Plut. Mor., Common Conceptions 18 — Of common conceptions, against the Stoics

Plut. Mor., Common Conceptions 18 — Of common conceptions, against the Stoics, Plutarch; served verbatim

DIADUMENUS. Besides all this, what should hinder but there may be an understanding of evil, and an existence of good? As the Gods, I believe, enjoy health, but understand the fever and pleurisy. Since even we, who, as they say, have abundance of evils but no good, are not yet destitute of the knowledge what prudence, what goodness, and what happiness is. And this also would be wonderful, that if virtue were absent, there should be those who could teach us what it is and give us a comprehension of it, while if vice were not extant, it should be impossible to have any understanding of it. For see what these men persuade us who philosophize against the conceptions,—that by folly indeed we comprehend prudence, but prudence without folly cannot so much as comprehend folly itself.

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

← Plut. Mor., Common Conceptions 17 contents Plut. Mor., Common Conceptions 19 →

Of common conceptions, against the Stoics, Plutarch — translated by Samuel White (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)