Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 10 — Roman Questions

Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 10 — Roman Questions, Plutarch; served verbatim

Question 10. Wherefore do men in divine service cover their heads; but if they meet any honorable personages when they have their cloaks on their heads, they are uncovered? Solution. The latter part of the question seems to augment the difficulty of the former. If now the story told of Aeneas be true, that whilst Diomedes was passing by he offered a sacrifice with his head covered, it is rational and consequent that, while we cover our heads before our enemies, when we meet our friends and good men we should be uncovered. This behavior before the Gods therefore is not their peculiar right, but accidental, continuing to be observed since that example of Aeneas.If there is any thing further to be said, consider whether we ought not to enquire only after the reason why men in divine service are covered, the other being the consequence of it. For they that are uncovered before men of greater power do not thereby ascribe honor unto them, but rather remove envy from them, that they might not seem to demand or to endure the same kind of reverence which the Gods have, or to rejoice that they are served in the same manner as they. But they worship the Gods in this manner, either showing their unworthiness in all humility by the covering of the head, or rather fearing that some unlucky and ominous voice should come to them from abroad whilst they are praying; therefore they pluck up their cloaks about their ears. That they strictly observed these things is manifest in this, that when they went to consult the oracle, they made a great din all about by the tinkling of brass kettles. Or is it as Castor saith, that the Roman usages were conformable to the Pythagoric notion that the daemon within us stands in need of the Gods without us, and we make supplication to them with a covered head, intimating the body’s hiding and absconding of the soul?

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

Aeneas — a life Diomedes — a candidate entry

Roman Questions, Plutarch — translated by Isaac Chauncy (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)