Another good opportunity for admonition occurs when a man has been abused for his mistakes by some one else and is feeling small and humbled. A person of discretion will make a happy use of the occasion by sending the abusive parties to the right about and himself taking his friend in hand, reminding him that, if there is no other reason for being careful, he should at least give his enemies no encouragement. ‘How can they open their mouths or say another word, if you cast aside once for [Sidenote: E] all these faults for which they abuse you?’ By this means the abuser gets the credit of the pain, and the admonisher that of the benefit. Some are more subtle. They convert their familiar friends by blaming some one else, accusing others of the things they know that those friends do. Once at a lecture in the afternoon our professor, Ammonius, aware that some of his class had not lunched as simply as they might, ordered his freedman to give his own boy a whipping, on the charge that ‘he must have vinegar with his lunch’. Meanwhile the glance he threw at us brought the reproach home to the guilty parties. In the next place, we should be cautious of speaking plainly to a friend before company. Remember the case of Plato. [Sidenote: F] Socrates having handled one of his associates somewhat vigorously in conversation at table, Plato remarked, ‘Would it not have been better if this had been said in private?’ ‘And,’ retorted Socrates, ‘would you not have done better if you had said that to _me_ in private?’ The story goes that, when Pythagoras once dealt rather roughly with a pupil before a number of persons, the youth hanged himself, and from that time Pythagoras never again reproved anyone in another’s presence. A fault should be treated like a humiliating complaint. The uncovering and [Sidenote: 71] prescribing should be secret, not an ostentatious display to a gathering of witnesses or spectators. It is not the act of a friend, but of a sophist, to use another’s slips to glorify oneself, showing off before the company like those medical men who perform surgical operations in the theatre in order to advertise themselves. And apart from the insult—which has no right to accompany any curative treatment—we have to consider the contentiousness and obstinacy of a man in the wrong. Not merely is it the case that—as Euripides has it— _Love, when reproved, Is but more tyrannous_,