Plut. Mor., Stoic Improbabilities 1 — A breviate of a discourse, showing that the Stoics speak greater improbabilities than the poets

Plut. Mor., Stoic Improbabilities 1 — A breviate of a discourse, showing that the Stoics speak greater improbabilities than the poets, Plutarch; served verbatim

Pindar’s Caeneus hath been taken to task by several, being improbably feigned, impenetrable by steel and impassible in his body, and so Descending into hell without a wound, And with sound foot parting in two the ground. But the Stoics’ Lapithes, as if they had carved him out of the very adamantine matter of impassibility itself, though he is not invulnerable, nor exempt from either sickness or pain, yet remains fearless, regretless, invincible, and unconstrainable in the midst of wounds, dolors, and torments, and in the very subversions of the walls of his native city, and other such like great calamities. Again, Pindar’s Caeneus is not wounded when struck; but the Stoics’ wise man is not detained when shut up in a prison, suffers no compulsion by being thrown down a precipice, is not tortured when on the rack, takes no hurt by being maimed, and when he catches a fall in wrestling he is still unconquered; when he is encompassed with a rampire, he is not besieged; and when sold by his enemies, he is still not made a prisoner. The wonderful man is like to those ships that have inscribed upon them A PROSPEROUS VOYAGE, or PROTECTING PROVIDENCE, or A PRESERVATIVE AGAINST DANGERS, and yet for all that endure storms, and are miserably shattered and overturned.

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

contents Plut. Mor., Stoic Improbabilities 2 →

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

Caeneus — a candidate entry Pindar — a life

A breviate of a discourse, showing that the Stoics speak greater improbabilities than the poets, Plutarch — translated by William Baxter (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)