Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 71 — Roman Questions

Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 71 — Roman Questions, Plutarch; served verbatim

Question 71. Why do they bind hay about the horns of oxen that are wont to push, that they may be shunned by him that meets them? Solution. It is that by reason of gormandizing and stuffing their guts oxen, asses, horses, and men become mischievous, as Sophocles somewhere saith, full-fed colt thou kickest up heels, From stuffed paunch, cheeks, and full meals? Therefore the Romans say that M. Crassus had hay about his horns, for they that were turbulent men in the commonwealth were wont to stand in awe of him as a revengeful man and one scarce to be meddled with; although afterwards it was said again, that Caesar had taken away Crassus’s hay, being the first man of the republic that withstood and affronted him.

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

Caesar — a candidate entry Crassus — 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)