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Now most people laugh if a man who is bald or hump-backed reviles and jeers at others for being in such case; for it is altogether ridiculous to indulge in reviling and jeering at anything that affords to another the opportunity for a caustic retort. For example, Leo Cf. 633 C, for a slightly different version of the story. of Byzantium, being reviled by a humpback for the weakness of his eyes, said, You reproach me with that which can happen to any man, while you bear on your back the mark of God’s wrath! Do not therefore ever revile an adulterer when you yourself are given to unnatural lust, nor a profligate when you yourself are stingy. Own kin are you of her who slew her spouse are the words of Alcmeon to Adrastus. What then does Adrastus say ? He reproaches the speaker with a shameful deed which is not another’s but all his own: But you yourself slew her who gave you birth.From the Alcmaeon of Euripides; cf. Nauck, T.G.F., Adespota, No. 358. Quoted also in Moralia 35 D. Domitius remarked to Crassus, Did you not weep at the death of a lamprey Crassus’s pet eel was famous. Plutarch speaks of it twice elsewhere: Moralia, 811 A and 976 A. Of other writers, Aelian, De natura animal. viii. 4, contains the most interesting account of it. which was being kept for you in a fish-pond ? And the other replied, Did you not bury three wives and not shed a tear ? The man who is going to indulge in reviling need not be smart and loud-voiced and aggressive, but he must be irreproachable and unimpeachable. For upon nobody does the divine power seem so to enjoin the precept, Know thyself, as upon him who purposes to censure another, so that such persons may not, by saying what they want to say, have to hear what they do not want to hear. For a person of this type, as Sophocles Two lines of a longer quotation from an unknown play; cf. Nauck, Trag. Graec. Frag., Sophocles, No. 843. puts it, By babbling thoughtless talk is wont to hear Against his will the words he willing speaks.
