Between Heathenism and Christianity - College of Stoic Philosophers

Plutarch and the Greece of His Age
NOTE: To translate Plutarch is a very different task from
that of translating Seneca. The style of the latter is terse and
epigrammatic; clauses and sentences often follow each other
without connectives, and are in the main short. That of the
former is the reverse. Most of his sentences are long, many
of them very long. These, as well as clauses and words, are
often strung together with the participles xai and
ydf>,
or other connectives, until the reader sometimes wonders
whether they will ever end. Seneca is full of pithy sayings
well suited for quotation: in Plutarch they are rare, The
style of both writers is highly rhetorical, but, if we except
the evident striving after effect, they have little else in com
mon.
As in the case of Seneca, it has been my aim to preserve for
the English reader the peculiarities of the Greek, so far as
possible. There is much to be said in favor of making a
translation, above everything else, readable: but in the effort
to do so, the translator is constantly exposed to the danger of
displacing the style of the original with his own. I hope I
have in a measure, at least, succeeded in putting before the
English reader, not only what Plutarch said in the following
Tract, but also how he said it.
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