De primo frigido

Plutarch

Plutarch. Moralia, Vol. XII. Cherniss, Harold and William C. Helmbold, translators. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1957 (printing).

This little essay, or open letter to Favorinus, is not written in a controversial spirit, though a few sharp comments are made from time to time. Having established (chapters 5-7) that an element of Cold really exists, Plutarch proceeds to consider what that element may be. Since fire is obviously excluded, can it be air, as the Stoics believe (8-12), or water, as Empedocles, and an early Peripatetic, Strato, hold (13-16)? Or, indeed, may it be earth itself (17-22)? This latter opinion is apparently put forward by Plutarch as an original contribution to theoretical physics and there is no reason to believe it is not his. The essay closes, however, with a recommendation to scepticism,[*](See J. Schröter, Plutarchs Stellung zur Skepsis (Greifswald, 1911), pp. 23 and 40. He compares other recomendations to the suspension of judgement, such as Mor. 430 f - 431 a. Cf. also Hartman, De Plutarcho, pp. 253 f.) so that our author may not have regarded his attempted proof as cogent, as indeed it is not.

The work was probably written in Delphi (cf. 953 c-d and e) after A.D. 107-(949 e, note) and addressed to the young philosopher Favorinus,[*](For the details see Ziegler’s article on Plutarch in Pauly-Wissowa, RE, col. 675.) the great lover of Aristotle (Mor. 734 f), who is also a speaker in Symposiacs, viii. 10. Though Favorinus was in all

likelihood some twenty years younger than Plutarch, the two men dedicated several works to each other.[*](Lamprias cat. 132: Plutarch’s Letter to Favorinus on Friendship (or The Use of Friends); Galen, de Opt. Doctr. (i. 41 K): Favorinus’s Plutarch, or On the Academic Disposition. See also Suidas, s.v. Φαβωρῖνος.) In the present essay it is, perhaps, odd that of the three quotations from Aristotle one is a rebuke (950 b), one is apparently a partial miscitation (948 a, note), while the third is of no importance. No doubt it is in virtue of Favorinus’ youth that his idol is treated so lightly, and that the sceptical note is sounded so firmly at the end. The young Peripatetic was also quoted by Plutarch (for partial refutation) in Mor. 271 c; but Plutarch (if Tarn[*](Alexander the Great, ii. 298 f.) and others are right) became much more favourable to Peripatetics later in his life (e.g. in the Life of Alexander).

Bernardakis’s text of this work is one of his most unsatisfactory; even for an editio minor it is careless and confused to a deplorable extent. Nor are the means of correcting and supplementing it at hand, the fifth Teubner volume being still, one fears, in the remote future. Then, too. the only photographs available were those of E and Β. which are not likely to add much to our knowledge.[*](See the recent brisk controversy as to their relationship: Manton, Class. Quart. xliii (1949), pp. 97-104; Hubert, Rhein. Mus. xciii (1950), pp. 330-336; Einarson and De Lacy, Class. Phil. xlvi (1951), p. 110, n. 56; Flaceliere, ed. Plutarch, Amatorius, pp. 35 ff. The evidence in this essay, for what it may be worth, seems to make it unlikely that B was here copied from either E or an immediate descendant; they both appear to go back to a common ancestor, perhaps through several intermediaries: see, e.g., 951 a, b, d, 953 e. See now Cherniss supra, pp. 27, note a; 31, 32.) Consequently the only course that seemed prudent was to return to

Wyttenbach wherever there was a reasonable doubt. Bernardakis has been tacitly corrected (or altered, whichever it may be) in a good many places. This has been done consistently when both E and Β agree with Wyttenbach’s and Hutten’s silence; Bernardakis’s silence, unfortunately, appears to have no significance.

The work is no. 90 in the catalogue of Lamprias.

Is there, then, Favorinus,[*](See the introduction to this essay.) an active principle or substance of Cold (as fire is of Heat) through the presence of which and through participation in which everything else becomes cold? Or is coldness rather a negation of warmth, as they say darkness is of light and rest of motion? Cold, indeed, seems to have the quality of being stationary, as heat has that of motion; while the cooling off of hot things is not caused by the presence of any force,[*](As, for instance, the force of fire.) but merely by the displacement of heat, for it can be seen to depart completely at the same time as the remainder cools off. The steam, for example, which boiling water emits, is expelled in company with the departing heat; that is why the amount becomes less by cooling off; for this removes the heat and nothing else takes its place.

First of all, must we not be wary of one point in this argument ? It eliminates many obvious forces by considering them not to be qualities or properties, but merely the negation of qualities or properties, weight being the negation of lightness and hardness that of softness, black that of white, and bitter that of sweet, and so in any other case where there is a natural opposition of forces rather than a relation of positive and negative. Another point is that all negation is inert and unproductive: blindness, for

example, and deafness, silence or death. Here you have the defection of a definite form and the annihilation of a reality, not something that is in itself a part of nature or reality. It is the nature of coldness, however, to produce affects and alterations in bodies that it enters no less than those caused by heat. Many objects can be frozen solid, or become condensed or made viscous, by cold.[*](As steam is condensed and oil becomes viscous.) Moreover, the property whereby coldness promotes rest and resists motion is not inert, but acts by pressure and resistance. being constrictive and preservative because of its strength. This explains how, though negation is a disappearance and departure of the contrary force, many things may yet become[*](The verb is ambiguous: become cold or dry or perhaps congealed. ) cold while all the time containing within themselves considerable warmth. There are even some objects which cold solidifies and consolidates the more readily the hotter they are: steel, for example, plunged in water. The Stoics[*](Cf.Mor. 1052 f; von Arnim, S.V.F. ii, pp. 134, 222; and see Hartman’s explanation, De Plutarcho, p. 566. Von Arnim thinks that the next five chapters also contain Stoic material.) also affirm that in the bodies of infant children the breath is tempered by cooling and, from being a physical substance, becomes a soul. This, however, is debatable; yet since there are many other effects which may be seen to be produced through the agency of cold, we are not justified in regarding it as a negation.

Besides, a negation does not permit degrees of less or more. Surely nobody will affirm that one blind man is blinder than another, or one dumb man more silent than another, or one corpse deader than its fellow; but among cold things there is a wide range of deviation from much to little, from very cold to not very, and, generally speaking, in degrees of intensity

and remission, just as there is in hot things. This occurs because the matter involved is in different cases acted upon by the opposing forces with more or less intensity; it thus exhibits degrees of one or the other, and so of hot and cold. There is, in fact, no such thing as a blending of positive qualities with negative ones, nor may any positive force accept the assault of the negation that corresponds to it or take it into partnership; instead it gives place to it. Now hot things do admit a blending with cold up to a point, just as do black with white, high notes with low, sweet tastes with sour; and this harmonious association of colours and sounds, drugs and sauces, produces many combinations that are pleasant and grateful to the senses.

For the opposition of a negation to a positive quality is an irreconcilable hostility, since the existence of the one is the annihilation of the other. The other opposition, however, of positive forces, if it occurs in due measure, is often operative in the arts, and very often indeed in various phenomena of nature, especially in connexion with the weather and the seasons and those matters from which the god derives his title of harmonizer and musician, because he organizes and regulates them. He does not receive these names merely for bringing sounds of high and low pitch, or black and white colours, into harmonious fellowship, but because he has authority over the association and disunion of heat and cold in the universe, to see that they observe due measure in their combination and separation, and because, by eliminating the excess of either, he brings both into proper order.