We'll be looking at Plutarch soon. Since we had no assigned reading for this week, though, let's take a look at something we can glance over today. I'm thinking we might usefully discuss a few of Horace's letters, specifically, the first, fifth, and sixth of the letters from his first book.
In the first letter, he declares his devotion to the study of virtue:
It is virtue, to fly vice; and the highest wisdom, to have lived free from folly.Yet in the fifth letter, he declares to his guest his readiness to pursue folly in his expression of the virtue of hospitality:
We shall have free liberty to prolong the summer evening with friendly conversation. To what purpose have I fortune, if I may not use it? He that is sparing out of regard to his heir, and too niggardly, is next neighbor to a madman. I will begin to drink and scatter flowers, and I will endure even to be accounted foolish. What does not wine freely drunken enterprise? It discloses secrets; commands our hopes to be ratified; pushes the dastard on to the fight; removes the pressure from troubled minds; teaches the arts. Whom have not plentiful cups made eloquent?In the sixth letter, he further complicates the picture:
Let the wise man bear the name of fool, the just of unjust; if he pursue virtue itself beyond proper bounds.... Lucullus, as they say, being asked if he could lend a hundred cloaks for the stage, “How can I so many?” said he: “yet I will see, and send as many as I have;” a little after he writes that he had five thousand cloaks in his house; they might take part of them, or all. It is a scanty house, where there are not many things superfluous, and which escape the owner’s notice, and are the gain of pilfering slaves.In resolving these apparent conflicts we come to understand what Horace really meant. How should they be resolved?
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