oikiskô] corrigit Valekenarius ad Herodot. p. 557."--_Wyttenbach._
[616] Sophocles, Fragm. 713. The lines are quoted more fully by our author in his "Lives," p. 911. There are there four preceding lines that compare human life to the moon's changes.
[619] "Intelligo Charondam."--_Xylander._
[620] Plutarch wants to show that curiosity and adultery are really the same vice in principle. Hence his imagery here. Jeremy Taylor has very beautifully dealt with this passage, "Holy Living," chap. ii. § v. I cannot pretend to his felicity of language. Thus Plutarch makes adultery mere curiosity, and curiosity a sort of adultery in regard to secrets. A profoundly ethical and moral view. Compare § ix.
[621] Compare Lucian's [Greek: echeglôttia], after [Greek: echecheiria] (_armistice_), _Lexiph_. 9.
[622] See the story in Homer, "Iliad," vi. 155 sq.
[624] Literally, some woman _shut up_, or _enclosed_.
[625] See also our author's "On those who are punished by the Deity late," § xi.
[626] See Euripides, Fragm., 389. Also Plutarch's "Theseus," cap. xv.
[627] Plutarch rather reminds one, in his evident contempt for _Epitaphs_, of the cynic who asked, "Where are all the bad people buried?" Where indeed?
[629] _euphronê_, a stock phrase for night, is here defined.
[630] "Historia exstat initio libri quinti Cyropædiæ."--_Reiske._
[631] Literally, "slippery and prone to." For the metaphor of "slippery" compare Horace, "Odes," i. 19-8, "Et vultus nimium lubricus adspici."
[632] This and the line above are in Sophocles, "Oedipus Tyrannus," 1169, 1170.
[635] The paronomasia is as follows. The word for impious people is supposed to mean _listeners to mills grinding_.
§ I. Some of the things that grow on the earth are in their nature wild and barren and injurious to the growth of seeds and plants, yet those who till the ground consider them indications not of a bad soil but of a rich and fat one;[637] so also there are passions of the soul that are not good, yet are as it were offshoots of a good disposition, and one likely to improve with good advice. Among these I class shyness, no bad sign in itself, though it affords occasion to vice. For the modest oftentimes plunge into the same excesses as the shameless, but then they are pained and grieved at them, and not pleased like the others. For the shameless person is quite apathetic at what is disgraceful, while the modest person is easily affected even at the very appearance of it. Shyness is in fact an excess of modesty. And thus it is called shamefacedness, because the face exhibits the changes of the mind. For as dejection is defined to be the grief that makes people look on the ground, so shamefacedness is that shyness that cannot look people in the face. And so the orator said the shameless person had not pupils[638] in his eyes but harlots. The bashful person on the other hand shows his delicacy and effeminacy of soul in his countenance, and palliates his weakness, which exposes him to defeat at the hands of the impudent, by 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.