Plut. Mor., Symposiacs 9.2.1 — Symposiacs

Plut. Mor., Symposiacs 9.2.1 — Symposiacs, Plutarch; served verbatim

Question II. WHAT IS THE REASON THAT ALPHA IS PLACED FIRST IN THE ALPHABET, AND WHAT IS THE PROPORTION BETWEEN THE NUMBER OF VOWELS AND SEMI-VOWELS? AMMONIUS, HERMEAS, PROTOGENES, PLUTARCH, ZOPYRION. IT being the custom of the Muses’ feast to draw lots, and those that were matched to propose curious questions to one another, Ammonius, fearing that two of the same profession might be matched together, ordered, without drawing lots, a geometrician to propose questions to a grammarian, and a master of music to a rhetorician.

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

← Plut. Mor., Symposiacs 9.1.3 contents Plut. Mor., Symposiacs 9.2.2 →

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

Ammonius — a candidate entry

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)