Plutarch
The E at Delphi — seven explanations of one letter
Περὶ τοῦ Ε τοῦ ἐν Δελφοῖς · Written probably in the 90s CE, when Plutarch was a priest at Delphi. The conversation it reports took place years earlier, when Nero was in Greece in 66-67 CE and Plutarch was a young student of Ammonius.
Among the offerings at Delphi stood a large letter E, and nobody knew what it meant. Plutarch remembers an evening, years earlier, when his teacher and friends tried: it counts the Seven Sages, who were really five; it is the word 'if', with which every question to the oracle begins; it is the number five, which the young Plutarch shows at some length explains almost everything. Then his teacher gives the last answer. The letter means 'Thou art'. It is what the worshipper says back to the god's 'Know thyself': you are, and we only become.
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. This essay's underlying English is R. Kippax's, from the 1684-94 Morals, and it reads like the seventeenth century: 'hath' and 'saith', long periodic sentences, Latinate vocabulary, and religious terms rendered by whatever English came to hand. The English runs roughly half as long again as the Greek, which is typical of the edition. Two words need watching throughout. 'Daemon' is δαίμων, a being between gods and men, and must not be read as the Christian 'demon'. And 'the God' with a capital is almost always Apollo of Delphi, not a monotheist's God.