Essay Collection: Moralia

Overview
Plutarch’s Moralia is a sprawling assemblage of more than sixty essays and dialogues that range across ethics, religion, psychology, politics, education, literary criticism, natural philosophy, and antiquarian lore. Written in Greek by a Middle Platonist immersed in Roman public life, these pieces present practical guidance on how to live well alongside speculative inquiries into the cosmos and the gods. Unlike the Parallel Lives, which pairs biographies to explore character through history, Moralia turns the same moral curiosity inward and outward, toward the cultivation of the self, the bonds of family and friendship, and the customs and beliefs that knit together Greek and Roman society.

Scope and Form
The collection was not designed as a single book; it is a later editorial gathering of treatises, letters, and symposium conversations, some of disputed authorship. Its forms are varied: brief admonitions, extended dialogues, myth-inflected cosmology, and convivial question-and-answer. Table Talk recreates learned dinner conversation, pivoting from riddling trifles to serious philosophy. Greek Questions and Roman Questions explain puzzling civic rituals and sayings. Literary and historical criticism appears in How to Read Poetry, On Listening to Lectures, and the polemical On the Malice of Herodotus.

Ethical Vision
Plutarch’s ethics is practical, civic, and aspirational. He counsels self-scrutiny and moral progress rather than perfection, urging readers to tame anger, curb idle talk, distinguish friends from flatterers, profit from enemies, and cultivate equanimity. Marriage and household advice in Advice to Bride and Groom and On Brotherly Love extends virtue into intimate life. Precepts of Statecraft and Whether an Old Man Should Engage in Public Affairs embed ethics within political service, hoping to harmonize personal character with the common good. Virtue is reason habituated into stable disposition, nourished by education, friendship, and example, and expressed through moderation rather than ascetic withdrawal.

Religion and Cosmology
Religious pieces interpret traditional piety through Platonist lenses while rejecting crude superstition. On Superstition warns that fear of the gods deforms the soul; reverence should be rational and humane. On Isis and Osiris reads Egyptian myth allegorically to illuminate a providential cosmos structured by good order struggling against disorder. Essays on Delphi, The E at Delphi, On the Pythia’s Oracles, On the Decline of Oracles, defend inspired speech while diagnosing historical change in sacred practice. The dialogue On the Delays of Divine Vengeance reconciles providence with the apparent postponement of justice; the world is moral, but its rhythms exceed human impatience. On the Face in the Moon ventures a striking cosmology in which the moon becomes a waystation for souls, fusing myth and science to suggest an ordered, ensouled universe populated by daemons mediating between gods and humans.

Society, Education, and Custom
Plutarch treats culture as a school for character. Instruction for youths in On Listening and How the Young Should Read Poetry aims to make literature a training ground for judgment. Antiquarian investigations present customs as repositories of collective memory, teaching readers to interrogate origins rather than accept habit blindly. His pedagogy is gentle but firm, favoring persuasion, imitation, and timely correction.

Style and Method
The prose mixes anecdote, quotation, and exempla from Greek and Roman history with a genial, conversational tone. Argument proceeds inductively from cases and stories toward general precepts, with frequent appeals to shared civic and religious experience. Plutarch remains a Platonist, yet he borrows freely from Stoic and Aristotelian psychology, preferring ecumenical synthesis to sectarian dispute.

Transmission and Influence
Preserved through Byzantine scholarship and revived in the Renaissance through translations such as Amyot’s, Moralia shaped humanist ethics for centuries. Erasmus, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Enlightenment moralists mined it for examples and maxims. Modern readers still find in it a humane program for self-rule and citizenship, an inquiry into religion without fanaticism, and a generous model of philosophy as an art of living.