Plut. Mor., Water or Fire 7 — Whether water or fire be most useful

Plut. Mor., Water or Fire 7 — Whether water or fire be most useful, Plutarch; served verbatim

Then again, there being four elements, water produces a fifth out of itself, which is the sea, no less beneficial than the rest, as well for commerce as for many other things. So that it may be said, this element united and perfected our manner of living, which before was wild and unsociable, correcting it by mutual assistance, and creating community of friendship by reciprocal exchanges of one good turn for another. And as Heraclitus said, If there were no sun, it would be perpetual night; so may we say, If there were no sea, man would be the most savage and shameless of all creature. But the sea brought the vine from India into Greece, and out of Greece transmitted the use of corn to foreign parts; from Phoenicia translated the knowledge of letters, the memorials that prevent oblivion; furnished the world with wine and fruit, and prevented the greatest part of mankind from being illiterate and void of education. How is it possible then but that water should be the most useful, when it thus furnishes us with an entirely new element?

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

← Plut. Mor., Water or Fire 6 contents Plut. Mor., Water or Fire 8 →

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

Heraclitus — a candidate entry

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)