Page:Plutarch - Moralia, translator Holland, 1911.djvu/132

110 and wrought: otherwise, if thou do, I shall cut thee through and tumble thee into the main sea.

Many fearful and terrible things there be that are done in anger, and as many for them again as foolish and ridiculous, and therefore of all passions that trouble the mind, it is both hated and despised most. In which regards expedient it were to consider diligently as well of the one as the other: for mine own part, whether I did well or ill, I know not; but surely, when I began my cure of choler in myself, I did as in old time the Lacedaemonians were wont to do by their Ilotes, men of base and servile condition: For as they taught their children what a foul vice drunkenness was, by their example when they were drunk, so I learned by observing others what anger was, and what beastly effects it wrought. First and foremost, therefore, like as that malady, according to Hippocrates, is of all others worst and most dangerous wherein the visage of the sick person is most disfigured and made unlikest itself; so, I seeing those that were possessed of choler, and (as it were) beside themselves thereby, how their face was changed, their colour, their countenance, their gait and their voice quite altered, I imagined thereupon unto myself a certain form and image of this malady, as being mightily displeased in my mind, if haply at any time I should be seen of my friends, my wife and the little girls my daughters, so terrible and so far moved and transported beside myself: not only fearful and hideous to behold, and far otherwise than I was wont, but also unpleasant to be heard; my voice being rough, rude and churlish: like as it was my hap to see some of my familiar friends in that case, who by reason of anger could not retain and keep their ordinary fashions and behaviour, their form of visage, nor their grace in speech, nor yet that affability and pleasantness in company and talk as they were wont.

This was the reason that Caius Gracchus the orator, a man by nature blunt, rude in behaviour, and withal over-earnest and violent in his manner of pleading, had a little flute or pipe made for the nonce, such as musicians are wont to guide and rule the voice gently by little and little up and down, between base to treble, according to every note as they would themselves, teaching their scholars thereby to have a tunable voice. Now when Gracchus pleaded at the bar at any time, he had one of his servants standing with such a pipe behind him: who observing when his master was a little out of tune, would sound a more mild and pleasant note unto him, whereby he reclaimed