by Plutarch
Plutarch end-to-end. The apophthegms - a curated wall of two hundred sayings - open the page. Then the man in twelve facts; the Spartans on stone; the herm-grid of named speakers; the Parallel Lives in two columns Greek to Roman; the Comparison-scale on which Plutarch weighed each pair; the Symposium of Table-Talk in dinner-conversation; the four cardinal virtues as marble columns; and the line on the mind as a fire.
tags: plutarch, moralia, spartans, leonidas, apophthegms, parallel lives, delphi, chaeronea, alexander, caesar, table talk, synkrisis, virtues
The complete Laconic Apophthegms - Plutarch's collection of Spartan sayings, Moralia 208b–236e, in the Goodwin/Loeb 1878 translation. Forty-four named Spartans, every Loeb sub-section preserved. Plus the Sayings of Spartan Women, Kings & Commanders, Romans, Philosophers, and Plutarch himself. Three hundred and eleven entries; filterable, draw at random, search any word.
311 sayings. Spartans, Spartan women, kings, generals, Romans, philosophers, and the man himself. Filter by source or by theme; spin the stele.
AGASICLES
“Agasicles the Spartan king, when one wondered why, since he was a great lover of instruction, he would not admit Philophanes the sophist, freely said, I ought to be their scholar whose son I am. And to one enquiring how a governor should be secure without guards, he replied, If he rules his subjects as fathers do their sons.”
ΗΘΙΚΑ
- THE MORAL WRITINGS -
LXXV TREATISES✦XIV BOOKS
4858 passages · 80 treatises · 14 books · arrow-keys to turn pages
Let us consider what may be said of the education of free-born children, and what advantages they should enjoy to give them a sound character when they grow up.
- OF MORALIA & PARALLEL LIVES -
PLUTARCHUS · MESTRIUS PLUTARCHUS
c. 46 - c. 120 CE · PRIEST AT DELPHI · CITIZEN OF CHAERONEA
Ἡ διάνοια οὐχ ὡς ἀγγεῖον πληρωθῆναι, ἀλλ’ ὡς ξύλον ἀνάφθαι δεῖται.
A priest at Delphi for thirty years. A guest of two emperors. A husband who wrote his wife the kindest letter in Greek literature when their two-year-old daughter died on the road. The man who, more than anyone else in the surviving record, decided what the centuries would remember about Sparta, Athens, and Rome. He wrote it down at Chaeronea, in a small town no one had any reason to remember, and he made the centuries do the work.
12 brief facts about the priest at Delphi, the host of dinner-talks, the writer who never left his town and whose pages tell almost everyone’s.
Twelve of the most chiseled. Click a slab to read the situation. Spartan style was austerity, so these are bare - no plaster, no gilt, no curve.
Nine books of dinner-conversation at the house in Chaeronea. Pick a question; the three guests will each give a take. They are not reaching consensus - they are passing the cup.
“In his anger. Anger asks for an answer; grief only asks to be left alone.”
“In his grief. The man who could weep over Patroclus had a deeper soul than the man who could only kill over him.”
“In neither alone - only in the moment they meet and recognise each other in him. That is the figure Homer painted.”
- Quaestiones Convivales, IX.13
Plutarch’s ethics rest on four pillars - the same four that Plato laid out in the Republic and that the Stoics took up afterwards. Click a column to light it; the architrave above will name it in Greek and the passage beneath will read.
A man who cannot govern himself is fit to govern nothing else. The temperate man is the one who has rationed his own appetites, and so has appetites left for the things that need them.
- Plutarch, after the Aristides
86 voices behind the 311 sayings. Each card is a small wayside herm. Click any to jump back to the apophthegm wall.
22 pairs (with one quartet) plus 4 singles whose counterparts are lost. The pairing is the argument: character is universal. Click a pair to read what Plutarch is testing by it.
| GREEK | ROMAN |
|---|---|
| Theseus | Romulus |
| Lycurgus | Numa Pompilius |
| Solon | Publicola |
| Themistocles | Camillus |
| Pericles | Fabius Maximus |
| Alcibiades | Coriolanus |
| Timoleon | Aemilius Paullus |
| Pelopidas | Marcellus |
| Aristides | Cato the Elder |
| Philopoemen | Flamininus |
| Pyrrhus | Marius |
| Lysander | Sulla |
| Cimon | Lucullus |
| Nicias | Crassus |
| Eumenes | Sertorius |
| Agesilaus | Pompey |
| Alexander | Caesar |
| Phocion | Cato the Younger |
| Agis & Cleomenes | Tiberius & Gaius Gracchus |
| Demosthenes | Cicero |
| Demetrius | Antony |
| Dion | Brutus |
- singles, without pair -
Most Parallel Lives end with a small synkrisis - a few paragraphs in which Plutarch weighs the pair and tilts the scale. Pick a pairing; watch the bronze decide.
Both founder-heroes; both kings; both vanishers. Plutarch finally tilts to Romulus, whose city outlived its founder.
- Theseus & Romulus, synkrisis
Three remarks on how to listen, how to read, and what the mind is when it is working.
The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.
The painter Apelles used to say of his rivals, “they finish their pictures, but I know when to stop.”
Sometimes a slight thing - a phrase, a jest - reveals more of the man than his greatest deeds.
He was a host before he was a philosopher, and a listener before he was a host.
✦ memory · ☽ night · ∞ loops · ❧ margins · ◆ proof
a personal library in perpetual arrangement · MMXXVI