Library › Greek: Philosophy › On the Soul (Fragments)
On the Soul (Fragments) consists of four short excerpts preserved in the anthology of Stobaeus, where they are headed "Themistius, from On the Soul". Since the eighteenth century they have usually been assigned instead to the lost On the Soul of Plutarch of Chaeronea, a title listed in the Lamprias Catalogue, and Sandbach prints them among Plutarch's fragments. They include Diogenes' remark about Plato, the story of a chaste married couple, Sophocles on the deaths of old men, and the death of the Stoic Antipater.
The excerpts are anecdotal moral reflections of the kind common in Plutarch, and their reattribution is a good example of how modern scholars correct the headings of ancient anthologies. They give a glimpse of a lost Plutarchan work on the soul, and they show how Stobaeus mined earlier writers for passages on marriage, old age and death.
About this edition. The Greek text comes from the Eulogikon open corpus of public-domain editions (standard reference: Stob. 3.13.68, 4.22.89, 4.50.29, 4.52.45 (Wachsmuth–Hense); cf. Plutarch frr. 173–178 Sandbach). Every word has been analyzed with odyCy, a neural language model for Ancient Greek — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from the Liddell–Scott–Jones Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ). Stobaeus's lemmata name 'Themistius, from On the Soul', but since Wyttenbach these excerpts are usually assigned to Plutarch's lost On the Soul (Lamprias no. 99), and Sandbach prints them among Plutarch's fragments.