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.
“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.
The principal works used in the study of Plutarch here placed before the reader are the following:
_Plutarchi Chaeronensis Moralia. Edidit Daniel Wyttenbach. 8 voll. Oxonii, 1795-1821._
_R. Volkmann. Leben und Schriften des Plutarch von Chaeronea. Berlin, 1869._
_O. Grèard. De la Morale de Plutarque. Cinquiéme edition. Paris, 1892._
_Plutarch’s Werke übersetzt von Klaiber, Bähr, u. A. Stuttgart, 1837-57._
_Plutarchi Chaeronensis Moralia. Recognovit Gregorius N. Bernardakis. Lipsiae, 1888-96. 7 voll._
The last named contains a revised text only; from it my translation of the De Sera was made. The German translation of Bähr, the well-known Heidelberg professor, in the collection above cited, follows the original very closely and has been of much service to me by its interpretation of obscure passages.
A complete catalogue of Plutarch’s Moralia is given in the appendix. The list is borrowed from the edition of Bernardakis and the question of authenticity is not taken into account.
NOTE:—To translate Plutarch is a very different task from that of translating Seneca. The style of the latter is terse and epigrammatic; clauses and sentences often follow each other without connectives, and are in the main short. That of the former is the reverse. Most of his sentences are long, many of them very long. These, as well as clauses and words, are often strung together with the participles καὶ and γὰρ, or other connectives, until the reader sometimes wonders whether they will ever end. Seneca is full of pithy sayings well suited for quotation; in Plutarch they are rare. The style of both writers is highly rhetorical, but, if we except the evident striving after effect, they have little else in common.