ADVICE ABOUT KEEPING WELL (DE TUENDA SANITATE PRAECEPTA)
INTRODUCTION
Plutarch had more than a casual interest in medicine, for, besides this essay
on keeping well, his other works abound in references to the behaviour of
the sick and their treatment, and the medical practices of his day. Long
before the time of Plutarch the art of medicine, always empirical, had been
put on a solid foundation, and the acute observations of Hippocrates and his
school had been set down in writing ; and this body of Hippocratic medical
writings, along with others, was in circulation, and had undoubtedly been
read by Plutarch.
That medicine has made very great advances since Plutarch's time is, of
course, self-evident; ‘aseptic,’
‘antiseptic,’ and ‘sterilize’ are now household
words, and the germ theory of disease has, in recent times, shed light on
much which before was dark. But Plutarch is not dealing with the technical
side of medicine ; he is only giving some common-sense advice on rational
living, and much that he has to say in regard to rest, exercise, and diet is
in accord with the best medical practice of the present day. In fact, it is
doubtful if any physician would take exception to anything that Plutarch
advises (his advice is meant for men whose work is done with their heads
rather than their hands), and one might name men in public life to-day, well
on in years, who have followed many of his suggestions, unwittingly, no
doubt, but to their own advantage.
[p. 215]
The essay seems, at the first glance, to be put in the form of a dialogue,
but it is about as much of a dialogue as Quiller-Couch's Foe-Farrell. The
dialogue form is merely a literary subterfuge to present an essay in a
slightly more attractive form, and the third person of the dialogue, only
occasionally recalled to the reader by the parsimonious interjection of
‘he said,’ may be presumed to be Plutarch, the author. The
two speakers in the brief dialogue at the beginning of the essay are
Moschion, a physician, whom Plutarch introduces also into the Symposiacs
(Moralia, 658 a), and Zeuxippus, a friend of Plutarch's, who is introduced
also as a speaking character in two other essays of Plutarch's (Moralia, 748
e and 1086 c), besides being mentioned several times in other essays.
That the essay was written some time after a.d. 81 is clear from the
reference to the death of the Roman Emperor Titus (123 d).
The title of the essay is included in Lamprias' list of Plutarch's works, and
Stobaeus, in his Florilegium, has several quotations from it, sometimes with
a slightly different reading, but none of these readings changes the meaning
of the passage at all, and rarely is one to be preferred to the reading
found in the mss. of Plutarch (see Vol. I. Introd. p. xxi).
Indeed, the text of this essay has suffered more at the hands of modern
editors than from the ancient copyists, for a glance at the foot-notes
inBernardakis's edition will show that the gratuitous and unnecessary
changes introduced into the text by modern editors outnumber their
corrections of the minor errors in spelling, and the like, made by the
ancient copyists.