Plutarch's Morals
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text · 6 illegible passages, excluded from answers
- Extent:
- ~160,000 words · 782 passages
Cite this work
- APAPlutarch. (n.d.). Plutarch's Morals. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plutarch/plutarch-s-morals
- MLAPlutarch. "Plutarch's Morals." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plutarch/plutarch-s-morals.
- ChicagoPlutarch. Plutarch's Morals. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/plutarch/plutarch-s-morals.
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.
+------------------------------------------------------------+ instead of semicolons. Spelling of proper names is | different in different pages and some words occur in | hyphemated and unhyphenated forms. These have not been | changed. A couple of commas and periods have been added or | removed to improve the reading and only obvious spelling | errors have been corrected. | +------------------------------------------------------------+ PREFACE. Plutarch, who was born at Chæronea in Boeotia, probably about A.D. 50, and was a contemporary of Tacitus and Pliny, has written two works still extant, the well-known _Lives_, and the less-known _Moralia_. The _Lives_ have often been translated, and have always been a popular work. Great indeed was their power at the period of the French Revolution. The _Moralia_, on the other hand, consisting of various Essays on various subjects (only twenty-six of which are directly ethical, though they have given their name to the _Moralia_), are declared by Mr. Pale