Plut. Mor., Bashfulness 14 — Of Bashfulness

Plut. Mor., Bashfulness 14 — Of Bashfulness, Plutarch; served verbatim

Neither is it a hard matter to put off some mean and ordinary people, which will be apt to prove troublesome to you in that nature. Some shift them off with a jest or a smart repartee; as Theocritus, being asked in the bath to lend his flesh-brush by two persons, whereof one was a stranger to him, and the other a notorious thief, made answer: You, sir, I know not well enough, and you I know too well. And Lysimache, the priestess of Minerva Polias in Athens, when the muleteers that brought the provision for the festival desired her to let them drink, replied, No; for I fear it may grow into a custom. So again, when a captain’s son, a young fluttering bully but a great coward, petitioned Antigonus for promotion, the latter answered: Sir, it is my way to reward my soldiers for their valor, not their parentage.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

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Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

Antigonus — a candidate entry Minerva — a candidate entry Theocritus — a candidate entry

Of Bashfulness, Plutarch — translated by Thomas Hoy (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)