Complete Works of Plutarch — Volume 3 Essays and Miscellanies
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~280,000 words · 1,348 passages
Cite this work
- APAPlutarch. (n.d.). Complete Works of Plutarch — Volume 3 Essays and Miscellanies. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plutarch/complete-works-of-plutarch-volume-3-essays-and-miscellanies
- MLAPlutarch. "Complete Works of Plutarch — Volume 3 Essays and Miscellanies." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plutarch/complete-works-of-plutarch-volume-3-essays-and-miscellanies.
- ChicagoPlutarch. Complete Works of Plutarch — Volume 3 Essays and Miscellanies. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plutarch/complete-works-of-plutarch-volume-3-essays-and-miscellanies.
What it is about
Plutarch's essays: not the Lives but what is known as the Moralia — dozens of short pieces on anger, talkativeness, superstition, the education of children, the oracle at Delphi, and the face one sees in the moon.
Context and history
The two should not be confused: the catalogue holds the Parallel Lives and it holds this, the less read half of Plutarch though the more varied. Here one sees that he was a priest at Delphi and that everything interested him; many of the passages quoted from him on friendship and calm come from here. Some of the attributed treatises are of disputed authenticity, as is common in so large a collection.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Epicurus's great confidant and familiar, Colotes, set forth a book with this title to it, that according to the tenets of the other philosophers it is impossible to live. Now what occurred to me then to say against him, in the defence of those philosophers, hath been already put into writing by me. But since upon breaking up of our lecture several things have happened to be spoken afterwards in the walks in further opposition to his party, I thought it not amiss to recollect them also, if for no other reason, yet for this one, that those who will needs be contradicting other men may see that they ought not to run cursorily over the discourses and writings of those they would disprove, nor by tearing out one word here and another there, or by falling foul upon particular passages without the books, to impose upon the ignorant and unlearned. Now as we were leaving the school to take a walk (as our manner is) in the gymnasium, Zeuxippus began to us: In my opinion, said he, the debate was managed on our side with more softness and less freedom than was fitting. I am sure, Heraclides went away disgusted with us, for handling Epicurus and Aletrodorus more roughly than they deserved. Yet you may remember, replied Theon, how you told them that Colotes himself, compared with the rhetoric of those two gentlemen, would appear the complaisantest man alive; for when they have raked together the lewdest terms of ignominy the tongue of man ever used, as buffooneries, trollings, arrogancies, whorings, assassinations, whining counterfeits, black-guards, and blockheads, they faintly throw them in the faces of Aristotle, Socrates, Pythagoras, Protagoras, Theophrastus, Heraclides, Hipparchus, and which not, even of the best and most celebrated authorities. So that, should they pass for very knowing men upon all other accounts, yet the