Plutarch's Morals   By: Unknown (46-120?)

PLUTARCH'S MORALS

GEORGE BELL & SONS, LONDON: YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN NEW YORK: 66, FIFTH AVENUE, AND BOMBAY: 53, ESILANADE ROAD CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON, BELL & CO.

PLUTARCH'S MORALS

ETHICAL ESSAYS

TRANSLATED

WITH NOTES AND INDEX

BY ARTHUR RICHARD SHILLETO, M.A.

Sometime Scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, Translator of Pausanias.

[Illustration]

LONDON GEORGE BELL AND SONS 1898

CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO., TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE.

Transcriber's note: The original book uses often colons 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. Paley "to be practically almost unknown to most persons in Britain, even to those who call themselves scholars."[1] Habent etiam sua fata libelli.

In older days the Moralia were more valued. Montaigne, who was a great lover of Plutarch, and who observes in one passage of his Essays that "Plutarch and Seneca were the only two books of solid learning he seriously settled himself to read," quotes as much from the Moralia as from the Lives . And in the seventeenth century I cannot but think the Moralia were largely read at our Universities, at least at the University of Cambridge. For, not to mention the wonderful way in which the famous Jeremy Taylor has taken the cream of "Conjugal Precepts" in his Sermon called "The Marriage Ring," or the large and copious use he has made in his "Holy Living" of three other Essays in this volume, namely, those "On Curiosity," "On Restraining Anger," and "On Contentedness of Mind," proving conclusively what a storehouse he found the Moralia , we have evidence that that most delightful poet, Robert Herrick, read the Moralia , too, when at Cambridge, so that one cannot but think it was a work read in the University course generally in those days. For in a letter to his uncle written from Cambridge, asking for books or money for books, he makes the following remark: "How kind Arcisilaus the philosopher was unto Apelles the painter, Plutark in his Morals will tell you."[2]