Plutarch

Plutarch, Greek Plutarchos, Latin Plutarchus, (born 46 CE, Chaeronea, Boeotia [Greece]—died after 119 CE), 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 1000 CE), Trajan bestowed the high honour of ornamenta consularia upon him. Although that 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 those 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. Those, 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 II, Aratus, Galba, and Otho.

The Lives display impressive learning and research. Many sources are quoted, and, though Plutarch probably had not consulted all those 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 BCE, probably sprang from his feeling that Herodotus 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-BCE 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 two educational works “How a Young Man Ought to Hear Poetry” (which qualifies the old Platonic objection to poetry) and “How to Listen,” together with the pseudo-Plutarchean treatise “On the Education of Children,” were popular and influential during the Renaissance. In the treatise on moral virtue Plutarch discusses how virtue must subordinate unreason to reason within the soul, a theme developed in many other of the works dealing with popular ethical problems; those adduce examples from the lives of famous men and contain sound but unoriginal moralizing. Among them are “Vice and Virtue,” “How to Recognize Progress in Virtue” (dedicated, like the Lives, to Sosius Senecio), “How to Distinguish a Flatterer from a Friend,” “On Having Many Friends,” and “On Fortune.” Another group of a rhetorical and epideictic character includes the historical essays “On the Fortune of Alexander,” “On the Fortune of the Romans,” and “Whether the Athenians Were More Famous in War or in Wisdom”; those resemble the traditional topics of declamation, and parallel to them are “Whether Water or Fire Is More Useful,” “Whether Virtue Can Be Taught,” and “Whether Mental or Bodily Afflictions Are the Worse.”

Plutarch’s interest in animals and their minds surfaces in four essays: two called “On Eating Flesh,” “Whether Land or Sea Animals Are More Intelligent” (a question that receives no clear answer), and “Gryllus” (also called “Do Animals Reason?”). “Gryllus” is an entertaining dialogue set on Circe’s island in which a pig, one of Odysseus’s transformed companions, attacks the Stoic argument denying reason to animals and convinces Odysseus of the moral superiority of many animals over humans. The tenets of the philosophical schools are the subject of several essays—for instance, “Platonic Questions,” “On the Creation of the Soul in the Timaeus” (expounding Plutarch’s views about Plato’s teaching on the soul), “Against Colotes” (attacking Epicurean views), and “On the Impossibility of Living Pleasurably According to Epicurus’s Teaching”; several other essays criticize Stoic doctrines. Physical and medical problems are discussed in “Precepts on Health,” “On the Face of the Moon’s Disk,” and “On Primary Cold” (which argues that cold is something real, not the mere absence of warmth).

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”; in “The One, the Many, and the Few in Government” the author (who may not be Plutarch) favours monarchy. The virtues of family life are treated in “On Brotherly Love,” “On the Love of One’s Offspring,” and “Conjugal Precepts”; with the Consolatio to his wife goes the fine essay “On Exile”; the Amatorius is a discussion of love, which favours heterosexual relationships.

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 those 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; “On the Malignity of Herodotus” displays the local patriotism of a Boeotian; and the “Comparison of Aristophanes and Menander” prefers Menander for moral reasons.

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.”

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 write 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. At the end of the 13th century Planudes set out to transcribe Plutarch’s works in an edition that left its mark on the manuscript tradition.

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 those 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. During the 18th century the veneration in which Plutarch was held as a moralist led to the rumour that he had written a life of Jesus, which was said to have been discovered.

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 by the 20th century his direct influence had shrunk, the popular ideas of Greek and Roman history continued to be those derived from his pages.

Legacy

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, the Pythagoreans, and the 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.

Citation:

Walbank, F. W. (2019, January 01). Plutarch. Retrieved January 9, 2019, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Plutarch