Moralia

Overview

About a thousand pages, the collective name for Plutarch’s seventy-eight surviving essays, dialogues and lectures on everything other than biography, composed around 80 to 120 CE. They include practical advice on listening to lectures, controlling anger, distinguishing a flatterer from a friend and consoling the bereaved.

The collection also includes dialogues on love and on the decline of oracles, a defence of eating no meat, the education of children, essays on Isis and Osiris and on superstition, and the polemic On the Malice of Herodotus. Montaigne read them constantly.

What happens

Practical advice essays. The collection opens across numerous essays offering practical advice on everyday concerns, listening to lectures, controlling anger, distinguishing a flatterer from a genuine friend, and consoling those who have suffered bereavement.

Dialogues on love and oracles. Plutarch presents dialogues on love and on the decline of oracles, engaging philosophically with both romantic attachment’s proper place in life and religious institutions’ apparent diminishing authority in his own era.

The defence of eating no meat. Among the collection’s more distinctive pieces, Plutarch offers a defence of eating no meat, staking out an unusually early and considered position on animal ethics extending moral consideration to non-human creatures.

The education of children. Plutarch addresses the education of children directly, extending his practical ethical concern into questions of how young people should actually be formed and raised well.

Essays on Isis, Osiris and superstition. Plutarch writes on Isis and Osiris and on superstition, engaging with religious questions across cultures and examining the specific dangers of excessive or misdirected religious fear.

On the Malice of Herodotus. The polemic On the Malice of Herodotus finds Plutarch directly criticizing the earlier historian’s treatment of various Greek states, demonstrating his engagement extended into historiographical controversy alongside ethics and religion.

How to read it

Read the Moralia’s gathering of seventy-eight essays under one collective title as capturing Plutarch’s genuinely encyclopedic range beyond the Lives’ biographical focus, treating subjects from controlling anger to Isis and Osiris with equal practical seriousness throughout.

Pay close attention to the essay consoling the bereaved, alongside similarly practical pieces on listening to lectures and educating children, as showing Plutarch working in a genuinely applied ethical mode, offering concrete guidance rather than only abstract argument.

Notice how the defence of eating no meat stakes out an unusually early and considered position on animal ethics, extending moral consideration to non-human creatures in ways that anticipate arguments most readers associate with considerably later philosophical developments.

Consider Montaigne’s constant reading of these essays as tracing a direct line of influence from Plutarch’s accumulated practical wisdom through to the essay form’s later Renaissance flowering, making the Moralia formatively important for personal essay writing’s eventual development.

Read this collection alongside Plutarch’s own Lives to see how the same author’s biographical narrative method there compares to the more directly discursive, essayistic approach he takes here across an even wider range of ethical, religious and practical subjects.

Questions it raises

• Does gathering such varied material, practical advice, philosophical dialogue, religious essay and historiographical polemic, under one collective title suggest genuine underlying unity in Plutarch’s thought, or does the Moralia’s diversity simply reflect his considerable range without deeper thematic coherence?
• How persuasive is Plutarch’s defence of eating no meat for a contemporary reader familiar with later developments in animal ethics? Does his ancient argument anticipate modern positions in substance, or does it rest on different underlying premises entirely?
• What does Montaigne’s constant reading of these essays suggest about their particular suitability as model for the personal essay form? Does something specific about Plutarch’s practical, applied approach make him especially generative for later essayistic writing?
• How do the collection’s more obviously practical essays, on anger, friendship and consolation, relate to its more explicitly religious and philosophical pieces, on Isis and Osiris or superstition? Does Plutarch treat these as genuinely connected concerns?
• Given that this collection spans seventy-eight separate pieces composed over an extended period, how should a reader approach it, cover to cover, or through selective reading of pieces most relevant to particular interests and concerns?
• What does On the Malice of Herodotus reveal about Plutarch’s own historiographical values and methods? Does this polemical engagement with an earlier historian illuminate his approach in the Lives, or does it represent a genuinely separate critical project?