Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 41 — Roman Questions

Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 41 — Roman Questions, Plutarch; served verbatim

Question 41. Why had the ancient coin on one side the image of double-faced Janus stamped, and on the other side the stern or stem of a ship? Solution. What if it be (as they commonly say) in honor of Saturn, that sailed over into Italy in a ship? Or, if this be no more than what may be said of many others besides (for Janus, Evander, and Aeneas all came by sea into Italy), a man may take this to be more probable: whereas some things serve for the beauty of a city, some things for necessary accommodation, the greatest part of the things that beautify a city is a good constitution of government, and the greatest part for necessary accommodation is good trading; whereas now Janus had erected a good frame of government among them, reducing them to a sober manner of life, and the river being navigable afforded plenty of all necessary commodities, bringing them in partly from the sea and partly from the out-borders of the country, their coin had a significant stamp, on one side the double-faced head of the legislator (as hath been said) by reason of the change made by him in their affairs, and on the other a small ship because of the river. They used also another sort of coin, having engraven on it an ox, a sheep, and a sow, to show that they traded most in such cattle, and got their riches from these; hence were many of the names among the ancients derived, as Suillii, Bubulci, and Porcii, as Fenestella tells us.

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 Evander — a life

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)