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For this reason the most useful means possible for turning the busybody from his vice is for him to remember what he has previously learned.With this chapter may be compared chapter 19 of De Vitioso Pudore (Moralia, 536 c-d). For, as SimonidesCf. the same story, illustrating the avarice of Simonides, in Moralia, 555 f; there the box containing his fees is full of silver. used to say that when he opened his boxes after some time, he always found the fee-box full, but the thanks-box empty, so if one opens from time to time the deposit-box of inquisitiveness and examines it, full as it is of many useless, futile, and unlovely things, perhaps this procedure would give sufficient offence, so completely disagreeable and silly would it appear. Suppose a man should run over the works of the ancients and pick out the worst passages in them and keep a book compiled from such things as headless lines in HomerLines which begin with a short syllable instead of the long one demanded by the metre: cf. Moralia, 397 d, 611 b; Athenaeus, xiv. 632 d. and solecisms in the tragedians and the unbecoming and licentious language applied to women by which Archilochus Cf.Moralia, 45 a. makes a sorry spectacle of himself, would he not deserve that curse in the tragedy, Be damned, compiler of men’s miseries?Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag. 2, p. 913, ades. 388; cf. Moralia, 855 b. And even without this curse, such a man’s treasurehouse of other people’s faults is unbecoming and useless. It is like the city populated by the vilest and most intractable of men which Philip founded and called Roguesborough.Cf. Jacoby, Frag. d. gr. Historiker, ii. B, p. 561, Theopompus, Frag. 110.
