7
So painful for all of us is the revelation of our own troubles that many die rather than reveal to physicians some hidden malady. Just imagine HerophilusOf Chalcedon, a great anatomist of the Alexandrian age (flor. circa 300 b.c.). or ErasistratusOf Ceos, worked in Alexandria at the height of his fame (258 b.c.). or Asclepius himself, when he was a mortal man,Asclepius, the son of Apollo, was deified after death as the god of medicine. carrying about their drugs and instruments, calling at one house after another, and inquiring whether a man had an abscess in the anus or a woman a cancer in the womb! And yet the inquisitiveness of this profession is a salutary thing. Yet everyone, I imagine, would have driven such a man away, because he does not wait to be sent for, but comes unsummoned to investigate others’ infirmities. And busybodies search out these very matters and others still worse, not to cure, but merely to expose them. For this reason they are hated deservedly. For example, we are annoyed and displeased with customs-officials, not when they pick up those articles which we are importing openly, but when in the search for concealed goods they pry into baggage and merchandize which are another’s property. And yet the law allows them to do this and they would loseSince the collection of taxes and duties was farmed out to individuals, they would be the losers in failing to make a minute search for dutiable articles. by not doing so. But busybodies ruin and abandon their own interests in their excessive occupation with those of others. Only rarely do they visit the farm, for they cannot endure the quiet and silence of being alone. But if, after a long absence, they do chance to put in there, they have more of an eye for their neighbours’ vines than for their own, and they ask how many of their neighbours’ cattle have died, or how much of his wine has turned sour. But they are soon sated with such news and run away. Yet the true and genuine farmer does not care to hear even news that makes its own way from the city; he saysKock, Com. Att. Frag., iii. p. 473, ades. 347; Cf. 511 e, supra, where it is the typical Athenian slave of whom his farmer-master complains. Then he will tell me while he digs On what terms peace was made. The cursed scamp Now strolls around and meddles with these things.
