Why so sharp-eyed, my most malignant Sir,
For others’ faults, yet overlook your own?
Pray turn your pryingness the other way about, and make it face inwards. If you are so fond of the business of inquiring into defects, you will find plenty to occupy you at home.
|*| Abundant as leaves on the oak or the water that rolls from Alizon will you find the errors in your conduct, the disorders in your heart and mind, and the lapses in your duty.
|E| According to Xenophon, a good householder has a special place for the utensils of sacrifice, and a special place for those of the table; agricultural implements are stored in one room, weapons of war in another. In your own case you have one stock of faults arising from envy, another from jealousy, another from cowardice, another from meanness. These are the faults for you to inspect and examine. Block up the windows |F| and alleys of your inquisitiveness on the side towards your neighbours, and open others which look into your own house—the male quarters, the female quarters, the living-rooms of the servants. Our busy curiosity will find occupation of a profitable and salutary, instead of a useless and malicious, kind, if each one will say to himself:
How have I err’d? What deed have I done? What duty neglected?
As it is, we are all of us like the Lamia in the fable, of whom |516| we are told that at home she is asleep and blind, with her eyes stowed away in a jar, but that when she comes abroad she puts them in and can see. Outside, and in dealing with others, we furnish our malice with an eye in the shape of our meddlesomeness, but we are continually being tripped up by our own misdeeds and vices, of which we are unaware, because we provide ourselves with no light or vision to perceive them. It follows that the busybody is a better friend to his enemies than to himself. While censoriously reproving their shortcomings and showing them what they ought to avoid or amend, he is so taken up with faults outside that he overlooks most of those at home.
|B| Odysseus refused even to talk to his mother, until he had got his answer from the seer concerning the business which had brought him to Hades. When he had received the information, he turned to her, and also began to put questions to the other women, asking who Tyro was, and the beautiful Chloris, and why Epicaste met her death by
Tying a sheer-hung noose from the height of the lofty roof-tree.
Not so we. While treating our own concerns with the greatest indifference, ignorance, and neglect, we begin discussing other people’s pedigrees—how our neighbour’s grandfather was a Syrian and his grandmother a Thracian. ‘So-and-So owes more than seven hundred pounds, and cannot pay the interest.’ We also make it our business to inquire about such matters as where So-and-So got his wife from, and what private talk was that between A and B in the corner. Socrates, on the other |C| hand, went about inquiring, ‘By what arguments did Pythagoras carry conviction?’ So Aristippus, when he met Ischomachus at Olympia, proceeded to ask by what kind of conversation Socrates affected the Athenians as he did. When he had gleaned a few seeds or samples of his talk, he was so moved that he suffered a physical collapse, and became quite pale and thin. In the end he set sail for Athens, and slaked his thirst with draughts from the fountain-head, studying the man, his discourses and his philosophy, of which the aim was to recognize one’s own vices and get rid of them.