Plut. Mor., Seven Wise Men 17 — The Banquet of the Seven Wise Men

Plut. Mor., Seven Wise Men 17 — The Banquet of the Seven Wise Men, Plutarch; served verbatim

And before Solon had fully finished, in came Gorgias, Periander’s brother, who was just returned from Tacnarum, whither he had been sent by the advice of the oracle to sacrifice to Neptune and to conduct a deputation. Upon his entrance we welcomed him home; and Periander having among the rest saluted him, Gorgias sat by him upon a bed, and privately whispered something to his brother which we could not hear. Periander by his various gestures and motions discovered different affections; sometimes he seemed sad and melancholic, by and by disturbed and angry; frequently he looked as doubtful and distrustful men use to do; awhile after he lifts up his eyes as is usual with men in a maze. At last recovering himself, saith he, I have a mind to impart to you the contents of this embassy; but I scarce dare do it, remembering Thales’s aphorism, how things impossible or incredible are to be concealed and only things credible and probable are to be related. Bias answered, I crave leave to explain Thales’s saying, We may distrust enemies, even though they speak things credible, and trust friends, even though they relate things incredible; and I suppose by enemies he meant vicious men and foolish, and by friends, wise and good men. Then, brother Gorgias, quoth Periander, I pray relate the whole story particularly.

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

Gorgias — a candidate entry Periander — a life Solon — a life Thales — a life

The Banquet of the Seven Wise Men, Plutarch — translated by Roger Davis (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)