Plutarch, ‘‘Of Garrulity, or Talkativeness,’’ tr. John Philips (in Plutarch’s Essays And Miscellanies, Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1911, vol. IV.), §8, 230:
For never any word spoken did so much good, as many locked up in silence. Thus at one time or other a man may utter what heretofore has been kept a secret; but when a secret is once blurted forth, it can never be recalled; for it flies abroad, and spreads in a moment far and near. And hence it is that we have men to teach us to speak, but the Gods are they that teach us silence; silence being the first thing commanded upon our first initiation into their divine ceremonies and sacred mysteries. And therefore it is that Homer makes Ulysses, whose eloquence was so charming, to be the most silent of men; and the same virtue he also attributes to his son, to his wife, and also to his nurse. For thus you hear her speaking:
Safe, as in hardened steel or sturdy oak,
Within my breast these secrets will I lock.
And Ulysses himself, sitting by Penelope before he discovered himself, is thus brought in:
His weeping wife with pity he beheld,
Although not willing yet to be revealed.
He would not move his eyes, but kept them fast,
Like horn or steel within his eyebrows placed.
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