Essays (Plutarch)

Why it’s on the list: Plutarch’s moral and philosophical essays — the shorter prose collected in antiquity as the Moralia, distinct from his Parallel Lives — ranging from practical advice (how to listen to a lecture, how to tell a flatterer from a friend) to arguments against the Stoics and Epicureans. They are one of the main routes by which the Hellenistic schools reached later readers at all.

Where I heard about it

• University of Austin — assigned in Hellenistic and Roman Philosophy on its Fall 2025 reading list (November 2025), 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. Full curriculum: UATX Fall Reading List.

About this edition

Written in Greek in the late first and early second century AD; any modern selection of the Moralia will do, and they vary widely in which essays they include.

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