Econlib

The Library

Other Sites

 Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow APPENDIX. - Plutarch's Lives (Dryden trans.) vol. 5

Return to Title Page for Plutarch’s Lives (Dryden trans.) vol. 5

Search this Title:

Also in the Library:

Subject Area: History

APPENDIX. - Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives (Dryden trans.) vol. 5 [1906]

Edition used:

Plutarch’s Lives. The Translation called Dryden’s. Corrected from the Greek and Revised by A.H. Clough, in 5 volumes (Boston: Little Brown and Co., 1906).

Part of: Plutarch’s Lives (Dryden trans.) 5 vols.

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


APPENDIX.

The translations in this volume were made as follows: —

Demosthenes, by a writer unnamed.

Cicero, by Thomas Fuller, D. D.

Demeirius, by John Nalson, LL. D.

Antony, by Charles Fraser, M. D.

Dion, by Robert Uvedale, LL. D.

Brutus, by R. Duke, Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge (the translator of the Life of Theseus).

Aratus, by John Bateman, M. D.

Artaxerxes, by Mr. Oakly.

Galba, by Andrew Taylor, Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.

Otho, by Samuel Garth, M. D. (the author of the Dispensary, the “well-natured Garth,” gratefully remembered by Pope; a short account of whom is given in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets).

A few additional notes are subjoined.

The lives of Galba and Otho recall us to that of Plutarch himself. There can be little question that they are his genuine work; any difference in tone may be easily accounted for by difference in subject, and we feel perhaps the effects of his having been studying Tacitus. The visit to Bedriacum may accordingly be added to the brief sum of Plutarch’s recorded Italian experiences.

Among the notable people with whom he came into connection should have been mentioned, perhaps, Dio Chrysostom, the eloquent speaker, to whom in the catalogue of his writings he is said to have dedicated one of his minor works, and king Philopappus, so well known by the monument to him remaining on the Museum Hill at Athens; who appears as resident in Athens at the time of one of the scenes in the Symposiac Questions.

There were, apparently, lives of both the Scipios; and the elder perhaps not the younger (as stated in Vol. I., p. 1), was compared with Epaminondas.

The most complete summary of all the notices of Plutarch’s life and circumstances to be found both in his own works and elsewhere is in the preface by Westermann to the edition of the Greek text by Bekker, published by Bernhard Tauchnitz. This I had not seen until after the Preface in Vol. I. had been printed.

Page 99 . — For the theory of Empedocles as to the elements of the world, compare Horace’s phrase of the rerum discordia concors. Two verses, still remaining among the fragments of Empedocles, express this doctrine of attractions and repulsions.

  • “All things at one time in liking collect and combine into one thing.
  • All things again at another, divide and are severed in quarrel.”

Life of Dion,page 245 . — Aristotle, in his Rhetoric, takes the verse of Simonides in quite a different sense. The Corinthians, he says, thought Simonides meant it to their disparagement, as if those could have little worth whom their enemies did not think it worth while to complain of.

Thirteen letters professing to be Plato’s have come down to us, almost all relating to these more eventful passages of his life, and addressed to Dion, Dion’s friends, and Dionysius himself. It is of course highly probable that letters of this description would be fabricated, — it is more probable, perhaps, that any extant compositions of the kind should be fictitious, than that they should be genuine. These which we have are not what we should expect Plato’s letters to be, and yet, on the other hand, are not what we should expect to have been written for him. Plutarch quotes the fourth and seventh; and some critics have considered these to be, not Plato’s own, but early compositions by some immediate disciples, written in his name, as a defence of his conduct. Mr. Grote appears to treat the whole collection as genuine.

Life of Aratus,page 367 . — The quotation from Pindar is from the eighth Pythian ode, line 44.