Plut. Mor., Symposiacs 1.8.1 — Symposiacs

Plut. Mor., Symposiacs 1.8.1 — Symposiacs, Plutarch; served verbatim

Question VIII. WHY OLD MEN READ BEST AT A DISTANCE. PLUTARCH, LAMPRIAS, AND OTHERS. To my discourse in the former problem some objection may be drawn from the sense of seeing in old men; for, if they hold a book at a distance, they will read pretty well, nearer they cannot see a letter. This Aeschylus means by these verses: Behold from far; for near thou canst not see; A good old scribe thou mayst much sooner be. And Sophocles more plainly: Old men are slow in talk, they hardly hear; Far off they see; but all are blind when near. And therefore, if old men’s organs are more obedient to strong and intense qualities, why, when they read, do they not take the reflection near at hand, but, holding the book a good way off, mix and weaken it by the intervening air, as wine by water?

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

Aeschylus — a life

Symposiacs, Plutarch — translated by Thomas Creech (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)