ἱστορίαι Historiai
Plut. Mor., Against Colotes 29 Against Colotes, the Disciple and Favorite of Epicurus, Plutarch; served verbatim
The doctrine then of retaining the assent is not, as Colotes thinks, a fable or an invention of rash and lightheaded young men who please themselves in babbling and prating; but a certain habit and disposition of men who desire to keep themselves from falling into error, not leaving the judgment at a venture to such suspected and inconstant senses, nor suffering themselves to be deceived by those who hold that in uncertain matters things which do not appear are credible and ought to be believed, when they see so great obscurity and uncertainty in things which appear. But the infinity you assert is a fable, and so indeed are the images you dream of; and he breeds in young men rashness and self-conceitedness, who writ of Pythocles, not yet eighteen years of age, that there was not in all Greece a better or more excellent nature, that he admirably well expressed his conceptions, and that he was in other respects like a woman, — praying that all these extraordinary endowments of the young man might not work him hatred and envy. But these are sophisters and arrogant, who write so impudently and proudly against great and excellent personages. I confess indeed, that Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Democritus contradicted those who went before them; but never durst any man besides Colotes set forth with such an insolent title as this against all at once.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

← Plut. Mor., Against Colotes 28 contents Plut. Mor., Against Colotes 30 →

Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass
Aristotle — a life Colotes — a candidate entry Democritus — a candidate entry Plato — a life Theophrastus — a life

Against Colotes, the Disciple and Favorite of Epicurus, Plutarch — translated by A. G. (rev. W. W. Goodwin), 1874
Apparatus shelf + pinned Perseus TEI — Plutarch's Morals (the Moralia), ed. William W. Goodwin, five volumes · 'Plutarch's Morals. Translated from the Greek by several hands. Corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, Ph. D.', with an introduction by R. W. Emerson; Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874 (five volumes; a minority of the TEI transcriptions were keyed from the same publisher's 1878 reprint)
license: public-domain (US: the Goodwin edition is an 1874 Boston publication of a 1684-1694 translation — title pages verified on all five shelf scans at acquisition; Perseus digital editions CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded per ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md pattern)