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The Rights and Wrongs of Curiosity (Plutarch to Augustine)1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

P. G. Walsh
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Extract

One of the more endearing of the seventy-eight treatises which make up the Moralia of Plutarch is one entitled ‘On not minding your own business'. The Greek title, Περ Πολυπραγμοσνης, reminds us momentarily of Plato's famous definition of justice in Republic 4, which is to do your own thing (μ πολυπραγμονεῖν). Plutarch was indeed an ardent Platonist, but here he is concerned not with political philosophy but with social habits. The treatise reminds me of nothing so much as of a famous Lancastrian comedian of my youth called Norman Evans, who in a sketch called Over the Garden Wall assumed the transvestite role of a nosy female neighbour, simultaneously pegging out clothes and retailing juicy items of gossip. For Plutarch, after defining this nosiness or πολυπραγμοσνη as ‘an unhealthy and harmful state of mind, a fondness for learning the misfortunes of others, a disease apparently free of neither envy nor malice’, condemns the common tendency to pry into the social origins of neighbours, their debts, and their private conversations. He likewise condemns people who read their friends' letters, and who watch sacred ceremonies which it is μ θμισ ρν (perhaps he had in mind Clodius' gate-crashing of the rite of Bona Dea). Such inquisitiveness, says Plutarch, is invariably accompanied by a wagging tongue, for what these people gladly hear, they gladly blab about: a ἃ γἔρ δως κοουσιν, δως λαλοσιν Pascal in his Pensees says much the same thing: ‘Curiosity is only vanity. Most often we only wish to know in order to talk about it.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , April 1988 , pp. 73 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1988

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References

Notes

2. Moralia 515B–523B. Since the treatise is relatively short, I have not thought it necessary to document the quotations in the text in detail.

3. The text of Lucius or the Ass may be conveniently found in the Loeb edition of Lucian, vol. 8 (ed. M. D. McLeod). For a thematic comparison of Lucius or the Ass and The Golden Ass, see the present writer's The Roman Novel (Cambridge, 1970), p. 147Google Scholar. For Apuleius' use of the Greek Metamorphoses, see Mason, H. J., ‘Fabula Graecanica: Apuleius and his Greek Sources’, in Aspects of the Golden Ass (edd. Hijmans, B. L. Jr and van der Paardt, R. Th.), Groningen, 1978Google Scholar, ch. 1.

4. For mention of Plutarch in The Golden Ass, see 1.2.1, 2.3.2. For the priest's condemnation, 11.15.1. I have discussed the influence of Plutarch on Apuleius in Neoplatonism and Early Christian Thought (edd. Blumenthal, H. J. and Markus, R. A.), London, 1981Google Scholar, ch. 2.

5. The instructive passage in Aulus Gellius is at 11.16. The sole earlier appearance of curiositas is in Cicero, Att. 2.12.2.

6. The evidence for this literary versatility may be conveniently consulted in The Cambridge History of Classical Literature II (Cambridge, 1982), p. 934Google Scholar.

7. See above all Labhardt, A., ‘Curiositas’, Mus. Helv. 17 (1960), 206ff.Google Scholar There is brief but useful discussion of the curiosity-literature relevant to The Golden Ass in Schlam's, C. C. review of Apuleian scholarship since 1938 in Classical World (1971), 297ffGoogle Scholar.

8. In Essays in Criticism 1 (‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’), Arnold says: ‘It is noticeable that the word curiosity, which in other languages is used in a good sense … has in our language … no sense but a rather bad and disparaging one. But criticism, real criticism, is essentially the exercise of this very quality.’ I owe these references to Stephen Walsh.

9. We may note further the injunction of Ecclesiastes 3.23, ‘Be not curious in unnecessary matters’, since this becomes a main plank in medieval condemnation of curiosity.

10. Condemnations of curiosity in Christian literature before Augustine are well documented in Labhardt (n. 7). For Tertullian's condemnation of it as the philosopher's vice, see Adv. Marc. 2.21.2. It also gives rise to heresy, a point made not only by Tertullian (Praescr. 30.2), but also by Hilary of Poitiers. Jerome (Ep. 21.8) condemns the builders of the Tower of Babel for trying to reach heaven curiositate non licita.

11. This is of course not to deny that Augustine is influenced by traditional Stoic arguments as propounded in Cicero and Seneca; cf. Joly, R., ‘Notes sur la conversion d'Augustin’, Ant. Class. 35 (1966), 217ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar. But Labhardt is surely right to point out that curiosus and curiositas are not prominent in the language of Latin Stoicism; Apuleius is the direct inspiration here.

12. It should however be noted that Mette, H. J., ‘Curiositas’, Festschrift Bruno Snell (Munich, 1956), pp. 227ff.Google Scholar, draws attention to the importance of Apuleius for this aspect of the Confessions.

13. De Vera Religione 29.52. Labhardt provides further citations (e.g. De Musica 6.13.39, De Utilitate Credendi 9.22), and these do not exhaust the catalogue.

14. Summa Theologiae2a2ae QQ. 166f. In setting up studiositas as the virtue contrasting with the vice of curiositas, Aquinas is drawing on Augustine's De Utilitate Credendi (ref. as at n. 13).