Theages on Virtue

Theages, Plutarch · Living the Life Series · 14 pages

Theages, from his treatise On the Virtues, in Thomas Taylor's translation from his 1818 Fragments of the Ethical Writings of Certain Pythagoreans in the Doric Dialect, together with an essay by Plutarch on whether virtue can be taught. Fourteen pages. The epigraph is from Pindar's second Pythian Ode, on keeping afloat like an unmerged cork on the broad barrier of the deep. The frontispiece is Daniel Ridgway Knight's Polishing the Urn. Please note that this document is reached from two separate lines on the Living the Life list, which differ only in the capitalisation of one word.

Theages begins from a division of the soul into three, and the whole treatment of virtue follows from it: one part is the reasoning power, another is anger, and another desire. Each is then given its own province — the reasoning power has dominion over knowledge, anger over impetus, and desire rules over the appetitions of the soul. Virtue on this account is not a single quality but the right ordering of three faculties that have different objects and can fall out of proportion with one another, which is why the treatise proceeds by examining each in turn rather than by defining virtue once. Plutarch's essay, printed alongside it, takes up the question that the Pythagorean scheme raises but does not settle — whether virtue can be taught at all, or whether the ordering Theages describes is something a person either has by nature or does not. Setting a Pythagorean fragment beside a later Greek essay on the same difficulty is the method used throughout this section, and here it lets the reader see one tradition state a position and another test it.

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