ON SHYNESS.636
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Plutarch and Shilleto, A. R. (Arthur Richard)
For those that give their ears to flatterers differ not a whit from such as let themselves be tripped up at wrestling, only their overthrow and fall is more disgraceful; some forbearing hostility and reproof in the case of bad men, that they may be called merciful and humane and compassionate; and others on the contrary persuaded to take up unnecessary and dangerous animosities and charges by those who praise them as the only men, the only people that never flatter, and go so far as to entitle them their mouthpieces and voices. Accordingly Bio673 compared such people to jars, that you could easily take by the ears and turn about at your will. Thus it is recorded that the sophist Alexinus in one of his lectures said a good many bad things about Stilpo the Megarian, but when one of those that were present said, "Why, he was speaking in your praise only the other day," he replied, "I don't doubt it; for he is the best and noblest of men." Menedemus on the contrary, having heard that Alexinus674 frequently praised him, replied, "But I always censure him, for that man is bad who either praises a bad man or is blamed by a good." So inflexible and proof was he against such flattery, and master of that advice which Hercules in Antisthenes675 gave, when he ordered his sons to be grateful to no one that praised them; which meant nothing else than that they should not be dumbfoundered at it, nor flatter again those who praised them.
Very apt, I take it, was the remark of Pindar to one who told him that he praised him everywhere and to all persons, "I am greatly obliged to you, and will make your account true by my actions."
§ xix. A useful precept in reference to all passions is especially valuable in the case of the bashful. When they have been overcome by this infirmity, and against their judgement have erred and been confounded, let them fix it in their memories, and, remembering the pain and grief it gave them, let them recall it to their mind and be on their guard for a very long time. For as travellers that have stumbled against a stone, or pilots that have been wrecked off a headland, if they remember these occurrences, not only dread and are on their guard continually on those spots, but also on all similar ones; so those that frequently remember the disgrace and injury that bashfulness brought them, and its sorrow and anguish, will in similar cases be on their guard against their weakness, and will not readily allow themselves to be subjugated by it again.
Source notes
636 Or bashfulness, shamefacedness, what the French call mauvaise honte.
637 Shakespeare puts all this into one line: "Most subject is the fattest soil to weeds."—2 Henry IV., A. iv. Sc. iv.
638 Or girls. κόρη means both a girl, and the pupil of the eye.
639 So Wyttenbach.
640 These lines are quoted again "On Moral Virtue," § vi.
641 "Iliad," xxiv. 44, 45.
642 Euripides, "Bellerophon," Fragm., 313.
643 Soph., Fragm., 736.
644 Surely it is necessary to read προδιαφθαρẽισα τῷ ἀκολάστῳ.
645 See Plato, "Charmides," 165 A.
646 Euripides, "Medea," 290, 291.
647 "Works and Days," 342.
648 Reading with Wyttenbach, μήδ᾽ ὑπόλαβε πιστεύειν, δοκοῦντα.
649 See Horace's very amusing "Satire," i. ix., on such tiresome fellows.
650 ὲπιτρίβω is used in the same sense by Demosthenes, p. 288.