Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 18 — Roman Questions

Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 18 — Roman Questions, Plutarch; served verbatim

Question 18. Why do many of the richer sort pay tithe of their estates to Hercules? Solution. Is this the reason, that Hercules sacrificed the tenth part of Geryon’s oxen at Rome? Or that he freed the Romans from the decimation under the Etrurians? Or that these things have no sufficient ground of credit from history, but that they sacrificed bountifully to Hercules, as to a certain monstrous glutton and gormandizer of good cheer? Or did they rather do it, restraining extravagant riches as a nuisance to the commonwealth, as it were to diminish something of that thriving constitution that grows up to the highest pitch of corpulency; being of opinion that Hercules was most of all honored with and rejoiced in these frugalities and contractions of abundance, and that he himself was frugal, content with a little, and every way sparing in his way of living?

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

Geryon — 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)