Moralia
Ethika
Philosophy is only valuable insofar as it can be applied to the practical business of living well, managing anger, grief, friendship, marriage, and civic duty, and essays addressing these ordinary concerns directly are as serious a philosophical project as abstract system-building.
- philosophy applied to ordinary practical life
- religious and antiquarian essays alongside ethics
- Platonist ethics defended against rival schools
- an essayistic, anecdotal prose style
- influence on Montaigne's invention of the essay
The Moralia collects roughly seventy-eight of Plutarch's surviving essays and dialogues, composed alongside his Parallel Lives, ranging from practical ethics, On the Control of Anger, Advice on Marriage, to religious and antiquarian inquiry, On Isis and Osiris, to literary and philosophical criticism defending Platonism against Stoic and Epicurean rivals. Rather than building a single system, Plutarch, a practicing priest at the Delphic oracle, treats each essay as an occasion to apply Platonist ethical principles to a specific human situation in a conversational, anecdote-rich style. Its accessibility made it, alongside the Lives, widely read in Renaissance Europe, directly shaping Montaigne's invention of the personal essay.
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