Plutarch
Is 'Live Unnoticed' Good Advice?
Εἰ καλῶς εἴρηται τὸ λάθε βιώσας · Plutarch lived from about 45 to about 120 CE. The maxim he is attacking, λάθε βιώσας, 'live unnoticed', was Epicurus's, from about four centuries earlier.
Epicurus advised his followers to 'live unnoticed', to stay out of politics, public life and the notice of powerful people. Plutarch thought this was the most dangerous thing the school taught, and in seven short sections he argues against it: that the advice defeats itself by being published, that it would have cost Greece its Epaminondas and its Socrates, and that a life no one sees is a kind of living burial. It is the shortest statement of the political objection to Epicureanism, and the objection has never quite gone away.
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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 as Charles Whitaker, one of those earlier hands, and the prose is late seventeenth-century: 'doth', 'hath', 'you will needs seclude us', and the verse quotations turned into rhyming couplets. This is the loosest translation in the collection. The English runs nearly twice the length of the Greek, consistently across all seven sections, because the translator expands every image and adds his own emphasis. Where the argument depends on a word, check the Greek; where it depends on a flourish, the flourish may be Whitaker's.