Despite Plutarch’s original design in the Parallel Lives, his biographies are usually published separately instead of in parallel. This stems from practical considerations, since most modern readers of Plutarch’s Lives are interested in a specific period of Greek or Roman history, and this volume conforms to that practice.20 However, in this collection his pairing of Philopoemen and Flamininus, who were contemporaries, appears in its entirety, including its closing Comparison, as Plutarch intended.
III. The Plutarchan Hero
Plutarch’s fundamental sensibilities are aristocratic, and this perspective naturally colours his attitude towards his heroes. Consequently, high birth counts to their credit, as does the martial valour that aristocrats in Greece as well as Rome never ceased to admire. Indeed, even if Plutarch plainly prefers peace to war, it remains the case that most of his heroes are lethal warriors. As statesmen, he expects them to guide and care for the masses but not to pay heed to their shifting and mercurial moods, except to take whatever measures are needed for their conciliation and persuasion – though this should never come at the cost of irresponsible policies. For Plutarch, demagogy is always a vice.21
Plutarch’s moralism draws on Platonic and Aristotelian ethics in conventional ways that could hardly surprise or offend his contemporaries. And so his heroes, when at their best, display courage and patriotism, are industrious and generous, and rely on intelligence and reason. They are truthful and honest in every transaction, and are consistently indifferent to wealth, luxury or sensuality. They are good family men. In politics they are committed to justice – and to freedom, even if they are kings. Plutarch especially prizes the virtue of gentleness or moderation – praotes – which, far from making a man weak, affords him the strength to exhibit justice and mercy: praotes furnishes self-restraint and leaves its possessor unaffected by injury or jealousy or the debilitating vice of anger. Another quality esteemed by Plutarch, not unconnected with praotes, is philanthropia, that is, a sense of humane civilization, which in his view is essential for attaining moral perfection.22 Plutarch’s idea of a humane civilization is a specific one, and although an inclination to philanthropia can occur naturally (as it does in the case of Marcellus), to flourish properly it requires the presence of Greek high culture and a philosophical Greek education.
This, for Plutarch, is a vital matter. No amount of natural talent can compensate for the absence of a properly philosophical education. Indeed, men endowed with marvellous capacities are often those at the greatest risk of veering into ethical failure if they lack the moral training required for curbing the force of their emotions and ambitions. Such is the case, in this volume, for Coriolanus, whose great nature remains untempered by philosophy, for the simple if regrettable reason that a thorough Greek education – paideia – was impossible for any Roman in his day. Paideia, for Plutarch, is almost the sine qua non of the perfect man, and its absence constitutes Plutarch’s readiest diagnosis whenever any of his heroes, Roman or Greek, proves deficient.23
It is clear, then, that, although the subjects of Plutarch’s Lives derive from different cultures and nearly always exist in different times and places, they nevertheless inhabit the same moral universe as they enact the same virtues or vices. And the criteria defining that moral universe are Greek ones. This in no way excludes Romans from the attainment of moral perfection, but it does require them to embrace the values of Greek civilization. Which, for Plutarch, was an important part of the rise of Rome. Although Numa, allegedly a pupil of Pythagoras, was a suitably learned man, an appreciation for Greek high culture came to Rome only with Marcellus and was welcomed by the Romans only gradually after that, a development unfolded in the Lives included in this volume and culminating in Aemilius Paullus, who was, according to Plutarch, an authentic philhellene.
For all its concentration on the nature of virtue, however, the Parallel Lives attracts readers owing to the excitement, drama and charm of its stories, those superficial enactments of virtue that nevertheless rivet our attention – and provoke our judgement. Our inclination to make our own assessment of Plutarch’s heroes is stimulated by the Comparison that concludes each pairing. There the heroes are pitted against one another. The Comparisons, set next to the complexities of the twinned Lives, seem unsophisticated, and it is odd how they sometimes include information not mentioned in the relevant Life or sometimes view previously narrated events in a drastically different way. Even their Greek, while not without flourishes, is in a different and less ambitious register than the biographies they conclude. These peculiarities once led scholars to doubt their Plutarchan authorship, an extreme view that has long been abandoned.24 Nonetheless, the Comparisons continue to perplex critics, who cannot agree on why it is Plutarch elected to find closure for his pairings in this remarkable device. One view is that Plutarch intended, through the inconsistencies and want of sophistication that mar the Comparisons, to bring to the fore the impediments that hamper simple moral judgements.25 Another approach prefers to take the Comparisons at face value: after the Lives have investigated the essential quality of the virtues manifested in the pairing, the Comparisons urge the reader to try to decide which of Plutarch’s protagonists was in fact the better man.26 Whatever one’s take on the Comparisons, however, it is obvious how, unlike the parallelism that structures the twinned biographies, their emphasis on contrasts signals the potential for rivalry even between very similar Romans and Greeks.
IV. Greek and Roman in the Imperial Age
What did it mean to be a Greek in imperial Rome? And what was the role of Greek culture in a world dominated by Roman power? By Plutarch’s day, as his own career demonstrates, Greece and Rome were hardly separate worlds. This was obviously true politically, as Plutarch more than once reminds his readers in his Advice on Public Life, but it was also the case that, in cultural terms, there was no strict divide. Elite Romans had long immersed themselves in Greek high culture, and not even Juvenal’s rants about the Orontes flowing into the Tiber can decisively distract anyone from the humane world of Plutarch’s Table Talk, which discloses a cosmopolitan society of Romans and Greeks bound together by their common devotion to Greek literature and Hellenic values. And, on the other side of the equation, even the staunchest proponent of Hellenism had to concede that ‘nowadays nearly everyone uses some Latin’ (Moralia 1010d).
Some Greeks went further than that. By Plutarch’s day, the Roman senate included Greek aristocrats, not all of whom are obvious to modern scholars because at least some of them preferred, in Roman public life, to use their Roman names instead of their Greek ones.27 These men were Roman citizens, spoke Latin as well as Greek and carried out their duties for the greater glory of Rome. Although specific figures are elusive, Plutarch regards it as an uncontroversial observation that senatorial ambitions pervade the Greek high society of his day (Moralia 470c). It has even been suggested that Sosius Senecio, the dedicatee of the Parallel Lives, originated in the Greek east.28 A splendid illustration of this Graeco-Roman complexity is Julius Celsus, a contemporary of Plutarch. A native of Asia Minor, Celsus was a tribune of the soldiers in a Roman legion, then a senator and finally consul in AD 92. He later held the lofty position of proconsul of Asia. His distinguished career was memorialized by his son, himself consul in AD 110, in the famous Library of Celsus in Ephesus. There Celsus’ service to the empire was recorded in both Greek and Latin inscriptions, and statues of Celsus exhibited him in his Roman offices. At the same time, Celsus’ monument was a Greek library, and his personal qualities, represented in the building’s ornamentation, were expressed as Greek virtues.29
Celsus’ library, like the Parallel Lives, raises more questions than it answers. Does it symbolize cultural unity, or is its hybridism its most conspicuous feature and therefore its most significant message? It was once natural to view Plutarch’s age as a time when, as Gibbon puts it, ‘the nations of the empire insensibly melted away into the Roman name and people’. The Parallel Lives were adduced as evidence of
this conciliatory spirit by Ronald Syme, who observed how they ‘proclaimed the harmony and parity of the two peoples in a sequence of historical biographies, Roman worthies paralleled with Greek’.30 Such views, however, fail to account for the predominately Greek atmosphere of Plutarch’s literary project, in which Roman history has been appropriated as a part of Hellenic culture, to the extent that Plutarch can claim of Rome, in response to the Elder Cato’s hostility towards Hellenic values, that ‘in the age when the city rose to the zenith of her greatness, her people had made themselves familiar with Greek learning and culture in all its forms’ (Elder Cato 23). The moral universe of the Parallel Lives, as we have seen, is a Greek one, in which Romans must find their fit if they are to arrive at true virtue. From this perspective, it is now commonly asserted, the Parallel Lives has little to do with harmony or reconciliation but is instead a statement of cultural resistance in response to Roman power.31
That, too, may be a bit reductive. Matters remain untidy in the Parallel Lives not least because Plutarch exhibits a somewhat paradoxical response to the Roman empire. On the one hand, it reflects a divine providence. On the other, it brought an end to real Greek freedom, a reality which Plutarch plainly regrets even if he accepts it.32 Plutarch comes back to this concern more than once, especially, in this volume, in his Philopoemen–Flamininus, a pairing which centres around issues of power, liberation and lost independence. And so Plutarch, a loyal and dutiful citizen of Rome, remains its critical and independent subject.
Plutarch’s independence, however, is hardly a hostile or antagonistic reflex. His characteristic generosity and fairness are lavished on his Roman as well as his Greek heroes, and it is important that, in the world of the Parallel Lives, it is very often the Roman who excels the Greek in a particular virtue. Men like Claudius Marcellus, Titus Quinctius Flamininus and Aemilius Paullus win his deep admiration – even as they bring Roman legions into places once governed by Greeks. If all this seems a bit untidy, it must be remembered that Plutarch’s was an age in which controversies over cultural identity and the correct response to Roman authority were topical and unsettled matters. It should not surprise us to find Plutarch investigating these issues in a manner too thoughtful to lend itself to a simple or easy formulation.33
V. Plutarch’s Historical Research
In the introduction to each biography in this volume there is a brief discussion of its historical setting and Plutarch’s sources. But certain issues, and certain writers, are relevant to every Life included here. The period spanning from Romulus to Aemilius Paullus was a vast one, and it is testimony to Plutarch’s deep reading and industry that he can cover so much historical territory. Plutarch read widely, taking detailed notes and also relying on what was undoubtedly a capacious memory. When it came to writing his biographies, however, his practice, sensible in a world constrained to use cumbersome scrolls instead of more easily accessible books or databases, was for long stretches to follow a single source which he then supplemented or corrected on the basis of his comprehensive research. Modern scholars are naturally interested in Plutarch’s sources and the uses to which he puts them.
Plutarch is responsible for his own ethical observations, and he is very fond of digressions, which he supplies out of his own erudition. Nor, even when he is guided by a single source, is Plutarch a mere copyist. He expresses every episode in his own distinctive literary style, shaping it to suit the moral purpose of the Life in which it appears. It is owing to this preoccupation that Plutarch sometimes abridges his sources, or conflates certain historical episodes, or violates the chronology of his narrative by displacing material from various periods of his subject’s life in order to illustrate what he deems an important aspect of the man’s character, all practices that occasionally frustrate or irritate modern historians.34
But how good were Plutarch’s sources? Any casual reader of Livy or Dionysius of Halicarnassus could feel justified in drawing the conclusion that the history of early Rome was fairly well known to the Romans and therefore reasonably accessible to Plutarch – and to us. This, however, would be a serious error. Although eventually the Romans worked out a cohesive – and very exciting – account of their origins and their rise as an Italian power, it was based on a good deal of legend, surmise and guesswork. Which is why their account of their early history creaks a bit. For instance, the Romans once believed, on the basis of Greek authorities going back to the fifth century BC, that their city was founded after the fall of Troy, late in the second millennium, which made sense if Rome was founded by Aeneas or any other refugee from the Trojan War.35 Later, however, they came to the view, again on the basis of Greek scholarship, that their city was more or less the same age as Carthage, Rome’s greatest rival. And so the city’s foundation date was shifted to the eighth century BC. Still, the Romans’ Trojan connection was preserved, and in the end, in one version at least, Aeneas brought the Trojan remnant to Italy, where he founded the city of Alba Longa. Generations later, Romulus and Remus, true princes of Alba Longa, after expelling tyranny from their native city, founded Rome. This account, which probably also owes itself to Greek invention,36 never entirely succeeded in stifling its numerous competitors: they could still be studied well into the empire, as Plutarch amply demonstrates in his long rehearsal of them in the opening chapters of his Romulus (1–2).
It is remarkable but true that in many ways we know more about early Rome than did Roman historians of the republic or the empire. The material evidence of the city, for instance, makes it plain that Rome was never founded in a single go. Instead, early inhabitations ultimately congealed into an urbanized settlement, the understandable disorder of which the Romans explained by appealing to the haste with which the survivors of the Gallic sack rebuilt their ruined city (Camillus 32).37 To take another example, the Romans very early on forgot that, after the fall of the monarchy, their government was first led by a single magistrate called the praetor maximus (literally, ‘the chief leader’), a post soon replaced by two consuls.38 Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, however, speak of consuls from the start. And the Romans’ own accounts of the expulsion of the Tarquins and the establishment of the republic were so cluttered by competing stories that, in the end, they settled on a tradition whereby, in the first year of the republic, they were governed by no fewer than five consuls, whose stories sit together uncomfortably.39
This early period was poorly known because the writing of history came late to Rome. As we have seen, on the topic of Roman history, the Romans were anticipated by the Greeks, who began making observations about Rome as early as the fifth century BC. The first true historians of Rome were the Greeks Hieronymous of Cardia (c. 360–c. 256 BC) and Timaeus of Tauromenium (c. 356–260 BC).40 Hieronymus, in writing about the invasion of Italy by Pyrrhus of Epirus (319–272 BC), included a detailed account of early Rome. Timaeus, who composed an influential history of the western Mediterranean world in thirty-eight books, integrated the history of Rome into the established chronology of Greek events, a project he furthered in his own narrative of the Pyrrhic War (280–278 and 275 BC). The beginnings of Roman history, then, lay outside Rome.
Quintus Fabius Pictor, a senator active in the Second Punic War (218–201 BC), was Rome’s first historian.41 Writing shortly before 200 BC, and writing in Greek, he gave his readers an account of Roman history from the mythical days of Hercules down to his own time. He set a fashion of senatorial historiography – in Greek – that continued until the Elder Cato (234–149 BC), late in his life, composed his Origines (Origins). This was the first Roman history ever written in Latin, and it was only afterwards that the Romans embraced the practice of writing their history in their own language.
But what were their sources? It will be obvious how much historians of early Rome depended on Greek sources, whose methods for recovering the facts of the monarchy or early republic we cannot now evaluate. Of archival material for early Rome, there was little. Legends and antiquarian speculations, by contrast,
were ample and no doubt credited. Family traditions, boastful and unverifiable, also enlarged and aggrandized Roman traditions, even if some Romans were inclined to take them with a pinch of salt (see Cicero, Brutus 62; Livy 8.40.2). Nor were Roman historians shy in trying to recreate their past by way of applying the events of their recent history to ancient situations: the narratives in Livy that recount early republican discord rely heavily on the social conflicts experienced during the late republic, not on contemporary evidence. There is not much here to inspire unqualified confidence.42
The Romans themselves were sceptical about their history prior to the Gallic sack of 390 BC, a point made explicitly by Livy (6.1.1–3) as soon as he gets past that point in his narrative. And we must remain dubious about Roman history before the invasion of Italy by Pyrrhus of Epirus, when, at last, contemporary witnesses began to shape available accounts. Matters improve significantly thereafter. Fabius Pictor, however partisan, was a contemporary or near contemporary of the events he narrated in his later books. The Punic Wars and Rome’s expansion into the eastern Mediterranean attracted the attention of numerous historians, Greek and Roman alike, writing from more than one perspective, and so from the third century BC onwards we possess histories that, while imperfect and incomplete, can be deemed satisfactorily grounded in reliable research.
The most important of these sources, for many of the biographies in this volume, is Polybius (c. 200–118 BC). He was a rising statesman in the Achaean League, as a consequence of which he found himself among the prominent Achaeans deported to Rome in the aftermath of the Third Macedonian War (171–168 BC). There he became friendly with several important senators, most crucially with Aemilius Paullus, who became his patron, and Paullus’ sons, Quintus Fabius Maximus and Scipio Aemilianus. While in Rome, Polybius directed his energies towards literary composition, the most important result of which was his Histories, a work in forty books that attempted to explain how, in the period between the end of the First Punic War (264–241 BC) and the conclusion of the Third Macedonian War, the Romans acquired, for better or worse, their worldwide dominion. He later expanded his project down to the year 145 BC – just to investigate whether it was better or worse. Polybius was a universal historian, that is, his account included important events conducted by Carthaginians and Greeks as well as by Romans. In the end, his detailed, impeccably researched and knowledgeable treatment of this period isolated several causes for Rome’s success, one of them being a world historical force he identifies with tyche, fortune.43