Plutarch : Moralia

Plutarch's Moralia is a miscellaneous collection of essays and treatises - in fact, everything that Plutarch wrote apart from his Parallel Lives. Plutarch wrote a lot (the modern Loeb translation of the Moralia runs to fifteen volumes) and it can be difficult to hunt down a small section in the mass of his works.

References to the Moralia generally use the traditional page numbering , but often translations display no page numbers or divisions at all. This table lists the contents of the Moralia, and the page number at which each item starts, together with links to online translations where they exist. The web sites on which the translations are held are shown in brackets. The individual treatises are still occasionally called by their Latin titles, and so the Latin equivalent of some of the titles is shown in green.

Some of the English translations of the Moralia which are available on the web are derived from five volumes published in 1874-1878, edited by W.W.Goodwin with an introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson. However these volumes were themselves merely a corrected version of an earlier translation, made by "forty or fifty university men" in 1684-94 - a remarkable early exercise in collaborative translation, even if their efforts were "careless and vicious in parts", as Emerson says.

The whole of the 1878 translation of the Moralia is available in PDF format, and most volumes of the Loeb edition can be found in archive.org. There is also a complete copy of the famous French translation, made by Jacques Amyot in 1572.

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