Plutarch’s Lives, like all of his writings, proved very popular. Much of their attraction resided in their style.3 In Plutarch’s day, Greek authors strove to use only the language and mannerisms of the literary world of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, the period, in their view, that represented Greek writing at its best. Plutarch shares this archaizing tendency, but he is not bound by it: his undeniably fine Attic prose admits, more than occasionally, contemporary vocabulary and syntax, the effect of which is a Greek that is always meticulous, respectable and suitable to its subject but almost never stodgy. Plutarch delights in metaphor and imaginative imagery, and he entertains his reader with frequent allusions to poetry and philosophy (which only seldom become pretentious). He exhibits an impressive narrative flair: his visual descriptions are vivid, his dramatic sense acute – and his capacity for depicting complexities and nuances of character is advanced. And the stories he tells are all superb stuff: the public and private lives of the greatest men of the Greek and Roman past, hallowed figures who made history and about whom Plutarch records ‘what is noblest and most important to know’ (Aemilius 1).
Plutarch died a famous man. And yet we know remarkably little about his life and career. In his writings, he often and affectionately mentions his family, especially his wife, Timoxena, herself an author (Moralia 145a) and the object of her husband’s devotion. Plutarch was the father of at least five children, three of whom died very young, and in his Lives he is alert to the pain felt by fathers who suffer such losses. And he is keen, especially in the Moralia, to mention his intercourse with friends, Romans and Greeks alike, with whom he shares common tastes in literary and philosophical discourse.
It was an obligation for a man of Plutarch’s class to participate in public life – he makes the point himself more than once (Moralia 793c–d, 794b, 811 a–c, 813c–d) – but rarely does he divulge much about his own career as a man of affairs. Still in his twenties, he successfully represented Chaeronea in an embassy to the Roman proconsul governing Greece (Moralia 816c–d). During the reign of Vespasian (AD 69–79), Plutarch made a visit to Rome where he impressed the Romans with his philosophical acumen – and his curiosity about Roman history. He quizzed the orator Julius Secundus about the emperor Otho and travelled throughout northern Italy with the distinguished Lucius Mestrius Florus, a friend of the emperor and consul in AD 75.4 Whether there was a political purpose to his visit – upon his ascension, Vespasian had rescinded many of Nero’s concessions to the Greek cities of the east – must remain unknown. Nonetheless, it was Mestrius Florus who secured Roman citizenship for Plutarch (Syll. 829a), a politically as well as socially important acquisition which Plutarch himself never mentions. Plutarch also received Athenian citizenship, and he was a long-serving priest at Delphi: after his death, the Delphians and the Chaeroneans together erected a statue in his honour (Syll. 843a). Trajan, we are told (but not by Plutarch), granted him the honorary trappings of a consul (ornamenta consularia), and in his old age he accepted from Hadrian an appointment as imperial procurator in Achaea (Syncellus 659 Dindorf), a distinction that indicates that he had earlier been enrolled in the equestrian order at Rome. Again, Plutarch says nothing of this, and some scholars are disinclined to believe in any of these imperial laurels.5 Nevertheless, it is clear enough that Plutarch was a man of practical accomplishments, who understood the realities of Roman power and personally benefited from it.
He certainly enjoyed the acquaintance of many important Romans.6 In addition to Mestrius Florus, Plutarch mentions grandees like Quintus Junius Arulenus Rusticus (consul in AD 92) and Gaius Minicius Fundanus (consul in AD 107). He dedicated several of his compositions, including the Parallel Lives, to Quintus Sosius Senecio, an honoured associate of Trajan who was a distinguished military commander and held the consulship twice (in AD 99 and 107). There is even good reason to believe that Plutarch could, in communicating with Trajan, denominate the emperor as his friend.7 This was illustrious company, though in each instance Plutarch represents his Roman associates not as powerbrokers but rather as deeply cultured men, thoroughly at home in the world of Greek literature and learning: it is their conspicuous philhellenism – not political or practical affairs – that unites Plutarch with his Roman friends.
Plutarch became an instant and lasting classic, not least because his Lives provided (and continue to provide) a welcome, and for us an essential, window to the past. In late antiquity he was deemed a consummate scholar, and even the Church Fathers read him. The survival of so much of his work is itself testimony to his popularity. He was not forgotten in the Middle Ages, and regained a wide readership in the Renaissance, though almost exclusively in Latin (and later in vernacular) translations. His prominence became even more conspicuous in the sixteenth century, when he was rendered into elegant and lively French by Jacques Amyot (first the Lives, in 1559, followed by the Moralia in 1572). Thereafter Plutarch remained a profound and pervasive influence in French letters. In Thomas North’s translation of Amyot, in 1579, Plutarch at last became available in English, and it was North’s Plutarch who inspired Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Timon of Athens.
II. Plutarch and Biography
Plutarch’s biographies are intended to illuminate the personality and character of each subject, an inquiry that necessitates an exposition of his (always his) historical actions within their historical context. But this account is not meant to be a historian’s narrative of events. Plutarch insists on this distinction in the prologue to his Lives of Alexander and Caesar:
My preamble shall consist of nothing more than this one plea: if I do not record all their most celebrated achievements or describe any of them exhaustively, but merely summarize for the most part what they accomplished, I ask my readers not to complain about this. For I am writing biography, not history, and the truth is that the most brilliant exploits often tell us nothing of the virtues and vices of the men who performed them, whereas a chance remark or a joke may reveal far more of a man’s character than the mere feat of winning battles in which thousands fall, or of marshalling great armies, or laying siege to cities.
(Alexander 1)
Now it is hardly the case that Plutarchan biography eschews battles or sieges, or political contests of great moment, nor does every biography teem with personal details. Nonetheless, it was never Plutarch’s purpose to narrate events in their broadest sweep. Instead, everything included in one of his biographies is there in order to help the reader to appreciate its hero’s struggle to live a virtuous life, so that the reader, too, can make progress towards virtue. It is on this basis that Plutarch puts together a subject’s Life: ‘I … select from the events of his career what is noblest and most important to know’ (Aemilius 1). This is because our encounter with the nobility of the past has the potential for making us better in the present (Pericles 1–2). So Plutarch scrutinizes his subjects’ lives in order to explicate their virtues – and their lapses from virtue, inasmuch as few men can sustain perfection over the course of an entire life. This inspection, although exacting, is not harsh. Plutarch likens the literary representation of his heroes to the work of the best portrait painters, who neither conceal nor exaggerate unflattering features (Cimon 2). Plutarch does not believe a single failure or even several failures need vitiate an entire career, and so his moralizing examinations are invariably conducted with a remarkable generosity of spirit.8
But what did it mean to imitate the virtues of a Plutarchan hero? The figures he wrote about were all of them great men, in Thomas Carlyle’s sense of the phrase: valorous men of war and domineering politicians who held the highest positions in their states – in short, men at the top who, if they did not transform history, nonetheless played a major role in shaping it. Now it is true that the Parallel Lives was dedicated to a man who was both a political grandee and a distinguished military commander, but even Sosius Senecio served Rome as an official of the emperor and not as an independent statesman or general like Mar
cellus or the Elder Cato. And it is obvious that Plutarch’s intended audience consisted mostly of men like himself, that is, highly educated Greeks.9 The contrast between their political and social situation and the circumstances of Plutarch’s ancient heroes was unmistakable.
Plutarch himself emphasizes, in his essay Advice on Public Life (Moralia 798a–825f), how much the conditions of imperial Greece differ from those of its classical past. In an age when Greek leaders no longer command armies or vanquish tyrannies (Moralia 805a), there is folly in confusing the present with the past:
We laugh at small children when they try to pull on their fathers’ boots and wear their crowns. But what of leaders in the cities, when they foolishly excite the multitude by encouraging them to imitate their ancestors’ achievements and spirit and deeds, even though those are all quite impossible under the present circumstances? Their behaviour may be laughable, but the consequences they suffer are no laughing matter. There are many other actions of the Greeks of old which one may recall in order to mould the character of the Greeks of today and give them wisdom. At Athens, for example, one might remind them not of their exploits in war but of their decree of amnesty after the rule of the Thirty, or how they fined Phrynichus for his tragedy about the fall of Miletus, or how they put on crowns when Cassander refounded Thebes, but, when they learned that at Argos the Argives clubbed to death 15,000 of their fellow-citizens, they gave orders that their entire assembly should be purified, or how, during the Harpalus affair, as they were searching all the houses, they passed by the one of the newly wedded bridegroom. Even now one can imitate these things, and in doing so make oneself like one’s ancestors; as for Marathon and Eurymedon and Plataea and all such examples as inspire the multitude with pride and fill them with pointless boasting, we should leave them to the rhetoricians.
(Moralia 814a–c)
The modern Greek, Plutarch observes, need no longer exert himself in war, and Roman administration makes it unnecessary as well as unwise to be so assertive in politics as to open the door to faction:
Consider the greatest goods which a city can enjoy – peace, freedom, prosperity, a thriving population and social harmony. As for peace, we have no real need of politicians at the present time, for every war, Greek and barbarian, has vanished. We have as much freedom as the ruling power allows us, and perhaps more than that would not be a good thing.
(Moralia 824c)
Public service remains a crucial duty, but it is no longer the same as it was in Greece’s grand and glorious past. As for old-style eminence, Plutarch asks, ‘what influence, what glory can be won by a man whose power is easily undone by an edict of a Roman proconsul?’ (Moralia 824e). As he makes clear elsewhere, factionalism within a Greek city can attract unwelcome and dangerous Roman attentions (Moralia 813e–f).10 The celebration and appropriation of the past, still important and beneficial, is no longer a simple matter in the imperial age for any Greek engaged in public life.11
It is perhaps worth observing that it was not only in Greece that there existed this sense of belatedness and discontinuity with the past. The Satires of Juvenal and the Annals of Tacitus betray the same anxiety. In his Dialogue on Oratory (36), one of Tacitus’ speakers, in explaining the disparity between contemporary orators and the likes of Cicero, observes how
Orators of today have obtained all the influence that it would be right for them to be allowed in a state that is settled and peaceable and prosperous, whereas their predecessors, living in times of unrest and unrestraint, seemed to achieve more, in those days of complete disorder lacking the guidance of a single ruler.
It is no accident that this sounds very much like Plutarch, since a Roman senator, no less than any Greek public figure, was, as Plutarch puts it, ‘both ruler and ruled’ (Moralia 813e). Tacitus, like Plutarch, was a biographer, and in his Agricola he explores the challenges of preserving republican virtue under imperial restrictions. For all public figures in the empire, their classical heritage was as much a problem as it was a source of pride or inspiration.12 Even a Roman, then, could learn something from Plutarch about the true value of the past.
This brings us back to the moral purpose of Plutarch’s biographies, from which one should learn the right things to imitate and ‘in doing so make oneself like one’s ancestors’ (Moralia 814c). This is an explicit theme in Aratus, probably an early biography. There Plutarch, addressing a youthful Greek audience, invites and implores his readers to emulate this great man of the past. Not that Plutarch’s readers are asked to overthrow tyrants or seize the Acrocorinth, as Aratus did, but they are urged to match him in moderation and magnanimity. The same kind of ethical imitation is the point of the Parallel Lives, though there Plutarch’s literary design, like his demands on the reader, is more sophisticated.
The Parallel Lives is a series of paired biographies, in each of which a Greek is matched with a Roman parallel. Plutarch began to compose these Lives early in the reign of Trajan (AD 98–117) and continued, it seems, for the rest of his life.13 In all, he completed forty-eight biographies, of which we possess forty-six. We have unfortunately lost the first pairing, which joined Epaminondas, a Life of the philosophically inclined Boeotian (d. 362 BC) who defeated the Spartans at the battle of Leuctra (371 BC) and who dominated Greek politics in his day, with Scipio Africanus, probably not a Life of the victor at Zama (202 BC) but rather of Scipio Aemilianus, the Roman philhellene who conquered and destroyed Carthage in 146 BC.14
Each pairing exhibits more or less the same design. There is usually a prologue, sometimes quite elaborate, explaining Plutarch’s selection of heroes. For instance, Timoleon is paired with Aemilius Paullus because the influence of fortune was so deeply implicated in the career of both (Aemilius 1), whereas, in the case of Marcellus and his match, Pelopidas, each was a valiant general ultimately undone by his recklessness (Pelopidas 1). After the prologue comes the biography of the Greek subject, then the Roman, though this order is occasionally reversed.15 At the end Plutarch supplies a Comparison (Synkrisis) of his two heroes in which he sorts out their comparative strengths and failings, sometimes coming to an explicit conclusion about which was the better man, at others leaving it to his readers to make their own determination.16
Within each Life one finds, despite modest variation, a fairly uniform pattern. Plutarch usually begins by introducing his subject’s family, after which he observes conspicuous features of his personality and physical appearance. A description of his early education (or its absence) routinely follows. After these preliminaries, the subject’s career is the focus, reviewed largely though not entirely in chronological sequence. This narrative is punctuated by relevant digressions or clusters of telling anecdotes, which also help to mark out important phases in the hero’s life. The circumstances of his death are described when they are known, and this event typically elicits a commentary on the hero’s legacy, sometimes through noticing how deeply he was missed, sometimes by way of an observation on the fate of his enemies.
It is important to recognize in each of Plutarch’s pairings an organic literary unity.17 Plutarch does not simply compose two discrete Lives which he fits together by means of a prologue and suffixed Comparison. Instead, Lives are made parallel by means of common themes and issues that permeate and consequently integrate the two biographies within each pairing. For instance, in Philopoemen–Flamininus, the Greek hero, portrayed throughout as a champion of Greek freedom, is honoured in that role at the Nemean festival (Philopoemen 11), an event that must be read over against Flamininus’ proclamation of the Greeks’ freedom during the Isthmian games (Flamininus 10), the moment in which the Roman becomes the liberator of Greece. Each episode is, independently, a milestone for its protagonist, but together they raise important and unsimple questions about the nature of Greek freedom and its dependence both on Greek character and Roman power, and these issues recur throughout the pairing.18
The finely textured parallelism in each pairing is there in order to assist the reader’s mo
ral improvement. It was Plutarch’s conviction, inspired by his Platonism, that the best way to apprehend virtue is by seeing through superficial differences in its specific manifestations in such a way that one gets at its essential reality, an approach to moral analysis he explains in his essay Virtues of Women:
There is no better way to learn the similarity and difference between the virtue of women and the virtue of men than by setting lives beside lives and deeds beside deeds … For the virtues, on account of [individual] natures, take on certain differences, personal colours one might say, as they assimilate themselves to the habits, physical temperaments, education and way of life of the individual … But let us not on this account create many different courages, wisdoms and justices, provided only that individual dissimilarities do not drive from any of the virtues its proper definition.
(Moralia 243b–d)
By examining the lives of famous women when they have been set in parallel, the reader of this essay is able to perceive the reality of their shared virtue, and it is a proper understanding of that virtue which is the real point of the exercise. Similarly, in the Parallel Lives, the true subject of each pairing is, in a sense, the virtue manifested in the careers of different men in different cultural situations.19 Parallelism thus guides the attentive reader towards moral verity, and this is how the Parallel Lives is able to make its readers better people. They will never imitate the specific deeds of Camillus or Fabius Maximus, but the same moral excellence is within their grasp, and because virtue is virtue whatever its particular setting, by behaving justly or moderately or honestly they can enact the ethical greatness of these historical figures.