From but a little torch-light Ida’s heights
May all be set ablaze; so, tell but one,
And all the town will know it.
The Roman Senate had been engaged for a number of days |C| in debating a secret matter of policy. As it gave rise to much mystification and conjecture, a woman—otherwise irreproachable, but still a woman—kept pestering her husband and imploring him to tell her the secret. On her oath, she would be silent: if not, might a curse fall upon her. She wept and wailed because she was ‘not trusted’. From a desire to bring home her folly by a proof, the Roman said, ‘Have your way, wife. But the news is terribly ominous. We have been informed by the priests that a lark has been seen flying about with a gold helmet and a spear. We are therefore discussing the portent, and are inquiring, with the help of the augurs, whether it is good or bad. But mind you tell nobody.’ With these words he went off to the Forum. The wife at once seized hold of |D| the first maid-servant to enter the room, and, beating her own breast and tearing her hair, exclaimed, ‘O my poor husband and country! What will become of us?‘, her wish being to give the maid the opportunity of asking ‘Why, what has happened?’ At any rate she took the question as put, and told the tale, adding the invariable refrain of every babbler, ‘Tell no one about it, but hold your tongue.’ The girl no sooner left her than she looked for the fellow-servant who had least to do, and |E| imparted it to her. She in turn told it to her lover, who was paying her a visit. The story went rolling on so rapidly that it reached the Forum before the man who had invented it, and he was met by an acquaintance, who said, ‘Have you just come down from home?’ ‘This minute,’ he replied. ‘Then you haven’t heard anything?’ ‘No. Why? Is there any news?’ ‘A lark has been seen flying about with a gold helmet and a spear, and the magistrates are about to hold a Senate meeting on the matter.’ At this the man exclaimed with a laugh, ‘O wife, wife! What a speed! To think the story has got to the Forum ahead of me!’ First he interviewed the magistrates and relieved their anxiety; then, on going home, |F| he proceeded to punish his wife by saying, ‘Wife, you have been the ruin of me. The secret is public property, and the fault has been traced to my house. And so I am to be exiled, all because of your loose tongue.’ Upon her attempting to deny it by arguing ‘But there were three hundred who heard it as well as you’, he retorted ‘Pooh for your three hundred! I invented it to try you, all because of your persistence’.
In this case the man took safe precautions in putting his wife |508| to the test, by pouring into the leaky vessel not wine or oil, but water. It was otherwise with Fulvius, the close friend of Augustus. The emperor in his old age was lamenting to him over his desolate home and grieving because, two of his daughter’s children being dead, and Postumius, the only one left, being in exile on some calumnious charge, he was being driven to adopt his wife’s son as his successor, although he felt compassion |B| for his grandson and was considering the question of recalling him from abroad. Fulvius divulged what he had heard to his wife, and she to Livia; whereupon Livia took Caesar bitterly to task, asking why, if he had been so long of this mind, he did not send for his grandson, instead of putting her in a position of enmity and strife with the successor to the throne. Accordingly, when Fulvius came to him—as he regularly did—in the morning and said ‘Good morning, Caesar’, he replied ‘Good-bye, Fulvius’. Fulvius took the hint, went away home at once, sent for his wife, and said, ‘Caesar knows that I have betrayed his secret, and I propose therefore to put myself to death.’ ‘Rightly too,’ answered his wife, ‘seeing that, after living with |C| me so long, you failed to discover the looseness of my tongue and to guard against it. But after me, if you please’—and seizing the sword she despatched herself first.
The comic poet Philippides therefore acted rightly when, in answer to the friendly civilities of King Lysimachus and his question ‘What is there of mine that I can share with you?‘, he replied ‘What you choose, Sire, except your secrets.’
On the other hand garrulity goes with the equally objectionable vice of inquisitiveness. The babbler must find much to hear, so that he may have much to tell. Especially must he go round tracking and hunting out hidden secrets, so as to provide himself with a miscellaneous stock-in-trade for his foolish |D| talk. Then, like a child with a piece of ice, he neither likes to keep hold nor wants to let go. Or rather, the secrets are reptiles, which he grasps and puts in his bosom, but which he cannot hold tight, and so is devoured by them. Garfish and vipers—so we are told—burst in giving birth to their young. So the escape of a secret is ruin and destruction to him who lets it out.
Seleucus the Victorious, having lost all his army and resources in his fight with the Gauls, tore off his royal circlet with his own hands, and fled away on horseback with three or four attendants. After a long and circuitous ride away from the highroads, he was at last so overcome by want that he approached a homestead, and being fortunate enough to find the owner in |E| person, asked him for bread and water. The man not only gave him these, but supplied him liberally and in the most friendly way with whatever else he had upon his farm. In doing so he recognized the king’s face. So overjoyed was he at his fortunate opportunity of rendering him service, that, instead of restraining himself and playing up to the king’s desire to be unknown, he accompanied him as far as the road, and, on taking his leave, said, ‘Good-bye, King Seleucus.’ At this the king, holding out his right hand and drawing the man towards him as if to kiss him, gave a sign to one of the attendants to cut off his head with a sword;
And so, with the word on his lips, his head in the dust lay mingled,—
whereas, if he had then had the patience to hold his tongue |F| for a little while, he would in all probability, when the king subsequently won success and power, have earned a larger return for his silence than for his hospitality.