Solemn Dissertation on the Philosophy of Silence

DE PHILOSOPHIA SILENTII.

...Codex on the Silentiaries and Decurions and Zonaras in Anastasius. The Romans yielded nothing to the Greeks in this praise of silence, as Valerius Maximus, their herald in Book II, chapter II, says:

"The heart of the Republic was faithful and deep, a Senate, fortified and hedged in on all sides by the wholesomeness of silence: those entering its threshold, having cast off private affection, took on the public one. And so I would not say that one, but that no one, would believe he had heard what had been entrusted to the ears of so many."

Nor for any other reason does Justin in Book XLIV, chapter 2 extol the Spaniards so much as because of silence properly kept.

"A nation," he says, "is most tenacious of words and secrets, such that they have more often died in silence under torture for the things entrusted to them; and thus the care for silence was stronger than life was."

This, which it would not be difficult to prove with the examples of King Philip II as well as the former Governor of the Belgians, the Duke of Alba, if I were studying brevity and if it had not been discussed in the previous paragraph concerning the silence of individual persons. That no small regard is held for silence among the Germans will be known from the punishment of silence, which is imposed in a defamatory process upon the defamer, and the proverb arising from it: "That one has no honor to speak of." To enumerate the Jews, Turks, and other nations that are cultivators of silence would be a task of inexhaustible labor.

The same silence, which, under the leadership of the philosophy of silence, I placed among the customs of individual men (§. XIIX) or of entire peoples (§. XIX), I now think must be referred to the signs of anger in Moral Semiotics. For it happens to many that because of excessive vehemence of anger they cannot even utter a word, and thus they turn hatred over in a hidden heart, awaiting an occasion for vengeance. And indeed, in the bitter, a greater power of harming and taking revenge accrues from long deliberation, as experience declares daily. Hence philosophers, curious investigators of this silence, warn that anger which is covered is to be feared more than that which is openly brought forth.