A short Plutarch essay arguing that vice alone, without any help from bad luck, is sufficient to make a person miserable.
"Is Vice Sufficient to Cause Unhappiness?" is one of the shorter pieces in Plutarch's Moralia, built as a debate between two personified forces, Fortune and Vice, over which one really produces a wretched life. Plutarch stages it like a public building contract: cities invite competing builders to bid for a temple and pick whichever proposal is cheapest, best, and fastest, so he invites Fortune and Vice to bid for the contract of manufacturing misery. Fortune shows up loaded with external disasters, wars, shipwrecks, tyrants, poison, prisons, false accusers, while Vice stands by naked, needing nothing from outside at all.
The essay's method is to run through the classic external catastrophes, poverty, slavery, being sold into captivity, drinking poison, crucifixion, denial of burial, and show a historical or legendary figure who met each one without being made wretched by it: Metrocles laughing at poverty, Diogenes mocking slavery, Socrates drinking hemlock serenely, the Roman general Decius devoting himself to death in battle, Indian widows who compete for the honor of dying on their husbands' funeral pyres. If external blows fail to break the virtuous, Plutarch reasons, then Fortune cannot be the true cause of misery on her own; she only succeeds when Vice has already softened the person up from within, the way a thread saws through bone once the bone has been soaked in vinegar, or Parthian poison only kills through an open wound.
Plutarch's larger point, consistent with his Moralia project generally, is a Stoic-adjacent psychological claim: unhappiness is an inside job. Vice by itself, he argues, needs no cooperation from circumstance to torment a soul, since it works through desire, anger, and superstitious fear regardless of whether a person is rich, prospering, or safe. The essay survives incomplete, breaking off mid-argument, but its surviving portion is a compact, example-driven case for locating the source of misery in character rather than in circumstance.
“vice disposes all men to misery, being itself a self-sufficient craftsman of wretchedness; for it has need of neither instruments nor servants.”
— An Vitiositas Ad Infelicitatem Sufficia · read this chapter →
“Do you bring on slavery, chains, and being sold? Diogenes despises you”
— An Vitiositas Ad Infelicitatem Sufficia · read this chapter →
“Did you not offer this same cup to Socrates before, and did he not, serene and gentle, without a tremor and without any change of color or expression, drink it down quite readily?”
— An Vitiositas Ad Infelicitatem Sufficia · read this chapter →
“Fortune, then, is not by herself the accomplisher of misery, unless she has vice working together with her.”
— An Vitiositas Ad Infelicitatem Sufficia · read this chapter →
“it makes men wretched even while they are rich, prospering, inheriting land, and sailing the sea”
— An Vitiositas Ad Infelicitatem Sufficia · read this chapter →
It argues that moral vice, not bad luck, is the true and sufficient cause of a wretched life. Plutarch personifies Fortune and Vice as rival contractors bidding to produce misery, and shows that Vice alone, with no external instruments, can ruin a soul.
He cites Metrocles laughing at poverty, Diogenes mocking slavery after being sold by pirates, Socrates calmly drinking hemlock, and the Roman general Decius willingly sacrificing himself in battle. Each faced a supposed disaster without becoming wretched.
He argues Fortune only succeeds when Vice has already softened a person from within, comparing it to a thread that saws through bone only after the bone has been soaked in vinegar, or poison that only kills through an existing wound.
No, the surviving text breaks off mid-argument, listing further things vice does not need from outside (accusers, stripped wealth, blocked office) before the manuscript ends.
It reflects a Stoic-adjacent view, common in Plutarch's Moralia, that virtue and vice within the soul determine happiness far more than external circumstance.
Moralia: Ad Principem Ineruditum · Moralia: Adversus Colotem · Moralia: Amatoriae Narrationes · Moralia: Amatorius · Moralia: An Recte Dictum Sit Latenter Esse Vivendum · Moralia: An Seni Respublica Gerenda Sit · Moralia: An Virtus Doceri Possit · Moralia: Animine An Corporis Affectiones Sint Piores · Moralia: Apophthegmata Laconica · Moralia: Aquane An Ignis Sit Utilior · Moralia: Bruta Animalia Ratione Uti · Moralia: Comparationis Aristophanes Et Menandri Compendium