Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/122

100 Sophocles, when he said thus unto him: It is not for a supper, Achilles, that you are so angry, but

And when upon these words Achilles took greater indignation, and chafed more and more, saying, that he would not sail forward but be gone back again, he came upon him a second time with this rejoinder:

By this means when we scar a valiant and hardy man with the opinion of cowardice; an honest, chaste, and civil person with the note of being reputed loose and incontinent; also a liberal and sumptuous magnifico with the fear to be accounted a niggard or a mechanical micher; we do mightily incite them to well-doing, and chase them from bad ways. And like as when a thing is done and past, and where there is no remedy, there should be borne a modest and temperate hand, in such sort that in our liberty of speech we seem to shew more commiseration, pity and fellow-grief of mind for the fault of a friend, than eager reprehension; so contrariwise where it stands upon this point that he should not fault, where (I say) our drift is to fight against the motion of his passions, there we ought to be vehement, inexorable, and never to give over nor yield one jot unto them. And this is the very time when we are to shew that love of ours and goodwill which is constant, settled, and sure, and to use our true liberty of speech to the full. For to reprove faults already committed, we see it is an ordinary thing among arrant enemies. To which purpose said Diogenes very well; That a man who would be an honest man ought to have either very good friends, or most shrewd and bitter enemies: for as they do teach and instruct, so these are ready to find fault and reprove.

Now far better it is for one to abstain from evil doing, in believing and following the sound counsel of his friends, than to repent afterwards of ill doing, when he seeth himself blamed and accused by his enemies. And therefore if it were for nothing else but this, great discretion and circumspection would be used in making remonstrances and speaking freely unto friends: and so much the rather, by how much it is the greater and stronger