In this case the man took safe precautions in putting his wife [Sidenote: 508] to the test, by pouring into the leaky vessel not wine or oil, but water. It was otherwise with Fulvius, the close friend of Augustus. The emperor in his old age was lamenting to him over his desolate home and grieving because, two of his daughter’s children being dead, and Postumius, the only one left, being in exile on some calumnious charge, he was being driven to adopt his wife’s son as his successor, although he felt compassion [Sidenote: B] for his grandson and was considering the question of recalling him from abroad. Fulvius divulged what he had heard to his wife, and she to Livia; whereupon Livia took Caesar bitterly to task, asking why, if he had been so long of this mind, he did not send for his grandson, instead of putting her in a position of enmity and strife with the successor to the throne. Accordingly, when Fulvius came to him—as he regularly did—in the morning and said ‘Good morning, Caesar’, he replied ‘Good-bye, Fulvius’. Fulvius took the hint, went away home at once, sent for his wife, and said, ‘Caesar knows that I have betrayed his secret, and I propose therefore to put myself to death.’ ‘Rightly too,’ answered his wife, ‘seeing that, after living with [Sidenote: C] me so long, you failed to discover the looseness of my tongue and to guard against it. But after me, if you please’—and seizing the sword she despatched herself first.
The comic poet Philippides therefore acted rightly when, in answer to the friendly civilities of King Lysimachus and his question ‘What is there of mine that I can share with you?‘, he replied ‘What you choose, Sire, except your secrets.’
On the other hand garrulity goes with the equally objectionable vice of inquisitiveness. The babbler must find much to hear, so that he may have much to tell. Especially must he go round tracking and hunting out hidden secrets, so as to provide himself with a miscellaneous stock-in-trade for his foolish [Sidenote: D] talk. Then, like a child with a piece of ice, he neither likes to keep hold nor wants to let go. Or rather, the secrets are reptiles, which he grasps and puts in his bosom, but which he cannot hold tight, and so is devoured by them. Garfish and vipers—so we are told—burst in giving birth to their young. So the escape of a secret is ruin and destruction to him who lets it out.