Plutarch
Greek biographer
Greek Plutarchos, Latin Plutarchus
born ad 46, Chaeronea, Boeotia [Greece]
died after 119
Main
biographer and author whose works strongly influenced the evolution of
the essay, the biography, and historical writing in Europe from the 16th
to the 19th century. Among his approximately 227 works, the most
important are the Bioi parallēloi (Parallel Lives), in which he recounts
the noble deeds and characters of Greek and Roman soldiers, legislators,
orators, and statesmen, and the Moralia, or Ethica, a series of more
than 60 essays on ethical, religious, physical, political, and literary
topics.
Life
Plutarch was the son of Aristobulus, himself a biographer and
philosopher. In 66–67, Plutarch studied mathematics and philosophy at
Athens under the philosopher Ammonius. Public duties later took him
several times to Rome, where he lectured on philosophy, made many
friends, and perhaps enjoyed the acquaintance of the emperors Trajan and
Hadrian. According to the Suda lexicon (a Greek dictionary dating from
about ad 1000), Trajan bestowed the high rank of an ex-consul upon him.
Although this may be true, a report of a 4th-century church historian,
Eusebius, that Hadrian made Plutarch governor of Greece is probably
apocryphal. A Delphic inscription reveals that he possessed Roman
citizenship; his nomen, or family name, Mestrius, was no doubt adopted
from his friend Lucius Mestrius Florus, a Roman consul.
Plutarch traveled widely, visiting central Greece, Sparta, Corinth,
Patrae (Patras), Sardis, and Alexandria, but he made his normal
residence at Chaeronea, where he held the chief magistracy and other
municipal posts and directed a school with a wide curriculum in which
philosophy, especially ethics, occupied the central place. He maintained
close links with the Academy at Athens (he possessed Athenian
citizenship) and with Delphi, where, from about 95, he held a priesthood
for life; he may have won Trajan’s interest and support for the
then-renewed vogue of the oracle. The size of Plutarch’s family is
uncertain. In the Consolatio to his wife, Timoxena, on the death of
their infant daughter, he mentions four sons; of these at least two
survived childhood, and he may have had other children.
Plutarch’s literary output was immense. The 227 titles in the
so-called catalog of Lamprias, a list of Plutarch’s works supposedly
made by his son, are not all authentic, but neither do they include all
he wrote. The order of composition cannot be determined.
The Lives
Plutarch’s popularity rests primarily on his Parallel Lives. These,
dedicated to Trajan’s friend Sosius Senecio, who is mentioned in the
lives “Demosthenes,” “Theseus,” and “Dion,” were designed to encourage
mutual respect between Greeks and Romans. By exhibiting noble deeds and
characters, they were also to provide model patterns of behaviour.
The first pair, “Epaminondas and Scipio,” and perhaps an introduction
and formal dedication, are lost. But Plutarch’s plan was clearly to
publish in successive books biographies of Greek and Roman heroes in
pairs, chosen as far as possible for their similarity of character or
career, and each followed by a formal comparison. Internal evidence
suggests that the Lives were composed in Plutarch’s later years, but the
order of composition can be only partially determined; the present order
is a later rearrangement based largely on the chronology of the Greek
subjects, who are placed first in each pair. In all, 22 pairs survive
(one pair being a double group of “Agis and Cleomenes” and the
“Gracchi”) and four single biographies, of Artaxerxes, Aratus, Galba,
and Otho.
The Lives display impressive learning and research. Many sources are
quoted, and, though Plutarch probably had not consulted all these at
first hand, his investigations were clearly extensive, and compilation
must have occupied many years. For the Roman Lives he was handicapped by
an imperfect knowledge of Latin, which he had learned late in life, for,
as he explains in “Demosthenes,” political tasks and the teaching of
philosophy fully engaged him during his stay in Rome and Italy. The form
of the Lives represented a new achievement, not closely linked with
either previous biography or Hellenistic history. The general scheme was
to give the birth, youth and character, achievements, and circumstances
of death, interspersed with frequent ethical reflections, but the
details varied with both the subject and the available sources, which
include anecdote mongers and writers of memoirs as well as historians.
Plutarch never claimed to be writing history, which he distinguished
from biography. His aim was to delight and edify the reader, and he did
not conceal his own sympathies, which were especially evident in his
warm admiration for the words and deeds of Spartan kings and generals;
his virulent and unfair attack on Herodotus, the Greek historian of the
5th century bc, probably sprang from his feeling that he had done Athens
more and Boeotia less than justice.
The Moralia
Plutarch’s surviving writings on ethical, religious, physical,
political, and literary topics are collectively known as the Moralia, or
Ethica, and amount to more than 60 essays cast mainly in the form of
dialogues or diatribes. The former vary from a collection of set
speeches to informal conversation pieces set among members of Plutarch’s
family circle; the date and dramatic occasion are rarely indicated. The
diatribes, which often show the influence of seriocomic writings of the
3rd-century-bc satirist Menippus, are simple and vigorous. The literary
value of both is enhanced by the frequent quotation of Greek poems,
especially verses of Euripides and other dramatists.
The treatises dealing with political issues are of especial interest.
“Political Precepts” is an enlightening account of political life in
contemporary Greece; in “Whether a Man Should Engage in Politics When
Old,” Plutarch urged his friend Euphanes to continue in public life at
Athens; Stoic ideas appear in the short work “To the Unlearned Ruler”
and the fragmentary argument that “The Philosopher Should Converse
Especially with Princes.”
Plutarch’s interest in religious history and antiquarian problems can
be seen in a group of striking essays, the early “Daemon of Socrates,”
and three later works concerning Delphi, “On the Failure of the
Oracles,” in which the decline of the oracle is linked with the decline
in the population, “On the E at Delphi,” interpreting the word EI at the
temple entrance, and “On the Pythian Responses,” seeking to reestablish
belief in the oracle. Contemporary with these is “On Isis and Osiris,”
with its mystical tones. “Convivial Questions” (nine books) and “Greek
and Roman Questions” assembled a vast collection of antiquarian lore.
Among the more important works that are of doubtful authenticity or
are clearly apocryphal are the Consolatio to Apollonius for his son, the
“Lives of the Ten Orators,” “On Fate,” the “Short Sayings of Kings and
Commanders,” the “Short Sayings of Spartans,” and “Proverbs of the
Alexandrines.”
Assessment
Plutarch’s perennial charm and popularity arise in part from his
treatment of specific human problems in which he avoids raising
disquieting solutions. He wrote easily and superficially, with a wealth
of anecdote. His style is predominantly Attic, though influenced by the
contemporary Greek that he spoke; he followed rhetorical theory in
avoiding hiatus between words and was careful in his use of prose
rhythms. He is clear, but rather diffuse. Plutarch’s philosophy was
eclectic, with borrowings from the Stoics, Pythagoreans, and
Peripatetics (but not the Epicureans) grouped around a core of
Platonism. His main interest was in ethics, though he developed a
mystical side, especially in his later years; he reveals that he had
been initiated into the mysteries of the cult of Dionysus, and both as a
Platonist and as an initiate he believed in the immortality of the soul.
He believed too in the superiority of Greek culture and in the
meritoriousness and providential character of the Roman Empire.
Personally, he preferred a quiet and humane civic life as a citizen of a
small Boeotian town, where his writing and teaching enlivened provincial
life in 1st-century Greece.
Reputation and influence
Plutarch’s later influence has been profound. He was loved and respected
in his own time and in later antiquity; his Lives inspired a
rhetorician, Aristides, and a historian, Arrian, to similar comparisons,
and a copy accompanied the emperor Marcus Aurelius when he took the
field against the Marcomanni. Gradually, Plutarch’s reputation faded in
the Latin West, but he continued to influence philosophers and scholars
in the Greek East, where his works came to constitute a schoolbook.
Proclus, Porphyry, and the emperor Julian all quote him, and the Greek
Church Fathers Clement of Alexandria and Basil the Great imitate him
without acknowledgment. His works were familiar to all cultivated
Byzantines, who set no barrier between the pagan past and the Christian
present. It was mainly the Moralia that appealed to them; but in the 9th
century the Byzantine scholar and patriarch Photius read the Lives with
his friends.
Plutarch’s works were introduced to Italy by Byzantine scholars along
with the revival of classical learning in the 15th century, and Italian
humanists had already translated them into Latin and Italian before
1509, when the Moralia, the first of his works to be printed in the
original Greek, appeared at Venice published by the celebrated Aldine
Press. The first original Greek text of the Lives was printed at
Florence in 1517 and by the Aldine Press in 1519. The Lives were
translated into French in 1559 by Jacques Amyot, a French bishop and
classical scholar, who also translated the Moralia (1572). The first
complete edition of the Greek texts by the French humanist Henri II
Estienne in 1572 marked a great improvement in the text.
That François Rabelais knew Plutarch well is proved by the frequency
with which he quotes from both the Lives and the Moralia in his
satirical novels. It was Michel de Montaigne, however, who read Plutarch
in Amyot’s version, who first made his influence widely felt. The style
of Montaigne’s Essays (1580–88) owed much to the Moralia, and from the
Lives he adopted Plutarch’s method of revealing character by
illustrative anecdote and comment, which he applied to self-revelation.
Moreover, the Essays made known the ideal, derived from Plutarch’s
presentation of character and openly expressed opinion, of “high antique
virtue and the heroically moral man” that became the humanist ideal of
the Renaissance period.
The Lives were translated into English, from Amyot’s version, by Sir
Thomas North in 1579. His vigorous idiomatic style made his Lives of the
Noble Grecians and Romans an English classic, and it remained the
standard translation for more than a century. Even when superseded by
more accurate translations, it continued to be read as an example of
Elizabethan prose style. North’s translation of Plutarch was William
Shakespeare’s source for his Roman history plays and influenced the
development of his conception of the tragic hero. The literary quality
of North’s version may be judged from the fact that Shakespeare lifted
whole passages from it with only minor changes.
In 1603 the complete Moralia was first translated into English
directly from the Greek. Its influence can be seen in the 1612 edition
of Francis Bacon’s Essays, which contain counsels of public morality and
private virtue recognizably derived from Plutarch. Francis Bacon was
more attracted by Plutarch the moralist than by Plutarch the teller of
stories or painter of character, but to the Renaissance mind it was the
blend of these elements that gave him his particular appeal. His liking
for historical gossip, for the anecdote and the moral tale, his
portrayal of characters as patterns of virtue or vice (in the manner of
the morality play and the character), and his emphasis on the turn of
fortune’s wheel in causing the downfall of the great, all suited the
mood of the age, and from him was derived the Renaissance conception of
the heroic and of the “rational” moral philosophy of the ancients.
Historians and biographers in the 16th and 17th centuries followed
Plutarch in treating character on ethical principles. The 17th-century
English biographer Izaak Walton knew Plutarch well, and his own Lives
(collected 1670, 1675) imitated Plutarch by dwelling on the strength,
rather than the weakness, of his subjects’ characters.
Plutarch was read throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. The English
poet and dramatist John Dryden edited a new translation of the Lives
first published in 1683–86, and abridged editions appeared in 1710,
1713, and 1718. The Moralia was retranslated in 1683–90 and also
frequently reprinted. In France, Amyot’s translations were still being
reprinted in the early 19th century, and their influence on the
development of French classical tragedy equaled that of North’s version
on Shakespeare. Admiration for those heroes of Plutarch who overthrew
tyrants, and respect for his moral values, inspired the leaders of the
French Revolution; Charlotte Corday, who assassinated the revolutionary
leader Jean-Paul Marat, spent the day before that event in reading
Plutarch.
In the German states, the first collected edition of Plutarch’s works
was published in 1774–82. The Moralia was edited by Daniel Wyttenbach in
1796–1834 and was first translated in 1783–1800. The Lives, first edited
in 1873–75, had already been translated in 1799–1806. The German
classical poets—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and
Jean Paul (Johann Paul Richter) especially—were influenced by Plutarch’s
works, and he was read also by Ludwig van Beethoven and Friedrich
Nietzsche.
In the 19th century, Plutarch’s direct influence began to decline, in
part as a result of the reaction against the French Revolution, in part
because the rise of the Romantic movement introduced new values and
emphasized the free play of passions rather than their control, and in
part because the more critical attitude of scholars to historical
accuracy drew attention to the bias of his presentation of fact. He was
still admired, however, notably by the American poet, philosopher, and
essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, and, although in the 20th century his
direct influence was small, the popular ideas of Greek and Roman history
continued to be those derived from his pages.
Frank W. Walbank
