INTRODUCTION
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Many will find this little jeu d’esprit as pleasant reading as anything in Plutarch. In part, this may be due to its (perhaps accidental) brevity; but its originality and freshness are undeniable. These qualities have, to be sure, puzzled a number of scholars who are still disputing whether the sources are principally Epicurean or Peripatetic or Cynic. Nothing quite like it is known elsewhere,But talking animals were not new (Hirzel, Der Dialog, i, p. 338 f.). which sad lack baffles the Quellenforscher. So, rather than allow a touch of spontaneous imagination to Plutarch, it has been confidently asserted that the dialogue must come from the school of Menippus, or be an attempt to turn the tables on Polystratus, and so on.
intro
Everything must have a source (if only the author’s ingenuity) and the source here, so far as it can be predicated with any certainty, is the tenth book of the Odyssey seen through the humorous eyes of a young Boeotian.So the sensible Hirzel (op. cit. ii, p. 131); see also Hartman, De Plutarcho, p. 576. Stylometry, however, does not encourage the view that this is an early work (Sandbach, Class. Quart. xxxiii, p. 196). We have here, then, a Boeotian pig instructing the favourite of Athena.Plutarch actually quotes the proverb in his Life of Demosthenes, xi. 5 (851 b) and Mor. 803 d, but does not seem to realize its possible application here. See the note on 995 f infra. It was once fashionable to assert, or imply, that since Plutarch was once a young Boeotian himself, matters could not be so simple, nor could he be the author. But the climate of scholarship is, perhaps, changing. There are few of Plutarch’s admirers who will not claim this lively work for one of his more admirable achievements, written, perhaps, when he was quite young.
