What it is
The Moralia (Greek Ēthika, "ethical writings") is the modern name for the large body of Plutarch's work that is not biography — some seventy-odd surviving essays, dialogues and treatises on an extraordinary range of subjects: ethics and self-improvement, politics and statecraft, religion and the Delphic oracle, education, marriage, friendship, the control of anger, the right way to listen, the reading of poetry, even questions of natural science and the faces in the moon. The platform reads it as the indispensable companion to the Parallel Lives: the Lives show character in action, the Moralia reflects directly on the principles the Lives enact.
Its purpose and range
Plutarch wrote, for the most part, as a moralist and teacher addressing educated readers who would hold public responsibilities. The platform reads the political essays as the most directly useful for the cluster: the Praecepta gerendae reipublicae (Precepts of Statecraft) advises the Greek notable on how to conduct public life under Roman rule; To an Uneducated Ruler and Whether an Old Man Should Engage in Public Affairs treat the ethics of office; the essays on education and on listening set out the formation of judgement that statesmanship requires. The platform reads these under virtue in public life and the education of statesmen.
Its argument and character
The Moralia has no single thesis; its unity is one of temper rather than doctrine. Plutarch writes as a Middle Platonist of humane, practical, undogmatic cast — suspicious of extremes, attentive to the texture of ordinary life, convinced that philosophy is for living and not for display. The platform reads this temper as itself the argument: that the moral life is built from attention to small things — habits, words, the government of one's own anger and appetite — and that this daily self-cultivation is continuous with the great public virtues the Lives celebrate. The same conviction underwrites the moral biography of the Lives.
Influence and use
The Moralia was read across the European centuries alongside the Lives — Montaigne's essays are saturated with it, and the form of the personal essay owes much to Plutarch's example. The platform carries it with the same citation discipline as the rest of the corpus: Plutarch is a witness to the moral and intellectual world of a cultivated provincial Greek under the Empire, to be read for his judgement and his temper, and cited by the standard Stephanus pages. It is the fullest record we have of how such a man thought the good life should be lived.