The next rule concerns the propounding of difficulties. A guest at a dinner is bound to accept what is put upon the [Sidenote: F] table, and neither to ask for anything else nor to find fault. When the feast consists of a discourse, any one who comes to it should listen and say nothing, if there is an understanding to that effect. Persons who cannot listen in a pleasant and sociable manner, but keep drawing the speaker off to other topics, interposing questions and mooting side-issues, get no benefit themselves and confuse both the speaker and the speech. When, however, he invites the audience to ask questions and advance difficulties, any that are proposed should prove to be useful and important. Odysseus, when in the suitors’ company, incurs ridicule through
_Begging for morsels and scraps, and not for a sword or a cauldron._
[Sidenote: 43] regard it as a sign of lofty-mindedness not only to give, but to ask for, something of value. It is, however, more a case for ridicule when a hearer poses a speaker with petty little problems of the kind often propounded by young men, when they are talking claptrap in order to make a show of attainments in logic or mathematics—for example, concerning ‘division of the indeterminate’ and the nature of ‘lateral’ or ‘diagonal’ [Sidenote: B] motion. The proper answer to such persons is the remark of Philotimus to a man who was suffering with abscesses and consumption, but who had been talking to him for some time about requiring ‘some little thing to cure a whitlow’. Perceiving the man’s condition from his complexion and breathing, Philotimus observed: ‘My good sir, a whitlow is not the question with you.’ Nor in your case, young sir, is it worth while to be discussing such questions as yours, but how you are to get rid of conceit, swaggering about love-affairs, and such-like nonsense, and how you are to plant your feet on the way to a healthy and sober-minded life.
Especially are you bound, in putting your questions, to accommodate yourself to a speaker’s range of knowledge or natural [Sidenote: C] ability—to his special _forte_. A philosopher who is more concerned with ethics should not be attacked with difficulties in natural science or mathematics, nor should one who prides himself upon his scientific knowledge be dragged into determining hypothetical syllogisms or solving fallacies. If you attempted to chop your wood with the key and to open your door with the axe, it would not be thought that you were making sport of these implements, but that you were depriving yourself of their respective powers and uses. In the same way, if you ask of a speaker a thing for which he has no gift or training, while you make no harvest of what he possesses and offers, [Sidenote: D] you not only do yourself harm to that extent, but you incur condemnation for malicious ill-nature.