1.The reproof might ostensibly be general, but its particular application was readily felt. Musonius, we are told by Epictetus, made all his hearers feel ‘as if some one had been talking to him about them’.

2.See Concerning Busybodies, 522 E.

3.Over and above his resemblances to Macaulay as a writer of essays and biographical history, there is a distinct similarity between their conversational tastes. We can imagine a Plutarch fully at home with Macaulay at one of those astonishing early Victorian breakfast-parties where a man might be asked if he ‘knew his Popes’, and where he might be endured while he recited them. Plutarch’s Table-Talk, like his Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages, reveals for contemporary Greek society the same deliberate cult of intellectual conversation sharpened by challenge and debate. In such conversation he must himself have played a conspicuous part. Nevertheless, it may fairly be gathered that the Greek or Graeco-Roman interlocutors in the reign of Trajan were the more ingenuously athirst for reciprocal enlightenment, however dubiously we may regard the value of the information or misinformation actually gained. Nor is it easy to believe that Plutarch would have thought it etiquette to indulge in the protracted monologues to which the more modern society submitted with such grace as it best could.

4.e.g. in his De repugnantiis Stoicorum and his Non posse suaviter vivi secundum Epicurum. Yet, as Mahaffy says, ‘it would be hard to say whether the number of Stoic dogmas which he rejects exceeds that which he quotes with approval’ (The Greek World under Roman Sway, pp. 300 sqq.).

5.Volkmann names in particular Clement of Alexandria and Basil.

6.This does not mean that he had no friends among the rhetorical teachers (the contrary is shown by his reference to ‘our Niger’ in praec. san., § 16), but only that he distrusted the type. He refused to approve of a fluent and polished style as an end in itself. Pliny describes how the amazingly voluble Isaeus would offer his audience a choice of subject and allow it to dictate the side which he should take. He would then rise and demonstrate his extemporizing powers with much show of rhetorical ornament.

7.Volkmann says of the Lives, ‘Das Werthvolle an ihnen sind nicht die historischen Details, die er giebt, sondern die eingestreuten Reflexionen, die ethischen Betrachtungen, das Eingehen auf individuelle Stimmungen und Leidenschaften der grossen MÄnner.’

8.Aulicis tantum scripsit, non doctis, says Scaliger.

9.Volkmann guesses that it is ein Produkt der spÄteren Sophistik. If so, we may congratulate the Sophist on his perfect reproduction of Plutarch’s style and of his non-sophistic tone.

10.Bacon’s Essay Of Followers and Friends owes almost nothing to Plutarch beyond the title. We do, however, find him borrowing the words ‘for there is no such Flatterer as a Man’s selfe’.

11.As Volkmann happily puts it, he writes ‘with comfortable breadth’.

12.The sentences would doubtless have been easier still if Plutarch had not felt bound to follow the fashion of the time and elaborately avoid hiatus.

13.Perhaps this is why Plutarch, as seen through Amyot, appeared to Montaigne ‘close and thorny,’ while his sense was nevertheless ‘closely-jointed and pithily-continued’.

14.Stobaeus (sixth century) had access to much of Plutarch that is now lost.

15.See an observation of Professor Summers, Seneca Select Letters, Introduction, p. lxxiv.

16.Plutarch ‘is the theme of more than 230 allusions or direct references on the part of Jeremy Taylor’ (Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship, i. 300).

17.He was familiar reading of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and appears in the Gesta Romanorum. Later the Adagia of Erasmus draw freely upon him.

18.‘Il a en quelque sorte crÉÉ Plutarque,’ says Demogeot.

19.Euphues appeared in 1579. Jusserand (The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare, p. 127) remarks that Euphues ‘addresses moral epistles to his fellow men to guide them through life’, but he appears to be unaware that Lyly borrowed this object, as well as so large a quantity of his matter, from Plutarch.

20.We meet, for example, with the story of Zeno, ‘the olde man in Athens that amiddest the pottes could hold his peace.’

21.History of Greek Classical Literature, ii. 427.

22.The Literature of Ancient Greece, p. 396.

23.Quoted by Sandys (A History of Classical Scholarship, i. 300).

24.The home of Bias.

25.According to another account he waited till the shadow was equal in length to the stick. The pyramid was then also equal in height to the length of its shadow.

26.The divinities of spring-water.

27.The title Lusios or Luaios was popularly interpreted Deliverer (from care or difficulty).

28.See note on Amasis.

29.i.e. anointing himself, not in connexion with bathing, but with exercise in the wrestling-schools.

30.The precise remark is uncertain, the text here being corrupt.

31.Equivalent to a command to ‘go weep’.

32.In antiquity these vessels were of bronze.

33.Which was bequeathed ‘to the wisest’. It was given to Thales, who passed it on to another, and the process was repeated till it came back to Thales, whereupon he dedicated it to Apollo.

34.The text here is corrupt.

35.i.e. Epicurean.

36.Member of a religious council which met at Delphi and represented the chief states of all Greece.

37.Made of polished bronze.

38.Which contained ‘every charm: love, desire, and sweet converse’ (Homer, Il. xiv. 214).

39.The use of oil to soften the hair was practically universal.

40.A common punishment for a slave was to put him to hard labour in turning the mill, in place of a horse or ass.

41.A frequent pretence of ancient witches.

42.These were farmed.

43.The Homeric s??a??e?ta (‘glossy’) is brought, either in error or by a deliberate pun, into relation with s??? (‘silence’).

44.The paedagogus, an attendant slave, who accompanied the boy and watched over his conduct.

45.In his Phaedrus.

46.i. e. in the mixolydian mode, which was of a sad and dirgelike character.

47.The rest of the essay is missing.

48.i.e. a rough and mountainous island.

49.A ‘satyric’ drama was a half-comic interlude or sequel to tragedies.

50.In the Stoic sense of adiaphoria.

51.Since diagrams were often drawn with sticks in the dust.

52.The Greek jest does not admit of translation. The same word may mean both ‘theft’ and a ‘stealthy act’.

53.The point lies in an ambiguity which is possible only in the Greek. The words may equally mean: ‘You issued no invitation when sacrificing your friends,’ and ‘when sacrificing, you did not invite your friends’.

54.Or what French would call the gouverneur.

55. This article is in all probability not the work of Plutarch. See the Introduction.

56.The play upon words (ethikas, ‘moral’ and ethikas, ‘of habit’) is not adequately translatable.

57.The Greek text is here corrupt; the translation represents the probable sense.

58.The Greek text is again faulty. The sense here given is approximate.

59.These maxims were probably in the first instance merely hygienic, or even popular superstitions, but subsequently they received recondite interpretations.

60.The Greek verse is doggerel, and no attempt is made to better it in the English.