Moralia

• 1. Introduction

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  The Moralia begins with a talking pig. In one of its 78 essays, the wandering hero Odysseus holds a conversation with one of Circe's enchanted swine, a dialogue that debates whether animals possess reason. That one exchange captures what makes this ancient collection so strange and so alive: it is unpredictable, learned, and funny in turns. Plutarch of Chaeronea, a 1st-century Greek scholar, gathered a lifetime of thinking into the Moralia, and what emerged was less a tidy philosophical treatise than an exuberant cabinet of curiosities. It ranges from parenting advice to cosmological riddles, from Spartan military customs to the mystery religions of Egypt. How did a collection this wide-ranging survive nearly two millennia? What do its contradictions reveal about its author? And why did some of the sharpest minds of the Renaissance fight to get their hands on it?

• 2. The Range of Essays

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  78 essays make up the Moralia as it has come down to us, but the label essays hardly does them justice. Some are philosophical treatises; others are transcribed speeches; one is a letter of condolence; another is a dinner-party conversation among seven legendary wise men. Plutarch asks whether old men should stay in politics, whether vice alone is sufficient to make a person unhappy, and whether land animals or sea animals are more intelligent. On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander the Great sits alongside On Peace of Mind, and On Tranquility of Mind sits beside Whether Fire or Water is More Useful. The collection also includes works that later scholars identified as pseudepigrapha, writings attributed to Plutarch but now understood to come from a slightly later hand. These include On Fate, On Music, and Lives of the Ten Orators, a set of biographies based on the work of a critic named Caecilius of Calacte. Scholars now call their unknown author Pseudo-Plutarch, though the works are classical in origin and retain value for historians of the ancient world. The Moralia were composed first; only in the last two decades of Plutarch's life did writing the Lives occupy most of his attention.

• 3. Sparta Through One Author's Eyes

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  Spartans wrote no history of their own before the Hellenistic period. Their only surviving literature is fragments of 7th-century lyrics, so the gap Plutarch fills is enormous. His five Spartan lives and his essays Sayings of Spartans and Sayings of Spartan Women draw on sources that have since disappeared, making them among the richest surviving records of Lacedaemonian life. The historians Sarah Pomeroy, Stanley Burstein, Walter Donlan, and Jennifer Tolbert Roberts have pointed out that Plutarch was writing centuries after the Sparta he describes, and a full millennium separates him from the earliest events he records. Even on his visit to Sparta, the customs he reported had long been abandoned, so he was working largely from texts and oral tradition rather than living observation. Pomeroy and her co-authors note that Plutarch was influenced by histories written after Sparta's decline, histories marked by nostalgia for a past that may have been partly imagined. They also observe that writers like Plutarch and Xenophon tended to exaggerate the monolithic nature of Spartan society, minimizing departures from ideals and obscuring historical change. The consequence is that the image of Spartan egalitarianism and superhuman endurance that persists in popular culture traces back largely to Plutarch. Yet those same historians concede that his writings on Sparta, more than those of any other ancient author, have shaped later views of Lacedaemon, and that they remain valuable for the large quantities of information they preserve.

• 4. Religion, Oracles, and Delphi

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  Plutarch held a priesthood at the oracle of Delphi, and that connection runs through some of his most important essays. His dialogue Why Pythia Does Not Give Oracles in Verse examines why the famous prophetess had stopped delivering her pronouncements in poetry. A related dialogue, On the E at Delphi, takes up the mystery of a letter E inscribed on the temple of Apollo, and it does so through a conversation featuring two people Plutarch knew personally: Ammonius, a Platonic philosopher who was Plutarch's own teacher, and Lambrias, Plutarch's brother. In that dialogue, Ammonius argues that the E originally stood for the number 5, an acknowledgement that the celebrated Delphic maxims came not from seven wise men but from five genuine ones: Chilon, Solon, Thales, Bias, and Pittakos. Two others, Cleobulos and Periandros, were included by political maneuver rather than wisdom. Book V of the Moralia also contains On Isis and Osiris, which the source describes as a crucial record of Egyptian religious rites. That essay has become one of the most important ancient sources on the mythology and worship surrounding those two deities, partly because so much other evidence has not survived.

• 5. Taking on Herodotus

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  On the Malice of Herodotus has been called the first instance in literature of the slashing review. Plutarch attacks the historian Herodotus for what he sees as systematic bias and misrepresentation throughout the Histories. The 19th-century English historian George Grote took the essay seriously as a substantive critique, and described the charge Plutarch leveled as one involving what Herodotus himself might have called honourable frankness. Plutarch does catch Herodotus in genuine errors; scholars have acknowledged the palpable hits. But most now read the essay as a rhetorical exercise, an attempt to see what could be argued against a writer already so famous as to be almost beyond criticism. According to Barrow, writing in 1967, the real source of Plutarch's fury was that Herodotus had dared to criticize the Greek city-states that saved Greece from Persia. Barrow concluded bluntly that Plutarch was fanatically biased in favor of those cities and would permit no wrong to be assigned to them. Whether attack or exercise, the essay signals something important about Plutarch's method: he was willing to pick a fight with one of the most celebrated writers in the Greek tradition, and the debate about his motives has continued ever since.

• 6. Erasmus and the Renaissance Reception

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  Erasmus of Rotterdam encountered the Moralia for the first time while working as an assistant to a scholar named Demetrius Ducas in Venice. That encounter led to a collaboration with Girolamo Aleandro, and together the two men served as proofreaders for a Greek edition of the Moralia published by the Italian printer Aldus Manutius in March 1509. When Erasmus left Venice for England, he carried one volume with him. He began translating it into Latin in Cambridge in 1511. A complete Moralia in Latin, containing eight chapters, appeared in August 1514 in Basel, published by Johann Froben. A scholar named Jorge Leto has suggested that six chapters had already appeared in late 1513 or early 1514, published by Badius Ascensius. Froben went on to print five editions of Erasmus's translation between 1514 and 1520. The arrangement of the texts that most readers would encounter in print descends from the Stephanus edition of 1572, which organized the Moralia into 14 books. The oldest surviving manuscript containing a catalogue of the treatises is the Parisinus gr. 1678, a damaged copy from the 10th century, with a second hand from the 12th century adding the list of works. The single manuscript that contains all 78 extant treatises dates to shortly after 1302.

• 7. Letters, Grief, and Reincarnation

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  Consolation to His Wife is unlike anything else in the collection. It is a letter Plutarch addressed to his wife, asking her not to surrender to excessive grief at the death of their two-year-old daughter, who had been named Timoxena after her mother. The letter is also a statement of Plutarch's personal beliefs. He writes that the soul, being eternal, is after death like a caged bird that has been released. A soul that has spent a long time in the body, he argues, has grown tame through habit and will quickly take another body and return to the troubles of the world. Old age, in his view, makes this worse by dimming the soul's memory of the other world even as its attachment to this one grows stronger. A soul that passes quickly through a body, by contrast, recovers its fire and moves on to higher things. That the author of a slashing rhetorical attack on Herodotus and a debate about whether fish are smarter than foxes could also write this way for his grieving wife captures the full distance of the Moralia's range. Michel de Montaigne, the Renaissance humanists, and Enlightenment philosophers all found the collection worth reading closely, and the letter to Timoxena's mother is one of the reasons the collection has never entirely left the curriculum.