When Plutarch wrote to the young Nicandro, who had just arrived at adulthood, the advice was not "now speak", nor "now impose yourself". It was the opposite: learn, first, to listen. And this order, listening before speaking, is not a detail of etiquette. It is the central argument of the treatise How to Listen.
Virtue only enters through the ear
Plutarch starts from an observation about the body. The eyes, any shine seduces, and what you see does not always form character. Virtue, he says, only has one way to access the soul, the ear. That's why listening needs to come first, it's the only channel through which training actually enters. Whoever starts speaking, without having listened enough, speaks from what he already had before, not from what he could have learned.
The soul as a field, not as a ready-made speech
There is an image in the treatise that explains why order matters. Plutarch compares the soul to a field. A field that is not cultivated does not remain empty, it fills with weeds. If someone starts talking before having listened enough, they speak from the weeds that have already grown alone, prejudice, an opinion by ear, half information, and not from what careful listening would have planted there.
Listening first is, in this sense, cultivation itself. Speaking well, then, is the harvest. Reversing the order is trying to harvest a field that no one has plowed.
Soul care, not data collection
And there is an even deeper reason for this priority. For Plutarch, listening well is not used to accumulate information, it is used for what the ancients called cura animi, the care of the soul. Those who listen well don't come away knowing more, they end up being someone else. It is a process of transformation that necessarily needs to come before speaking, because only after being transformed by good listening does someone actually have something of their own to say.
This is why the treatise ends with this phrase, "the principle of living consists in listening well." No "the principle of living consists in speaking well." Order, for Plutarch, was never incidental.
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See recommended readingsFrequently asked questions
Why should you listen before speaking?
Because, according to Plutarch, virtue only reaches the soul through the ear, never through one's own speech. Those who speak before learning to listen repeat unexamined opinions. Well-trained listening is what gives speech something worth saying afterwards.
What was Plutarch's advice to young Nicandro?
In the treatise How to Listen, Plutarch does not teach Nicandro how to speak well or how to impose himself. It teaches, first, how to listen, because all human formation, paideia, begins with the ear, not with speech.
What is Plutarch's cura animi?
It is the care of the soul that good listening provides. For Plutarch, listening well is not collecting information, it is an exercise that transforms the listener, the cura animi, the care for oneself that precedes any valuable word of one's own.
Continue: How to Listen, by Plutarch · What is paideia, the Greek human formation? · Plato's dialogue Meno
Source class (YouTube): Como Ouvir, de Plutarco (NousCast)