intro
The essay seems, at the first glance, to be put in the form of a dialogue, but it is about as much of a dialogue as Quiller-Couch’s Foe-Farrell. The dialogue form is merely a literary subterfuge to present an essay in a slightly more attractive form, and the third person of the dialogue, only occasionally recalled to the reader by the parsimonious interjection of he said, may be presumed to be Plutarch, the author. The two speakers in the brief dialogue at the beginning of the essay are Moschion, a physician, whom Plutarch introduces also into the Symposiacs (Moralia, 658 a), and Zeuxippus, a friend of Plutarch’s, who is introduced also as a speaking character in two other essays of Plutarch’s (Moralia, 748 e and 1086 c), besides being mentioned several times in other essays.
intro
That the essay was written some time after a.d. 81 is clear from the reference to the death of the Roman Emperor Titus (123 d).
intro
The title of the essay is included in Lamprias’ list of Plutarch’s works, and Stobaeus, in his Florilegium, has several quotations from it, sometimes with a slightly different reading, but none of these readings changes the meaning of the passage at all, and rarely is one to be preferred to the reading found in the mss. of Plutarch (see Vol. I. Introd. p. xxi).
intro
Indeed, the text of this essay has suffered more at the hands of modern editors than from the ancient copyists, for a glance at the foot-notes in Bernardakis’s edition will show that the gratuitous and unnecessary changes introduced into the text by modern editors outnumber their corrections of the minor errors in spelling, and the like, made by the ancient copyists.
1
MOSCHION. So, Zeuxippus, yesterday you drove away Glaucus, the physician, when he wished to join in your philosophical discussions.
