intro
Critics lay stress on a few mistakes which Plutarch made in interpreting Latin (these will be found noted in Rose and in Hartman), but against them must be set the unnumbered instances in which he is right. He did not, however, have to depend wholly on Latin writers, for he undoubtedly had at hand the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus (1st cent. b.c.) and the works of Juba,Müller, Frag. Hist. Graec. iii. 465-484. the scholarly king of Mauretania, who as a youth had been brought to Rome in 46 b.c. to grace the triumph of Julius Caesar. Juba became greatly interested in Roman customs, and wrote a book in which he paralleled them with the customs of other peoples.
intro
Many of the matters discussed in the Roman Questions are to be found treated elsewhere in Plutarch’s work, particularly in the Roman Lives. The Lives of Romulus and of Numa are especially rich in parallel passages: for very many of the Roman customs were thought to go back to the earliest period of Roman history.
intro
The book was probably published after the death of Domitian in a.d, 96, though this is a not quite certain inference from the text (276 e). The work is No. 138 in Lamprias’s catalogue of Plutarch’s works. The . ms. tradition (on which see J. B. Titchener, University of Illinois Studies, ix., 1924) is good.
1
Why do they bid the bride touch fire and water?
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Is it that of these two, being reckoned as elements or first principles, fire is masculine and water feminine, Cf. Varro, De Lingua Latina, v. 61. The genders are those of ignis and aqua, not those of the Greek words. and fire supplies the beginnings of motion and water the function of the subsistent element or the material?
1
Or is it because fire purifies and water cleanses, and a married woman must remain pure and clean?
