Plut. Mor., Vice and Unhappiness 2 — Whether Vice is Sufficient to Render a Man Unhappy

Plut. Mor., Vice and Unhappiness 2 — Whether Vice is Sufficient to Render a Man Unhappy, Plutarch; served verbatim

So absolutely does Vice dispose of all men, being such a self-sufficient worker of infelicity, that it has no need either of instruments or servants. Other tyrants, endeavoring to render those men miserable whom they punish, maintain executioners and tormentors, devise searing-irons and racks, to plague the reasonless soul. But Vice, without any preparation of engines, as soon as it enters into the soul, torments and dejects it, filling a man with grief, lamentations, sorrow, and repentance. For a sign that this is so, you may observe that many being cut are silent, being scourged take it patiently, and being racked and tormented by their lords and tyrants send not forth the least shriek, since the soul, repressing the voice by reason, restrains and keeps it in as with the hand; but you will scarce ever be able to quiet anger or to silence sorrow; nor can you persuade one that is in a fright to stand still, or one that is stung with remorse of conscience to forbear exclaiming, tearing his hair, and smiting his thigh. So much is Vice more violent than either fire or sword.

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

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Whether Vice is Sufficient to Render a Man Unhappy, Plutarch — translated by Samuel White (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)