A Plutarchan Hypomnema on Self–Love

Abstract

Plutarch's statement in the introduction to De Tranquillitate Animi has elicited much industrious activity from the scholarly world, and rightly so. The sentence dve)i8^(x^r)v Jtepi evOujnac; ex xcov imo^vrpaxoov cov e\iavT(b jrejioir^evoc; exvyxavov (464F) invites one naturally to apply the method of classical hermeneutics (as understood by Babilas 1961, 30, 51-52), consisting in the confrontation of an author's oeuvre (its inventio, dispositio, and elocutio) with all the elements of its generating context (historical circumstances, literary antecedents, biography and psychology of the author, immediate reasons for the composition, etc.) that might shed some light on the work in question and help to understand it. In the case of De Tranquillitate Animi Plutarch himself mentions his hypomnemata as one of the ele? ments that contributed to this work, thus provoking his reader to investigate the relationship between these hypomnemata and the text in hand.

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