deas, and Zeno alone was silent, the
strangers greeted him and pledged him, and said, "What are we to tell
the king about you, Zeno?" And he replied, "Nothing, but that there is
an old man at Athens that can hold his tongue at a drinking bout." So
profound and mysterious and sober is silence, while drunkenness is
talkative: for it is void of sense and understanding, and so is
loquacious. And so the philosophers define drunkenness to be silly talk
in wine. Drinking therefore is not censured, if silence go with it, but
foolish prating turns being under the influence of wine into
drunkenness. And the drunken man prates only in his cups; but the
talkative man prates everywhere, in the market-place, in the theatre,
out walking, by night and by day. If he is your doctor, he is more
trouble to you than your disease: if he is on board ship with you, he
disgusts you more than sea-sickness; if he praises you, he is more
fulsome than blame. It is more pleasure associating with bad men who
have tact than with good men who prate. Nestor indeed in Sophocles'
Play, trying by his words to soothe exasperated Ajax, said to him
mildly,

"I blame you not, for though your words are bad,
Your acts are good:"

but we cannot feel so to the talkative man, for his want of tact in
words destroys and undoes all the grace of his actions.

Sec. V. Lysias wrote a defence for some accused person, and gave it him,
and he read it several times, and came to Lysias in great dejection and
said, "When I first perused this defence, it seemed to me wonderful, but
when I read it a second and third time, it seemed altogether dull and
ineffective. Then Lysias laughed, and said, "What then? Are you going to
read it more than once to the jury?" And yet do but consider the
persuasiveness and grace of Lysias' style;[554] for he "I say was a
great favourite with the dark-haired Muses."[555] And of the things
which have been said of Homer the truest is that he alone of all poets
has survived the fastidiousness of mankind, as being ever new and still
at his acme as regards giving pleasure, and yet saying and proclaiming
about himself, "I hate to spin out a plain tale over and over
again,"[556] he avoids and fears that satiety which lies in ambush for
every narrative, and takes the hearer from one subject to another, and
relieves by novelty the possibility of being surfeited. But the
talkative worry one's ears to death with their tautologies, as people
scribble