Produced by Paul Murray, Turgut Dincer and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net _BOHN'S CLASSICAL LIBRARY_ PLUTARCH'S MORALS GEORGE BELL & SONS, LONDON: YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN NEW YORK: 66, FIFTH AVENUE, AND BOMBAY: 53, ESILANADE ROAD CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON, BELL & CO. PLUTARCH'S MORALS ETHICAL ESSAYS TRANSLATED WITH NOTES AND INDEX BY ARTHUR RICHARD SHILLETO, M.A. _Sometime Scholar of Trinity College, Cambridge, Translator of Pausanias._ [Illustration] LONDON GEORGE BELL AND SONS 1898 CHISWICK PRESS:--CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO., TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE. +------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's note: The original book uses often colons | | instead of semicolons. Spelling of proper names is | | different in different pages and some words occur in | | hyphemated and unhyphenated forms. These have not been | | changed. A couple of commas and periods have been added or | | removed to improve the reading and only obvious spelling | | errors have been corrected. | +------------------------------------------------------------+ PREFACE. Plutarch, who was born at Chaeronea in Boeotia, probably about A.D. 50, and was a contemporary of Tacitus and Pliny, has written two works still extant, the well-known _Lives_, and the less-known _Moralia_. The _Lives_ have often been translated, and have always been a popular work. Great indeed was their power at the period of the French Revolution. The _Moralia_, on the other hand, consisting of various Essays on various subjects (only twenty-six of which are directly ethical, though they have given their name to the _Moralia_), are declared by Mr. Paley "to be practically almost unknown to most persons in Britain, even to those who call themselves scholars."[1] _Habent etiam sua fata libelli._