Plutarch's Letter of Condolence to Apollonius

Plutarch, Frank Cole Babbitt · Constitution of Man Series · 38 pages

The Letter of Condolence to Apollonius from the Moralia, in Frank Cole Babbitt's Loeb translation of 1928, and at 38 pages the longest file in this batch. Babbitt's introduction is unusually candid about the text's standing: the letter has in comparatively recent years fallen under suspicion as perhaps not Plutarch's work, on two grounds — the unusual length of its quotations, which he describes as emptied from the sack rather than scattered by hand, and certain incongruities of style.

His own verdict resists both charges without dismissing them. For every departure from accepted Plutarchean style, he notes, a striking instance of conformity can be cited, so no positive result follows from that line of argument; and while many quotations are unusually long, they are not longer than in other authors. One detail cuts in the letter's favour: the quotations from Euripides show a manuscript tradition so much better than the surviving Euripides texts that editors commonly adopt Plutarch's readings in preference. The quotation from Plato, by contrast, varies in minor ways from the received text without disturbing the sense. Babbitt adds that the letter tells us almost nothing about Apollonius and his dead son, and hardly more about Plutarch, lacking the intimate touch of the similar letter he wrote to his own wife.

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