Such an hypothesis can only be ventured in the broadest outline, for no one date covers all the Lives or all the Dialogues, and some of the facts are perplexing. In the Second Pythian Dialogue Diogenianus appears as a very young man, and is introduced as the son of a father known to the company; and Diogenianus of Pergamum takes part in several of the Symposiacs, but there is no mention of a son old enough to be brought with him. On the other hand, Boethus in the same dialogue is ‘on his way to the camp of the Epicureans’; in one of the Symposiacs he is ‘an Epicurean’ simply. In the last book of the Symposiacs Theon’s sons come in, but we do not hear of him elsewhere as a father of grown-up sons.

The dialogue On the Face which appears on the Orb of the Moon is unique as showing the interest taken by men of good general education in scientific subjects in the first century of our era, and as evidence of the point to which the natural sciences had then attained. Professional science may be said to have been almost limited to the province of the mathematician and his congeners. Natural History was part of the general outfit of the ‘Philosophers’, and there was no idea of the ‘Conquest of Nature’ for the relief of man’s estate, unless by the engineer or the physician. With these limitations, the progress made may strike some modern readers as surprisingly great, and a good example may be found in the very precise knowledge of Hipparchus and Ptolemy of the delicate phenomena of the moon’s movements. We are tempted to ask whether, if Greeks had not settled these problems, which men of no other ancient race attacked scientifically, they would have been settled to this day. To come down to a humbler matter: if the properties of the conic sections had not been discovered by Apollonius and his predecessors, would they stand in their place, probably a modest one, on a modern syllabus, and, meanwhile, could the mechanical arts have progressed without them? And the conic sections are simple things compared with the lines, surfaces, and solids determined once for all by Archimedes. Archimedes was a mathematician by the grace of Nature, and an engineer by the order of a prince; and the conic sections themselves were examined, not from any practical interest in the cone, but because they were found to furnish instances of the curves which might facilitate the line of inquiry, suggested by Plato with such amazing foresight, as a half-way house towards a solution of Apollo’s problem.[14] Of course this can only be stated as a question—not a rhetorical question—and must be left on the knees of the gods. The general subject is discussed in D. Ruhnken’s admirable De Graecia artium ac doctrinarum inventrice, an inaugural lecture delivered at Leyden in 1757 (just thirty years after Newton’s death).

A few lines about the scholar to whose prolonged labours upon Plutarch we owe so much are only his due. Daniel Wyttenbach was born at Bern, where his father was a divine of good Swiss family, in 1746. He studied at Marburg and Göttingen, and passed to Holland, filling professorial chairs at Amsterdam, and, from 1798, at Leyden. In Holland he was the colleague and intimate friend of Valckenaer (1715-85) and David Ruhnken (1723-98), himself by birth a German. By their advice, he turned from a meditated edition of the Emperor Julian’s works to Plutarch. The two advisers were not quite at one, and Wyttenbach seemed to crouch between two burdens—Valckenaer wished him to produce a final edition of some one work, Ruhnken (who would gladly have faced the task himself if he had been a younger man) preferred that he should not stop short of all Plutarch. In 1772 he produced his learned and complete commentary on the De sera numinum Vindicta. About this time the Delegates of the Oxford Press were anxious to produce a worthy edition of a great classic; and in 1788 Thomas Burgess, Fellow of Corpus Christi College, afterwards Bishop of St. Davids and of Salisbury, visited Holland and sought an introduction to Wyttenbach, with whom an arrangement was concluded in the autumn of that year. The issue of the volumes of text, with critical notes and revised Latin version, began in 1795 and went on steadily till 1797; but there was much delay and many searchings of heart over the last volume, containing the fragments, the dispatch of which was hindered by the state of war and the occupation of Holland by foreign troops. It was at last discovered in 1800 in the port of Hamburg, and appears to have reached Oxford in that year. The first two volumes of the commentary, to page 242 C, had preceded it in 1798, and were also published in 1800. The last volume must have proceeded slowly, for it had only reached 392 D, near the end of the E at Delphi, when, on January 12, 1807, it was interrupted by an explosion due to the careless use of fire on a barge loaded with gunpowder. The effects of the conflagration which followed are visible in Leyden to this day. The disaster was ill-timed for us, for the commentary stops just short of a passage of great interest (see p. 75). Wyttenbach bore this trouble, which he has graphically described in several letters, and also those caused by ill health and narrowed means, with much fortitude. He died in 1820, and the last volume of the commentary was sent to Oxford and published in 1821, followed by the two volumes of the Index Graecitatis in 1830. He was a most amiable man, and the letters which passed between him and Ruhnken have much charm of feeling and expression. Both wrote in admirable Latin; Wyttenbach’s style is always fluent and picturesque, but has certain idiosyncrasies, which may delay an English reader.[15]

Of older scholars who had dealt with Plutarch, by far the most important was Turnebus[16] (1512-65). Of Xylander (W. Holzmann, 1532-76), who produced the Latin translation, the basis of his own commentary, and a Greek text, Wyttenbach writes with much respect and sympathy, as he does also of Reiske (1716-74), his own contemporary, who, however, was not quite adequately equipped, in point of material or of critical judgement.

I should like to express my deep sense of the loss caused to classical scholarship by the lamented death of Herbert Richards. I have more than once referred to his critical notes on the Moralia, which have been appearing lately in the Classical Review: many of the finer points of Greek idiom do not concern a translator, but there are several most valuable suggestions and criticisms which I have felt confidence in adopting.

A still more personal loss, which intimately concerns this volume, is that of Ingram Bywater. He had promised a revision of it in its passage through the press; and his vigilance as a Curator as well as his jealousy for the severer traditions of scholarship, apart from his personal kindness, would, I know, have made it a searching one. He did not specially care for English translation, and his own masterly version of the Poetics of Aristotle is prefaced by something like a protest. Nor did he feel much sympathy with what he would call the ‘Realien’. On the realities of life no one had a saner or better informed judgement. For natural science and its representatives he cherished a genuine respect; and perhaps none of the tributes to his memory would have touched him more than one which was paid in the pages of Nature by an old colleague and friend of the Exeter College days. But he had a certain shyness of the intrusion of arguments based, say, upon geometry or music, into problems of language already sufficiently perplexed. How generously his noble library and his own stores of wisdom were thrown open to those who sought them is known to many, as it is to myself.

Yet another great loss to me has been that of the Rev. David Thomas, Rector of Garsington, in Oxfordshire, a veteran mathematician, my near neighbour and most kindly and helpful referee during many years.

I cannot send out even so small a volume without a word of gratitude for affectionate and lifelong help received from John Wordsworth, Bishop of Salisbury 1885-1911. His own enduring contribution to secular scholarship was made in 1874, and holds its place in the judgement of Latin scholars. He was always shouldering new burdens, the last being the mastering, for a definite purpose of friendship and public duty, of the language and history of Sweden. But his great stores of books and of knowledge were always in order, and always made available to others. He would often preface any opinion of his own by ‘My father used to think highly’ of such a book or such a person; and it was always well to be reminded of that true scholar and most courteous gentleman of an older day.

I owe much, for help and advice, to living friends whom I should like to thank, but may not. But I must be allowed to acknowledge, in no conventional spirit, the great care bestowed on these pages by the Reader for the Delegates of the Press, who has entered into difficulties of matter as well as of language as few scholars can be expected to have the patience to do.[17]