Plut. Mor., Water or Fire 1 — Whether water or fire be most useful

Plut. Mor., Water or Fire 1 — Whether water or fire be most useful, Plutarch; served verbatim

Water is the best of things, but gold is like burning fire, says Pindar. Therefore he positively assigns the second place to fire; with whom Hesiod agrees, where he says, First of all Chaos being had. For most believe that by the word chaos he meant water, from χύσις, signifying diffusion. But the balance of argument as to this point seems to be equal. For there are some who will have it that fire is the principle of all things, and that like sperm it begets all things out of itself, and resolves all things again by conflagration. Therefore, not to mention the persons, let us consider the arguments on both sides, which are to us the most convincing.

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

contents Plut. Mor., Water or Fire 2 →

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

Hesiod — a candidate entry Pindar — a life

Whether water or fire be most useful, Plutarch — translated by F. Fetherston (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)