It is easier to avoid such affairs than to come well out of them... There is more valour needed not to take up the affair than to conquer in it. When there is one fool ready for the occasion, one may excuse oneself from being the second.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
He was writing about literal duels: the institution that obliged seventeenth-century men to answer an insult with steel, where etiquette could cost a life and declining read as cowardice. That machinery is extinct, and this entry exists for completeness, not because the machinery deserves modern instructions. What survives is the sentence he buried in it, which needs no updating: when one fool is ready for the occasion, you may excuse yourself from being the second. The duel's modern heirs, the public showdown, the reply-all war, the resignation flourished as a weapon, are covered where they live: in maxim 172 (never contend with someone with nothing to lose) and maxim 225 (know your chief fault). The full period logic of honour culture we leave, respectfully, in its century.