Fools in their folly speak
Euripides in the Bacchae: [...] Fools in their folly speak.
Our prophet Isaiah expresses the same thing in just the same words. Seneca to Lucilius: 'The Greeks have a proverb that as men's life is, so is their talk'. What this was like is not clear, except that there is a verse very like it current in Greek: 'Man's character is known from what he says' In Laertius, the philosopher Democritus called speech 'the mirror of life' a sort of reflection of it, as it were. Nothing could be said more truly. For no mirror reflects the bodily appearance better or more definitely than speech reflects the image of the heart. Men are discerned by their words just as brazen vessels are by their resonance.
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Oculis magis habenda fides, quam auribus
Better trust eyes than ears
Eyes are to be believed rather than ears. What is seen is more certain than what is heard. So Horace: 'Wide-open ears / Entrusted secrets ill retain'. Again in the Art of Poetry:
Tidings that come by ear we find
Less actively distress the mind,
Than what the looker-on espies
Thrust plainly 'neath his faithful eyes.
Though perhaps that is a little different. Closer to the meaning is Plautus' phrase when he called a bawd's hands 'eyed' not 'eared', meaning that in the end they believe only what they see. Again, when people wish to represent a story as actual fact, they use a word derived from historein, which means 'to see'. Finally there is that fiction of Virgil's about the two gates of the underworld, one of ivory, by which is meant what comes out of the mouth, because of the ivory whiteness of the teeth, and the other of horn, by which is meant what is seen by the eyes, because of the blackness of the pupil. In a word, ears do more for knowing, eyes are surer in producing confidence. And so in ordinary speech, when someone tells an unlikely story, we usually enquire if he has seen these things. If he says no, he only heard them, he gets laughed at.
The proverb is found in Julian's letter to Leontius, 'A certain Thurian saying has it, men's ears are less faithful than their eyes'. He called it Thurian to indicate that Herodotus was the author of the saying, either because of his divine inspiration, or because that writer lived and died at Thurii; however it was taken from his Clio, 'For ears are less faithful to men than eyes.'
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Malum malo medicari
To heal one evil with another
To heal one evil with another, is to use a second evil to cure the first. Sophocles in the Ajax Mastigophoros: 'Peace, peace! Seek not the ill to remedy / With further ill, and make fate's wound yet worse'. Tecmessa warns Ajax not to add to the misfortune of his madness by yet another and greater misfortune, his voluntary suicide. And Herodotus in Thalia: 'Do not cure evil by evil.'
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Suum cuique pulchrum
What is one's own is beautiful
Suum cuique pulchrum is a proverbial saying about people who prefer what is their own, whatever it may be like, and rather out of prejudice than judgment. It arises from the usual attitude of mind among the human race, with whom philautia, or self-love, is so deeply rooted that you will find no one so modest, so thoughtful, or so clear-sighted that he will not be blind or suffer from delusions, misled by some mental bias, when it comes to putting a value on something of his own. Have we ever seen anyone born in such a barbarous land that he does not think his home country the best of all? What race is so savage, or has a tongue so uncouth, as not to consider all others beneath it? What bodily form is so brutish as not to appear most beautiful to itself? Aristotle wrote truly in his Rhetoric, book 2: 'And besides all men are self-lovers, and whatever is their own is of necessity sweet to each, eg their deeds and words; on this account they are as a rule fond of flatterers.' This is true in general and universally (as Horace says, 'self-love is blind'), but it particularly applies to artists, and among them specially to poets, and also to lovers. Aristotle wrote most rightly in his Ethics, book 4, that every crafts-man is greatly delighted by his own work, as if these were things sprung from himself. Poets love their own poems as parents love their children. A work is to the craftsman something like the offspring of the mind, and Socrates said that the midwife was a better judge of progeny than the mother herself. It is the way of loving husbands to vie with each other in singing the praises each of his own bride. An outstanding example of this is found in the youthful Tarquins. Even today there is a shrewd and common saying, 'there's no such thing to be found as an ugly sweetheart' because to him who loves them even homely things must seem very beautiful. Theocritus expressed this idea with elegance in his sixth Eclogue:'- for often in love, O Polyphemus, the least fair seems fair'. Plato expressed this proverb in the Lysis, but contrariwise: 'There is a danger lest, according to the old proverb, that should be dear which is beautiful', as if we should not find a thing beautiful because it is dear, but dear because it is beautiful. To this belongs what Cicero writes in the fifth book of the De finibus: 'Everyone is most influenced by his own particular interest' and again in book i of the De officiis: 'Each of whom, engrossed in his own profession, undervalued that of the other'.
However, it can be forgiven if that common self-love goes just so far as to make each of us tend a little to favour our own children, our own arts or business or discoveries, our own country, so long as it does not sweep us to that point of blindness which makes us libel the virtues of others and flatter our own vices, giving them the name of virtues - so that we see ourselves like Suffenus in Catullus or Maevius in Horace. In his Epistles Horace observes this failing: 'While my faults please me' he says, 'or deceive me in the end'. At this place Porphyrio points out that Horace is alluding to the widespread opinion that men not only fail to be sorry for their faults but actually find them pleasing. He says there was a well-known Greek proverb on this subject, but this proverb is lacking in the texts owing to the fault of the copyists.
Another remark of Horace applies to this too: 'Base vices dupe the blind, or even please: / Balbinus loves the polyp that on Agne's nose he sees. To Balbinus, a stupid lover, even the polyp of his darling Agne seemed to smell sweet. (A polyp is an affection of the nostrils which smells strong, like the goaty smell of the armpits; so we talk about sufferers from the polyp and the goat.) Cicero to Atticus, book 14: 'My dear fellow, let me give you a general rule on matters in which I have a fair amount of experience. There was never a poet or orator yet who thought anyone better than himself. This applies even to the bad ones. How much more to one so gifted and erudite as Brutus! I actually made the experiment the other day in connection with the edict. I composed a draft at your request. I liked mine, he preferred his own. Indeed, when, at his own entreaty, I might almost say, I addressed to him an essay on the best style of oratory, he wrote not only to me but to you too, that he could not agree with my preference. So pray let every man write as best suits himself. "For every man his own bride, mine for me. For every man his own love, mine for me." Not a very elegant distich. Atilius wrote it, a most clumsy versifier'. Thus far Cicero. It appears from his words that the two verses, 'For every man' etc come from some play by Atilius. Again, Cicero says in the Tusculan Questions, book 5: 'He was, in fact, an enthusiastic musician, a tragic poet too - how good, matters little: for in this art, more than in others, it somehow happens that everyone finds that what is his own is beautiful. So far I have never known the poet (and I have been friends with Aquinius) who did not think himself the best; this is the way with them: You are charmed with your work, I with mine'. The same idea is expressed by Plautus in the Stichus, in different words but with great elegance: 'To every queen her king is fair, to every bridegroom his bride'.
With this we can also connect that line of Theocritus: 'Nor am I so unbeautiful, if truth be told'. And Virgil imitating it:
Nor am I so ill-favoured; once of late
I saw myself reflected on the shore
When dying winds had left the water calm.
Horace alludes to the adage more openly in one of his epistles:
You are keeping them for Jove's ears.
Beautiful in your own eyes, you believe that you
And you only, drip the whole honey of poetry
'Beautiful in your own eyes' means self-admiring. This phrase is little different from what St Augustine says in several places, for instance in Letter 48, drawing it from a certain Tychonius: 'What we wish is sacred'. (It is a half-line from an heroic poem.) One could wish that this saying were not so applicable to the ways of some people today, who lay claim to piety more arrogantly than ever the Pharisees did, and, while they are steeped in vices neither to be tolerated nor mentioned, show astonishing self-satisfaction in their savage criticism of the way other men live.
Collected Works of Erasmus
Vol 31
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