the proverb tells us, "What is in the heart of the sober is on the tongue of the drunken."9 And so Bias, being silent at a drinking bout, and jeered at by some young man in the company as stupid, replied, "What fool could hold his tongue in liquor?" And at Athens a certain person gave an entertainment to the king's ambassadors, and at their desire contrived to get the philosophers there too, and as they were all talking together and comparing ideas, 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,
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.
§ 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