The Moralia is a group of manuscripts dating from the 10th-13th centuries, traditionally ascribed to the 1st-century Greek scholar Plutarch of Chaeronea. The eclectic collection contains 78 essays and transcribed speeches. They provide insights into Roman and Greek life, but often are also timeless observations in their own right. Many generations of Europeans have read or imitated them, including Michel de Montaigne and the RenaissanceHumanists and Enlightenment philosophers.
Contents
General structure
The Moralia include On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander the Great—an important adjunct to his Life of the great general—On the Worship of Isis and Osiris, and On the Malice of Herodotus, in which Plutarch criticizes what he sees as systematic bias in the Histories of Herodotus;." along with more philosophical treatises, such as On the Decline of the Oracles, On the Delays of the Divine Vengeance, On Peace of Mind and lighter fare, such as Odysseus and Gryllus, a humorous dialog between Homer's Odysseus and one of Circe's enchanted pigs. The Moralia were composed first, while writing the Lives occupied much of the last two decades of Plutarch's own life. Some editions of the Moralia include several works now known to be pseudepigrapha: among these are the Lives of the Ten Orators, On the Opinions of the Philosophers, On Fate, and On Music. One "Pseudo-Plutarch" is held responsible for all of these works, though their authorship is unknown. Though the thoughts and opinions recorded are not Plutarch's and come from a slightly later era, they are all classical in origin and have value to the historian.
Books
Since the Stephanus edition of 1572, the Moralia have traditionally been arranged in 14 books, as in the following list that includes the English, the original Greek, and the Latin title:
"The catalogue is transmitted by a group of Moralia manuscripts, the oldest of which is the Parisinus gr. 1678, a copy from the tenth century, on which a second hand of the twelfth century intervened to add the list; see Irigoin." The only surviving manuscript containing all seventy-eight of the extant treatises included in Plutarch's Moralia dates to sometime shortly after 1302 AD.
Modern editions
Plutarch. Moralia. 16 vols., transl. by Frank Cole Babbitt et al., series: "Loeb Classical Library". Cambridge : Harvard UP et al., 1927–2004.
Specific ideas contained
Origins dilemma
In his essay "The Symposiacs," Plutarch discusses the famous problem of the chicken and the egg. Although Plutarch was not the first person to discuss the problem, he was the first person to put the question into its modern form.
Included in Moralia is letter addressed by Plutarch to his wife, bidding her not give way to excessive grief at the death of their two-year-old daughter, who was named Timoxena after her mother. In the letter, Plutarch expresses his belief in reincarnation:
or Nous is a philosophical term for intellect. In Moralia, Plutarch agrees with Plato that the soul is more divine than the body while nous is more divine than the soul. The mix of soul and body produces pleasure and pain; the conjunction of mind and soul produces reason which is the cause or the source of virtue and vice.
