Plutarch, De garrulitate
W. C. Helmbold, Ed.

And yet Nature has built about none of our parts so stout a stockade as about the tongue,¹ having placed before it as an outpost the teeth, so that when reason within tightens ‘the reins of silence,’ ² if the tongue does not obey or restrain itself, we may check its incontinence by biting it till it bleeds. For Euripides³ says that ‘disaster is the end,’ not of unbolted treasuries or storerooms, but of ‘unbridled tongues.’ And those who believe that storerooms without doors and purses without fastenings are of no use to their owners, yet keep their mouths without lock or door, maintaining as perpetual an outflow as the mouth of the Black Sea, appear to regard speech as the least valuable of all things. They do not, therefore, meet with belief,⁴ which is the object of all speech. For this is the proper end and aim of speech, to engender belief in the hearer ; but chatterers are disbelieved even if they are telling the truth. For as wheat shut up in a jar⁵ is found to have increased in quantity, but to have deteriorated [p. 405] in quality, so when a story finds its way to a chatterer, it generates a large addition of falsehood and thereby destroys its credit.