Plut. Mor., Natural Questions 37 — Plutarch's Natural Questions

Plut. Mor., Natural Questions 37 — Plutarch's Natural Questions, Plutarch; served verbatim

XXXVII. WHY DO DOGS FOLLOW AFTER A STONE THAT IS THROWN AT THEM AND BITE IT, LETTING THE MAN ALONE WHO FLUNG IT? Is it because he can comprehend nothing by imagination nor call a thing to mind, which are gifts and virtues proper to man alone; and therefore, seeing he cannot discern the party that offered him injury, he supposeth that to be his enemy which seemeth in his eye to threaten him, and of it he goes about to be revenged? Or is it that he thinks the stone, while it runs along the ground, to be some wild beast, and according to his nature he intendeth to catch it first; but afterwards, when he seeth himself deceived and put besides his reckoning, he setteth upon the man? Or rather, doth he not hate the man and the stone both alike, but pursueth that only which is next unto him?

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

← Plut. Mor., Natural Questions 36 contents Plut. Mor., Natural Questions 38 →

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)