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It is a troublesome and difficult task that philosophy has in hand when it undertakes to cure garrulousness. For the remedy, words of reason, requires listeners; but the garrulous listen to nobody, for they are always talking. And this is the first symptom of their ailment: looseness of the tongue becomes impotence of the ears.It suits Plutarch’s humour in this passage, in which he speaks of garrulity as a disease, to invent one, and possibly two, pseudo-medical terms, ἀσιγησία, inability to keep silent, and ἀνηκοΐα, inability to listen. The figure is maintained in διαρρέουσι at the end of section d. Rouse suggests: And here is the first bad symptom in diarrhoea of the tongue - constipation of the ears. For it is a deliberate deafness, that of men who, I take it, blame Nature because they have only one tongue, but two ears.b If, then, EuripidesCf.Moralia, 39 b; von Arnim, Stoic. Vet. Frag., i. p. 68, Zeno, Frag. 310. was right when he said with reference to the unintelligent hearer, I could not fill a man who will not hold My wise words flooding into unwise ears, it would be more just to say to the garrulous man, or rather about the garrulous man, I could not fill a man who will not take My wise words flooding into unwise ears, or rather submerging, a man who talks to those who will not listen, and will not listen when others talk. For even if he does listen for a moment, when his loquacity is, as it were, at ebb, the rising tide immediately makes up for it many times over.
