Plut. Mor., Natural Questions 29 — Plutarch's Natural Questions

Plut. Mor., Natural Questions 29 — Plutarch's Natural Questions, Plutarch; served verbatim

XXIX. WHAT IS THE REASON THAT WE ADMIRE HOT WATERS (i. e. BATHS) AND NOT COLD; SINCE IT IS PLAIN THAT COLD IS AS MUCH THE CAUSE OF ONE SORT AS HEAT IS OF THE OTHER? IT is not (as some are of opinion) that heat is a quality, and cold only a privation of that quality, and so that an entity is even less a cause than a non-entity. But we do it because Nature has attributed admiration to what is rare, and she puts men upon enquiry how any thing comes to pass that seldom happens. As Euripides saith, Behold the boundless Heaven on high, Bearing the earth in his moist arms,— what wonders he brings out by night, and what beauty he shows forth by day!... The rainbow and the varied beauty of the clouds by day, and the lights which burst forth by night...

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

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

Euripides — a life

Plutarch's Natural Questions, Plutarch — translated by R. Brown (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)