The much larger _Symposiacs_[201] tell the same story, no longer indirectly, but, as it were, aloud and open-mouthed. There are [Sidenote: _The_ Symposiacs.] nine books of them; ten or a dozen questions, sometimes more, are discussed in each book, often at considerable length. Table-talk among the Greeks and Romans was notoriously inclined in a literary direction.[202] But Plutarch’s table-talk is nothing so little as it is literary. The customs and etiquette of conviviality; the proceedings, proper or not proper, at and after a good dinner; the physical qualities of foods and wines, receive natural, full, and curious treatment. Sometimes the writer allows his fancy the remotest excursions, as in the famous debate whether the bird comes before the egg or the egg before the bird. He discusses philosophy, physics, physic; he inquires whether sea-water will or (like a more sophisticated product) will not wash clothes; appraises the quality of jests; considers whether meat gets high sooner in moonlight or sunlight; and whether there is more echo by day or by night. But amid all this expatiation he seems to avoid literature as if it were Scylla and Charybdis in one. If he draws anywhere near the subject, it is to treat it in the least literary way possible. We see the name of Homer in the title of a chapter, and begin to hope for something to our point. But Plutarch is only anxious to know why, when Homer mentions games, he puts boxing first, then wrestling, and running last. We find in one of the prefaces (that to Book V.) a scornful glance at φορτικοὶ καὶ ἀφιλόλογοι, who tell riddles and so forth after dinner. But, alas! the book itself practises “Philology” in a way that is of very little good to us. It does indeed open with the old and still unsettled question why the dramatic and literary treatment of painful things is pleasant; but this is a question rather of philosophy than of literature. It starts the inquiry whether prizes for poetry at festivals are of great antiquity; but this is mere antiquarianism. When it is for a moment actually “philological,” inquiring into epithets like ζωρότερον and ἀγλαόκαρπον and ὑπέρφλοια, it is always the bare meaning, the application, and so forth, that is attended to. When, for instance, Plutarch discusses the second word, he does not so much as touch that general question of Greek compound epithets which Mr Matthew Arnold touches (and begs) in a well-known passage.[203] He does not even glance at the grace, the beauty, the harmony of the word itself. He only wants to know why the poet specially applies this term to apple-trees, and why Empedocles selects apples themselves for the other epithet, ὑπέρφλοια. Nay, in discussing this last he gives a kind of indirect slap at the notion of an epithet being selected for the sake of “pretty writing and blooming colour.”[204] And so everywhere. It is not too much to say that Plutarch _invariably_ avoids when he can, and when he accidentally