Reason nor Emotion to run away with him; he is as far removed from the dialectic severities of Plato, as he is from the superstitious beliefs and practices of the later Platonists. He has no special and peculiar message either to the theologian in the pulpit, or to the child at its mother's knee. He appeals to humanity at large; to the people who have work to do, and who want to get it done with honesty and dignity; to students, teachers, politicians, members of a busy society; to people who are liable to all the temptations, and capable of all the virtues, which naturally arise in the ordinary life of highly civilized communities. He analyses and illustrates such common vices as anger, avarice, envy, hate, flattery;[1] he penetrates and exposes such ordinary failings as garrulity, gaucherie, personal extravagance, and interfering curiosity.[2] His sympathetic pen, as of one who knows the value of such things, depicts with rare charm the loveliness of friendship, and of affection for brother, child, and wife; while he applies a more religious consolation to those who are suffering under the bitterness of exile, the sadness of bereavement by death.[3] To connect Plutarch's Religion with his Ethics at all these points of contact
- ↑ See the "De cohibenda ira," "de cupiditate divitiarum," "de invidia et odio," "de adulatore et amico."
- ↑ "De arrulitate," "de vitioso pudore," "de vitando aere alieno," "de curiositate."
- ↑ "De amicorum multitudine," and "de adulatore et amico"; "de fraterno amore," "de amore prolis"; "conjugalia præcepta," "de exilio," "consolatio ad uxorem," "consolatio ad Apollonium." ("I can easily believe," says Emerson, "that an anxious soul may find in Plutarch's 'Letter to his Wife Timoxena,' a more sweet and reassuring argument on the immortality than in the Phædo of Plato.")
