A practical essay from Plutarch's Moralia on raising freeborn sons well: choosing a spouse, nurses, tutors, and habits that shape virtue.
De Liberis Educandis ("On the Education of Children") is a short practical treatise from Plutarch's Moralia, the huge miscellany of essays that survives alongside his more famous Parallel Lives. It walks through a Greco-Roman upbringing roughly in chronological order: whom a father should marry if he wants well-born children, whether mothers should nurse their own infants, how to choose slave-companions and tutors for a boy, what subjects deserve most attention, and how to handle a young man's first taste of independence. Throughout, Plutarch argues that virtue requires three things working together — nature, reason (learning), and habit (practice) — and that even a poor natural endowment can be corrected by the right teaching and training, just as a poor teaching can ruin a fine nature.
The essay is full of the anecdotes and sayings Plutarch is known for: Lycurgus's experiment with two puppies raised differently to prove the power of habit, Aristippus's joke about a stingy father buying his son "two slaves," Socrates' calm response to being kicked by a rude youth, and a series of Pythagorean riddle-sayings ("do not step over the balance beam," "abstain from beans") each given a moral gloss. Plutarch insists education must be the crown placed on top of every other advantage — good birth, wealth, beauty, and physical strength are all called fragile or borrowed goods, while "education alone, of all the things that are in us, is immortal and divine." He also addresses harder territory frankly: he is visibly uncertain about whether an older male admirer should be allowed near a boy, weighing the example of Socrates and Plato against the objections of stricter fathers, and lands on distinguishing lovers of the soul from lovers of mere youth.
The essay matters as a window into how an educated Greek of the Roman imperial period (Plutarch, c. 46–120 CE) thought a family should function — what counted as good parenting, what dangers (flatterers, bad tutors, corrupt slaves, harsh punishment) needed guarding against, and how philosophy was meant to sit above rhetoric, athletics, and memory training as the real goal of a young man's formation. Much of its advice — use praise and blame rather than blows, watch a teenager more closely than a small child, fathers should model the behavior they demand — reads as strikingly modern, even though the setting (slave tutors, arranged marriages, pederasty) is entirely of its own time.
“For laziness ruins the virtue of a good nature, while teaching corrects a poor one; easy things escape the careless, while difficult things are captured by diligence.”
— De Liberis Educandis · read this chapter →
“For character (ethos) is habit (ethos) of long standing, and if one were to call the moral virtues "habitual" virtues, one would not seem to be mistaken.”
— De Liberis Educandis · read this chapter →
“Education alone, of all the things that are in us, is immortal and divine.”
— De Liberis Educandis · read this chapter →
“Praise and blame are more beneficial to the freeborn than any kind of ill-treatment, the one spurring them on toward what is honorable, the other holding them back from what is shameful.”
— De Liberis Educandis · read this chapter →
“there is no class more utterly destructive, none that more readily and more quickly derails youth, than flatterers, who utterly ruin both fathers and sons together”
— De Liberis Educandis · read this chapter →
It is a short practical essay on raising freeborn children, covering choice of spouse and nurses, selecting tutors, discipline methods, and the proper balance of rhetoric, physical training, memory work, and philosophy. It argues that virtue results from nature, learning, and habit working together, and that education is the one good fortune cannot take away.
No. He explicitly says children should be led "by exhortations and reasoning, and certainly not by blows or ill-treatment," arguing that harsh treatment suits slaves, not the freeborn, and that alternating praise and rebuke works better.
He recommends mothers nurse their own infants rather than relying on wet nurses, arguing that nature gave women two breasts partly so twins could be fed, and that shared nursing creates a stronger emotional bond than paid affection can.
Plutarch recounts how the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus raised two puppies from the same parents differently — one became gluttonous, the other a skilled hunter — then released them before assembled Spartans to demonstrate that habit and upbringing, not birth alone, shape character.
He treats flatterers as the single most corrupting influence on a young man, describing how they counter a father's calls for sobriety and thrift with encouragements toward drunkenness, licentiousness, and extravagance, and urges fathers to drive them out entirely.
He treats general subjects and rhetorical training as useful but secondary, physical training as necessary for health and military fitness, and philosophy as the crown of all education, since it alone addresses the health of the soul rather than the body or reputation.
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: An Vitiositas Ad Infelicitatem Sufficia · Moralia: Animine An Corporis Affectiones Sint Piores · Moralia: Apophthegmata Laconica · Moralia: Aquane An Ignis Sit Utilior · Moralia: Bruta Animalia Ratione Uti