Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 99 — Roman Questions

Plut. Mor., Roman Questions 99 — Roman Questions, Plutarch; served verbatim

Question 99. What is the reason that of the other priests they depose any one that is condemned or banished, and substitute another in his room; but remove not the augur from his priesthood so long as he lives, though he be convicted of the greatest crimes? They call them augurs who are employed in soothsaying. Solution. Is the reason (as some say) that they will have none to know the mysteries of the priests who is not a priest? Or that the augur is bound by oath to discover to none the management of sacred things; therefore they refuse to absolve him from his oath, when he is reduced to a private capacity? Or is it that the name of augur is not a title of honor and dignity, but of skill and art? It would therefore be the like case to depose a musician from being a musician or a physician from being a physician, with that of prohibiting a diviner from being a diviner; seeing they cannot take away his faculty, though they deprive him of the title. Moreover they do not substitute augurs, because they will keep to the number of augurs that were at the beginning.

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)