De musica, (On music).
Volume VII.
De fluviorum et montium nominibus et de iis quæ in illis inveniuntur, (On the names of rivers and mountains and those things that are found in them).
De vita et poesi Homeri, Lib. I et II, (On the life and poetry of Homer).
The two treatises last named fill more than one-third of the volume, the remainder being chiefly taken up with fragments, some of them only a few lines in length. It also contains the so-called catalogue of Lamprias which, including the Parallel lives, assigns 227 different works to Plutarch. Volume seven concludes with an index of names. As these treatises are usually cited by their Latin titles, they only are given above. A complete edition of Plutarch’s Morals, with an introduction by R. W. Emerson was published in Boston about twenty-five years ago, under the editorial supervision of Professor Goodwin of Harvard University. The translations were made by a number of English scholars near the close of the seventeenth century. In their revised form they are in the main correct and some of them are vigorous and readable.
Footnotes
[1]. It is a noteworthy fact that many of Rome’s great men were Spaniards, while many others were not natives of the city. Among the former were the emperors Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius. The two Senecas, Lucan, Martial and Quintillian were also Spaniards. Vespasian was born at Reate; Livy, in Padua; Horace, at Venusia; Virgil, in Mantua; Cicero, at Arpinum; the emperor Claudius, at Lugdunum; the two Plinys, at Comum, etc.
[2]. Seneca is generally regarded as the first Roman writer who used caro, flesh, as distinct from, and opposed to, spirit.
[3]. Students of German literature are reminded of a certain moral and intellectual similarity between Plutarch and Gellert. The latter, though a man of much less natural ability, had all of Plutarch’s kindliness, moral and religious earnestness, sympathy for those in distress, and the same popularity among all classes from prince to peasant. Both were equally religious, though one was a heathen and the other a Christian; both preserved the same serenity of mind and cheerfulness of heart in a time of national degradation and immorality.
[4]. “When Plutarch, after the death of his daughter; was writing a letter of consolation to his wife, we find him turning away from all the commonplaces of the stoics as the recollection of one simple trait of his little child rushed upon his mind:—‘She desired her nurse to press even her dolls to her breast. She was so loving that she wished everything that gave her pleasure to share in the best she had.’” The statement that Seneca is all man will be questioned by those who know that two of his Letters of Condolence are addressed to women. These are almost the only writings in Roman literature so addressed.