MARCH 2004
PLUTARCH
> P L O U T A R X O S
(circa 45 - 125 A.D.)
Priest of the Delphic Oracle
http://www.e-classics.com/plutarch.htm
Go to Home Page for 15 Greek Heroes from Plutarch's Lives
Greece, by the turn of the first millenium, was a sad
ruin of its former glory. Mighty Rome had looted
its statues and reduced Greece to conquered territory.
1 Despite these circumstances, Mestrius Plutarchus
(known to history as Plutarch) lived a long and fruitful
life with his
wife and family in the little Greek town of Chaeronea.
> For many years
Plutarch served as one of the two priests at the temple
of Apollo at Delphi (the site of the famous Delphic
Oracle) twenty miles from his home. By his writings
and lectures Plutarch became a celebrity in the Roman
empire, yet he continued to reside where he was born, and
actively participated in local affairs, even serving as
mayor. At his country estate, guests from all over the
empire congregated for serious conversation, presided
over by Plutarch in his marble chair. Many of these
dialogues were recorded and published, and the78 essays
and other works which have survived are now known
collectively as the Moralia.
After the
horrors of Nero and Domitian, and the partisan passions
of civil war, Rome was ready for some gentle
enlightenment from the priest of Apollo. Plutarch's
essays and his lectures established him as a leading
thinker in the Roman empire's golden age: the reigns of
Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian.
The study and
judgment of lives was always of paramount importance for
Plutarch. In the Moralia, Plutarch expresses a
belief in reincarnation. 2 His letter of
consolation to his wife, after the death of their
two-year-old daughter, gives us a glimpse of his
philosophy:
"The soul, being eternal, after death is like a
caged bird that has been released. If it has been a
long time in the body, and has become tame by many
affairs and long habit, the soul will immediately take
another body and once again become involved in the
troubles of the world. The worst > thing about
old age is that the soul's memory of the other world
grows dim, while at the same time its attachment to
things of this world becomes so strong that the soul
tends to retain the form that it had in the body. But
that soul which remains only a short time within a body,
until liberated by the higher powers, quickly recovers
its fire and goes on to higher
things."
Once his
judgment had been seasoned by maturity, and his writing
skill by long practice on his essays, Plutarch commenced
the composition of his immortal Parallel Lives. The
language Plutarch wrote in was Attic Greek, which was
well-known to the educated class in the Roman Empire. The
installments of this ponderous work (what has survived
totals approximately 800,000 words, ~1300 pages of fine
print) were sent to Sosius Senecio, who was consul of
Rome during the years 99, 102, and 107 A.D. Through
Sosius, Plutarch had the ear of the emperor Trajan and
the means to have many copies of his work made.
Plutarch's plan in
the Lives was to pair a philosophical biography of a
famous Roman with one of a Greek who was comparable in
some way. A short essay of comparison follows most
of the pairs of lives. His announced intention was
not to write a chronicle of great historical events, but
rather to examine the character of great men, as a lesson
for the living. Throughout the Lives, Plutarch pauses to
deliver penetrating observations on human nature as
illustrated by his subjects, so it is difficult to
classify the Lives as history, biography, or
philosophy. These timeless studies of humanity are
truly in a class by themselves.
Plutarch's
Greek heroes had been dead for at least 300 years by the
time he wrote their lives (circa 100 A.D.).
Plutarch therefore had to rely on old manuscripts, many
of which are no longer available. But even the
legends of antiquity may be smelted by the power of
reason to yield some insight, as Plutarch assures us at
the beginning of his life of Theseus. It is up to the
reader to use this divine spark to intuit the truth from
] the details by means of the power of abstraction, which
is "passing from a plurality of perceptions to a
unity gathered together by reason." (Plato,
Phaedrus 249). Plutarch himself had no faith in the
accuracy of even the purportedly factual materials he had
to work with, as is evident from this comment in his life
of Pericles:
"It is so hard to find out the truth of anything by
looking at the record of the past. The process of
time obscures the truth of former times, and even
contemporaneous writers disguise and twist the truth out
of malice or flattery."
The Romans
loved the Lives, and enough copies were written out over
the next centuries so that a copy of most of the lives
managed to survive the coming Dark Ages of dogma and
neglect. However, many lives which appear in a list
of his writings, such as those of Hercules, Scipio
Africanus, and Epaminondas, have not been found and may
be lost forever.
At the
beginning of the Italian Renaissance, it was the
rediscovery of Plutarch's Lives that stimulated popular
interest in the classics. Epitomes, which hit the
highlights of the best stories and were written in Tuscan
and other local dialects, circulated as popular
literature. Captains and merchants took time to read the
popularized Plutarch for its practical wisdom, and thus
the Lives not only survived, but became a huge hit all
over Europe during the Renaissance. 3
"We dunces would have been lost if this book had not
raised us out of the dirt," said Montaigne of the
first French edition (1559). 4 C.S.
Lewis concludes that in Elizabethan England,
"Plutarch's Lives built the heroic ideal of the
Elizabethan age." 5 Sir Thomas
North prepared the first English edition of Plutarch's
Lives in 1579, and Shakespeare borrowed heavily from it.
6 In 1683, a team of translators headed by
John Dryden authored a complete translation from the
original Greek (North had translated from Amyot's French
edition).
Great souls
have found comfort in Plutarch's wisdom.
Beethoven, growing deaf, wrote in 1801: "I have
often cursed my Creator and my existence. Plutarch
has shown me the path of resignation. If it is at
all possible, I will bid defiance to my fate, though I
feel that as long as I live there will be moments when I
shall be God's most unhappy creature ... Resignation,
what a wretched resource! Yet it is all that is
left to me."
By the
twentieth century, however, Plutarch's popularity began
to fade. Professional classicists produced no
revitalizing new edition of the Lives in modern English,
and by the 1990's, classical studies had so declined in
popularity that a riot at Stanford University featured
thousands of the top students in the United States
chanting the battlecry of the new creed, Diversity:
"Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Western Culture's Got To Go."
Plutarch's heroes had no place in their brave new world
of gray equality, populated by puppets of money,
resentful of eminence.
Moreover, all discrimination between good and bad was
actively suppressed among the intelligentsia. In
the words of Simone Weil: "The essential
characteristic of the first half of the twentieth century
is the growing weakness, and almost the disappearance, of
the idea of value. ..
But above all [those responsible were] the writers who
were the guardians of the treasure that has been lost;
and some of them now take pride in having lost it."
7
Another cause
for Plutarch's loss of popularity was that reading skills
declined generally with the advent more seductive
entertainment such as television and Nintendo games, and
the decline of public schools. Plutarch's elaborate
sentence structure and long digressions, preserved in the
Dryden edition, are a challenge to modern young readers
of English, who, if they read at all, require a
pruned-down text that gets to the point.
As classics
departments continue to close, embattled scholars demand
cramdown Greek grammar for all, and Greek drama in the
original. The best has indeed become the enemy of
the good. Scholastic diligence has produced
such a dense cloud of ink that the ancient light grows
dim, and so, at the end of the twentieth century, the
cycle of Plutarch's popularity has reached its perigee.
But Plutarch
will always come back, as he has after other dark ages.
We find Plutarch surprisingly relevant today because
nothing really has changed in human nature over the
nineteen centuries since Plutarch wrote. As the greatest
English thinker, Samuel Johnson, put it: "... we are
all
prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same
fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger,
entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure."
The Rambler, No. 60. And we all need heroic
examples to show > us the way.
>
There is a
definite effect on readers of these ancient stories.
Emerson said: "We cannot read Plutarch without a
tingling of the blood; and I accept the saying of the
Chinese Mencius: 'A sage is the instructor of a
hundred ages. When the manners of Loo are heard of,
the stupid become
intelligent, and the wavering, determined.'
"8 The spiritually inductive power of
Plutarch's heroes, apart from Plutarch's own skill at
sketching character and imparting wisdom, may explain the
perennial appeal of the Lives.
To the
biographies of his heroes, Plutarch brought a master's
eye for the essence. Impressionist artists and
poets are not to be faulted for failing to record every
detail of their subjects with scrupulous fidelity, and
likewise we should recognize that a deft sentence from
Plutarch means more than volumes from minor
scribes. Historical details are only incidental to
the character of Plutarch's subjects. He clearly
disclaims any pretensions to being a historian at the
beginning of his life of Alexander: "My intention is
not to write histories, but lives." The
difference between Plutarch and a dry chronicle of the
times is the difference between a cake and a pile of
ingredients, understanding and knowledge, a person and a
corpse.
It is this
difference which makes a classic. Plutarch
transcends the historical subjects he deals with and the
period he wrote in. As Ben Jonson said of
Shakespeare, we may say of Plutarch: "He was not of
an age, but for all time."
Go to Home Page for 15 Greek Heroes from Plutarch's Lives
NOTES:
1. Rome destroyed Corinth
and enslaved its population in 146 B.C. Macedonia had
already been crushed at the battle of Pydna in 168
B.C. The Peloponnesus became a Roman province in 27
B.C.
2. Plutarch believed in one
unitary god, with different names for its different
aspects. In between god and mortal men, Plutarch
believed that there was an infinite hierarchy of other
beings, who were subject to death and rebirth but on
longer cycles. Inasmuch as they had not completely
purged all of their passions, these spiritual beings had
weaknesses, such as anger. Men could be promoted
into angels, and angels could be demoted into men,
according to how they had lived their previous lives.
3. One of the first books printed
was a complete edition of the Lives translated into Latin
from the original Greek, published in Rome in 1470. First
publication of the Lives in the major European languages
occurred as follows: Italian (1482), Spanish (1491),
German (1541), French (1559), and
English (1579).
4. Montaigne, "To Morrow is
a New Day," in The Essayes of Montaigne, tr. John
Florio (paraphrased) (New York: Random House, 1933).
5. C.S. Lewis, English Literature
in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954)
p. 305.
6. For the influence of Plutarch
on Shakespeare, see Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus,
Julius Caesar, and Timon of Athens. Characters
having Plutarchean names are found in A Midsummer Night's
Dream, Pericles, and The Winter's Tale.
7 Simone Weil, "The
Responsibility of Writers" in The Simone Weil
Reader, edited by George A. Panichas (New York: David
McKay Co., 1977).
8 Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Uses
of Great Men" in Representative Men (1850).
Artist:Lawrence Alma-Tadema
When Jacques Amyot translated Plutarch’s Lives into French in 1559, he reintroduced the story of Cleopatra to a new generation of artists, writers, and playrights. Translated from the French into English by Thomas North in 1579 (and directly from the Greek by Dryden in 1683), Plutarch was a major source for the Roman plays of Shakespeare, as one can see in this comparison when Antony first glimpses Cleopatra in her royal barge.
"Therefore when she was sent unto by divers letters, both from Antonius himself and also from his friends, she made so light of it and mocked Antonius so much that she disdained to set forward otherwise but to take her barge in the river of Cydnus, the poop whereof was of gold, the sails of purple, and the oars of silver, which kept stroke in rowing after the sound of the music of flutes, howboys, cithernes, viols, and such other instruments as they played upon in the barge. And now for the person of herself: she was laid under a pavilion of cloth of gold of tissue, apparelled and attired like the goddess Venus commonly drawn in picture; and hard by her, on either hand of her, pretty fair boys apparelled as painters do set forth god Cupid, with little fans in their hands, with the which they fanned wind upon her. Her ladies and gentlewomen also, the fairest of them were apparelled like the nymphs Nereides (which are the mermaids of the waters) and like the Graces, some steering the helm, others tending the tackle and ropes of the barge, out of the which there came a wonderful passing sweet savour of perfumes, that perfumed the wharf's side, pestered with innumerable multitudes of people."
Plutarch, Life of Marcus Antonius (XXVI) (North trans.)
"The barge she sat in, like a burnished
throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumèd, that
The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
O’erpicturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature. On each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did."
Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (II.2.192-206)