Plutarch's Morals
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Attributed (authorship debated)
- Condition of the text:
- Some scanning errors (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand) · 6 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~160,000 words · 782 passages
Cite this work
- APAPlutarch. (n.d.). Plutarch's Morals. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plutarch/plutarch-s-morals
- MLAPlutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plutarch/plutarch-s-morals.
- ChicagoPlutarch. Plutarch's Morals. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plutarch/plutarch-s-morals.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
The 'Moralia': the non-biographical part of Plutarch's work, some sixty-odd treatises and dialogues on almost everything, from how to read the poets to why the oracles fell silent.
Context and history
It is the counterweight to the 'Parallel Lives', and many people do not know it exists. Plutarch was a priest at Delphi and a Platonist, and he writes like a cultivated man in conversation: there is advice on friendship and on how to tell a flatterer from a friend, a treatise on anger, another on tranquillity of mind, pages on the education of children, on whether animals reason, and the 'Table Talk', which is literally after-dinner conversation. Montaigne read him all his life and owes much of the tone of the 'Essays' to him. It is worth knowing that the collection is varied and uneven, and that some treatises circulating in it are not by him.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
freeborn. For slaves try to shirk and avoid their work, partly because of the pain of blows, partly on account of being reviled. But praise or censure are far more useful than abuse to the freeborn, praise pricking them on to virtue, censure deterring them from vice. But one must censure and praise alternately: when they are too saucy we must censure them and make them ashamed of themselves, and again encourage them by praise, and imitate those nurses who, when their children sob, give them the breast to comfort them. But we must not puff them up and make them conceited with excessive praise, for that will make them vain and give themselves airs. § XIII. And I have ere now seen some fathers, whose excessive love for their children has turned into hatred. My meaning I will endeavour to make clearer by illustration. While they are in too great a hurry to make their sons take the lead in everything, they lay too much work upon them, so that they faint under their tasks, and, being overburdened, are disinclined for learning. For just as plants grow with moderate rain, but are done for by too much rain, so the mind enlarges by a proper amount of work, but by too much is unhinged. We must therefore give our boys remission from continuous labour, bearing in mind that all our life is divided into labour and rest; thus we find not only wakefulness but sleep, not only war but peace, not only foul weather but fine also, not only working days but also festivals. And, to speak concisely, rest is the sauce of labour. And we can see this not only in the case of animate, but even inanimate things, for we make bows and lyres slack that we may be able to stretch them. And generally the body is preserved by repletion and evacuation, and the soul by rest and work. We ought also to censure some fathers who, after entrusting their sons to tutors and preceptors, neither see nor hear how the teaching is done. This is a great mistake.…