Essays (Plutarch)

Plutarch’s moral and philosophical essays — the shorter prose pieces collected in antiquity as the Moralia, distinct from the Parallel Lives he is better known for. They range from practical advice (how to listen to a lecture, how to tell a flatterer from a friend) to arguments against the Stoics and Epicureans, and they are one of the main routes by which the Hellenistic schools reached later readers at all. Written in Greek in the late first and early second century AD.

Why it’s on the list: It is one of four primary texts in Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy, alongside Diogenes Laertius, Cicero’s On Obligations and Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy — a course that reads the post-Aristotelian schools through the men who transmitted them rather than through modern summaries, and Plutarch is the transmitter who argues back.

Where I saw it: Assigned in Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy on the University of Austin’s Fall 2025 reading list — “65 Texts Our Students Are Reading”, 65 assigned texts across 12 courses, shared by @uaustinorg on November 13 2025 and saved to Kyle’s Apple Note “Books To Read”. The full curriculum is transcribed on UATX Fall Reading List.

Connections

• UATX Fall Reading List — the curriculum this was assigned in.
• The University of Austin — the institution whose course list this is.
• Plutarch — the author.
• Plutarch’s Lives — his other work in the anti-library; the Essays are the Moralia side of the same writer.
• Stoicism — one of the schools the essays argue with.
• Greek Philosophy — the tradition these come out of.
• Classics