Plutarch, De communibus notitiis adversus Stoicos 39: the cone (Goodwin 1874; Greek text)

Companion source

Source: Perseus Digital Library; local TEI chunk .xml from the xmlchunk route for section 39, and the Greek section as plain text .txt extracted from the Perseus Greek page for the same section; retrieved 2026-09-08. Metadata: English from Plutarch’s Morals, translated from the Greek by several hands, corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin, vol. 4 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1874), Perseus text 2008.01.0393; Greek from Plutarch, Moralia, ed. Gregorius N. Bernardakis, vol. 6 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1895), as stated in the Perseus page header. Stephanus pages 1079e–1080a. Extraction: TEI XML stored as served; Greek text obtained by stripping the HTML of the Perseus reading page. Rights: public domain texts; Perseus licenses its digital editions under CC BY-SA.

Source digest

Plutarch reports Chrysippus’s reply to Democritus’s question whether the surfaces of adjacent sections of a cone cut parallel to the base are equal or unequal: the surfaces are “neither equal nor unequal”, while the bodies are unequal. Plutarch rejects this as a licence to write whatever comes to mind, insisting that unequal bodies have unequal surfaces.

For this project, this is the passage that H04 verified in Xylander’s 1570 Latin; the English and Greek here supply searchable text for the reception task H05. The P01 review keeps the comparison with C032 as a modern analogy only.

Passage anchors

• English: “if a cone is divided by a plane parallel with its base, what is to be thought of the superficies of its segments, whether they are equal or unequal”, followed by “the superficies are neither equal or unequal, but that the bodies are unequal”.
• Greek: “τὰς μὲν ἐπιφανείας … μήτ᾽ ἴσας εἶναι μήτ᾽ ἀνίσους, ἄνισα δὲ τὰ σώματα”.

Coverage and limits

Reading level full-read for section 39 in both languages. The Greek xmlchunk route returned a 503 error twice on 2026-09-08, so the Greek was taken from the reading page instead.