Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 52 — Roman Questions

Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 52 — Roman Questions, Plutarch; served verbatim

Question 52. Why do they sacrifice a dog to Mana Geneta, and pray that no home-born should become good? Solution. Is the reason that Geneta is a deity that is employed about the generation and purgation of corruptible things? For this word signifies a certain flux (i.e. Mana from manare) and generation, or a flowing generation; for as the Greeks do sacrifice a dog to Hecate, so do the Romans to Geneta on the behalf of the natives of the house. Moreover, Socrates saith that the Argives do sacrifice a dog to Eilioneia (Lucina) to procure a facility of delivery. But what if the prayer be not made for men, but for dogs puppied at home, that none of them should be good; for dogs ought to be currish and fierce? Or is it that they that are deceased are pleasantly called good; and hence, speaking mystically in their prayer, they signify their desire that no home-born should die? Neither ought this to seem strange; for Aristotle says that it is written in the treaty of the Arcadians with the Lacedaemonians that none of the Tegeates should be made good on account of aid rendered to the party of the Lacedaemonians, i.e. that none should be slain.

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

← Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 51 contents Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 53 →

Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass

Aristotle — a life Socrates — 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)