Plut. Mor., Passions and Diseases 1 — Whether the passions of the soul or diseases of the body are worse

Plut. Mor., Passions and Diseases 1 — Whether the passions of the soul or diseases of the body are worse, Plutarch; served verbatim

HOMER, having contemplated the various kinds of mortal animals, and compared them one with another in respect to their lives and habits, cried out: What wretched creature of what wretched kind, Than man more weak, calamitous, and blind! attributing to man that unhappy primacy of having the superiority in miseries. But we, considering man as having already gained the victory for infelicity, and being publicly declared the most miserable of all animals, will compare him with himself in a contention about his own calamities, not unprofitably but even altogether necessarily dividing his soul from his body; that we may thence learn, whether we live more miserably on account of Fortune or of ourselves. For sickness is indeed, engendered in the body by Nature; but vice and malice in the soul are first its own work, afterward its passion. Now it is of no small advantage towards content of mind, if that which is the worse is curable, and lighter and less violent in its attacks than we feared.

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

contents Plut. Mor., Passions and Diseases 2 →

Whether the passions of the soul or diseases of the body are worse, 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)