Plut. Mor., Water or Fire 10 — Whether water or fire be most useful

Plut. Mor., Water or Fire 10 — Whether water or fire be most useful, Plutarch; served verbatim

Let us begin anew. As to the use of fire, considered as fire, we have no need of water. Rather the contrary is to be made out; for water extinguishes fire. And as for water, there is no use to be made of it in most things without fire. For water heated becomes more usefill, whereas otherwise it is prejudicial. So that, of the two, that is to be accounted best which is profitable of itself without the assistance of another. Besides, water is beneficial only to the feeling, when you either wash with it or touch it; but fire is profitable to all the senses, being not only felt, but also seen at a distance; so that you may add this to the rest of the virtues of it, that its uses are manifold.

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

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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)