Golden Verses 4 — Master the Appetites; Respect Yourself Above All (lines 9–12)

Know these things as they are, and train yourself to master the following: first of all the belly, and sleep, and lust, and anger. Never do anything shameful — neither in another's company nor alone. And above all, hold yourself in reverence.

Here the poem turns inward and names the inner adversaries explicitly: gastḗr (the belly — appetite, greed for food and by extension all acquisitive hunger), hýpnos (sleep — sloth, the wish to be unconscious), lagneía (lust), and thymós (the hot, anger-prone spiritedness). These are not condemned as evils to be amputated; they are forces to be ruled. The verb is krateîn — to have mastery, to hold power over. The Pythagorean aim is not the death of appetite but its governance, the difference between a horse killed and a horse trained.

The verse then delivers a line that separates ordinary morality from genuine self-cultivation: never do anything shameful, mḗte met' állou mḗt' idíēi — "neither with another nor in private." The point is that virtue practiced only when observed is not virtue but performance. The person who behaves only because others are watching has not mastered the appetites; they have merely hidden from them. Hierocles draws this out: the one who is his own guardian does not fall into evil even when out of reach of public opinion.

And the foundation of that private integrity is the verse's culminating command: pántōn dè málist' aischýneo sautón — "above all, feel reverence (or shame) before yourself." This is the deepest psychological insight of the early section. The Greek aischýnomai means both "to feel shame before" and "to revere." The instruction is to internalize a witness — to become the one before whom you would be ashamed to do wrong. When your own regard is the standard, solitude offers no loophole.

The list of inner adversaries is strikingly close to the ṣaḍ-ripu, the "six enemies" of classical Indian ethics — kāma (lust), krodha (anger), lobha (greed), mada (pride), moha (delusion), mātsarya (envy). The Pythagorean quartet of belly, sleep, lust, and anger overlaps substantially, and the shared premise is identical: the moral life is in large part a campaign of self-governance over named inner forces, not a vague aspiration to be good.

The command to behave the same alone as in company is the precise ethical content of the Confucian shèn dú (慎獨) — "being watchful when alone," the discipline of acting rightly when no one observes, treated in the Doctrine of the Mean as the mark of the cultivated person. The Pythagorean "neither with another nor in private" and the Confucian "watchfulness in solitude" are the same teaching arising independently.

The internalized witness — reverence before oneself — anticipates the Stoic notion (in Epictetus and Seneca) of the inner daimon or the imagined wise observer before whom one lives, and resonates with the conscience as developed in later Christian thought. The Yogic yamas and niyamas likewise begin with restraints (ahiṃsā, satya, brahmacarya — non-harm, truthfulness, continence) that are meaningless unless kept when unobserved.

The universal principle is that freedom is the fruit of self-rule, not its opposite. The person enslaved to appetite, sleep, lust, and temper imagines themselves free because they do what they want — but they are merely doing what the appetites want. Real liberty is the capacity to act from one's deeper aim rather than one's loudest impulse, and that capacity is built only by training.

The second universal truth is that character is what you do when no one is watching. Every tradition that has thought seriously about virtue arrives at the same test: integrity is wholeness — being the same person in private as in public. To revere yourself is to refuse to be one thing for others and another thing in the dark.

The four adversaries are alive and well in modern dress: the belly is the compulsive scroll, the snack, the cart full of things we don't need; sleep is the snooze button and the avoidance of hard tasks; lust takes its ancient forms and many new digital ones; anger floods the comment section and the family group chat. The poem's counsel is not to despise these drives but to train them — to build, through small repeated choices, the capacity to govern rather than be governed.

The sharpest modern application is the "neither with another nor in private" line, because privacy has never been more total. What you watch, read, and do alone — on a device no one else sees — is now the largest unobserved territory of most lives. The Pythagorean answer is to install the only witness who is always present: yourself, regarded with enough seriousness that you would not want to disappoint that regard. Self-respect, in this strong sense, is the most reliable guardian of conduct, because it cannot be left behind when you close the door.