Plutarch
Against Colotes — the defence of every philosopher the Garden mocked
Πρὸς Κωλώτην · Plutarch lived from about 45 to about 120 CE. The book he is answering was written by Colotes, one of Epicurus's own pupils, in the first generation of the school, so the reply comes roughly four centuries after the attack it answers.
One of Epicurus's own pupils, Colotes, wrote a book arguing that on the teachings of every other philosopher it would be impossible even to live, and dedicated it to a king. Four hundred years later Plutarch answered it, philosopher by philosopher: Democritus, Empedocles, Parmenides, Plato, Socrates, and the sceptics of Colotes' own day. Then, in the last five sections, he turns the charge around and asks the question that has followed the Garden ever since: the Epicureans write in praise of laws and government, so where are the Epicurean lawgivers, generals and magistrates?
How to read this page — what a person checked, and what the model wrote
The notes beside this text are here so you can read it straight through without stopping to look things up: what the passage assumes you already know, who is named without introduction, when the author is joking, what a social rule cost to break, and where the translator quietly tidied something up.
A language model wrote them, and no specialist has reviewed them. That makes them a companion rather than an authority — useful the way a well-read friend is useful, and wrong now and then in the same way. If you are writing something with a bibliography, cite the translation, named at the foot of this page, and let a note point you at what to check.
The division of labour on this page:
- Checked by a person: the translation, unaltered from the printed book; the source text, from the edition named below; every map dot for a named place, verified by hand against a gazetteer; every quotation, supplied from a hand-built list.
- The model's work: every note, headnote, gloss and piece of background; scene-location pins, which are its judgement and say so; any claim about tone, register or intent — those are arguments rather than facts, and you are free to disagree with them.
Quotations are the one thing the model is never allowed to propose — it may only explain one it has been handed from a hand-verified list, which is why you will see few of them. Spotting an allusion is the most valuable thing a commentary does and the easiest thing to invent convincingly, so that restraint is deliberate and is not going to change.
Spotted something wrong? Tell me — a reader who catches an error is the fastest way this gets better.
William Watson Goodwin (Q8020099, 1831-1912) edited and corrected the Plutarch's Morals published at Boston in 1874, revising a set of much older translations 'by several hands' rather than translating afresh. The Perseus file names the translator of this essay only by the initials A. G.; the underlying English is seventeenth-century and reads like it: 'hath', long periodic sentences, Latinate vocabulary, and the philosophers' technical terms rendered by whatever English came to hand. The English runs about one and a half times the length of the Greek, which is typical of the edition. Where Plutarch is arguing about perception or being, the Greek term matters more than the English, because the translator does not hold one rendering steady across the work.