Preliminary Stages or Final Destinations? Plutarch’s Remarks on the Subjects of Most Interest to Beginners in Philosophy

Abstract

In his influential doctoral dissertation Fritz Krauss adopted Rudolf Hirzel’s view that as a young man Plutarch had turned from the study of rhetoric to the study of philosophy. His aim was to establish that any of Plutarch’s surviving texts that display explicit traces of rhetorical conventions date to his early years. However, Krauss provided only one piece of positive evidence to support Hirzel’s conjecture: a passage from On Progress in Virtue. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that, upon closer examination, this passage does not depict engagement with rhetoric as a preliminary stage in the education of young men, but rather, it describes the opposite process.