Plut. Mor., Herodotus's Malice 3 — Of Herodotus’s Malice

Plut. Mor., Herodotus's Malice 3 — Of Herodotus’s Malice, Plutarch; served verbatim

Secondly, when a writer, catching hold of a fault which has no reference to his story, shall draw it into the relation of such affairs as need it not, extending his narrative with circumlocutions, only that he may insert a man’s misfortune, offence, or discommendable action, it is manifest that he delights in speaking evil. Therefore Thucydides would not clearly relate the faults of Cleon, which were very numerous; and as for Hyperbolus the orator, having touched at him in a word and called him an ill man, he let him go. Philistus also passed over all those outrages committed by Dionysius on the barbarians which had no connection with the Grecian affairs. For the excursions and digressions of history are principally allowed for fables and antiquities, and sometimes also for encomiums. But he who makes reproaches and detractions an addition to his discourse seems to incur the tragedian’s curse on the collector of men’s calamities.

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

← Plut. Mor., Herodotus's Malice 2 contents Plut. Mor., Herodotus's Malice 4 →

Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

Dionysius — a candidate entry Thucydides — a candidate entry

Of Herodotus’s Malice, 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)