Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 51 — Roman Questions

Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 51 — Roman Questions, Plutarch; served verbatim

Question 51. Why is a dog set before the Lares, whom they properly call Praestites, while the Lares themselves are covered with dogs’ skins? Solution. Is it that Praestites are they that preside, and it is fit that presidents should be keepers, and should be frightful to strangers (as dogs are) but mild and gentle to those of the family? Or is it rather what some Romans assert, that—as some philosophers who follow Chrysippus are of the opinion that evil spirits wander up and down, which the Gods do use as public executioners of unholy and wicked men—so the Lares are a certain sort of furious and revengeful daemons, that are observers of men’s lives and families, and are here clothed with dogs’ skins and have a dog sitting by them, as being sagacious to hunt upon the foot and to prosecute wicked men?

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

Chrysippus — 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)