Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 38 — Roman Questions

Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 38 — Roman Questions, Plutarch; served verbatim

Question 38. Why did Q. Metellus, being a high priest and otherwise reputed a wise man and a statesman, prohibit the use of divination from birds after the Sextile month, now called August? Solution. Is it not that—as we make such observations about noon or early in the day, and also in the beginning or middle of the month (when the moon is new or increasing), but beware of the times of the days or month’s decline as unlucky—so he also was of opinion that the time of year after eight months was, as it were, the evening of the year, when it declined and hastened towards an end? Or is it because they must use thriving and full-grown birds? For such are in summer; but towards autumn some are moulting and sickly, others chickens and unfledged, others altogether vanished and fled out of the country by reason of the season of the year.

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

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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)