Plutarch

Source

• Born: 46 A.D.
• Birthplace: Chaeroneia, Boetia, Greece
• Died: c. 120 AD
• Best Known As: Author of Plutarch's Lives

Plutarch is the most famous biographer of the ancient world and the author of a famous collection now known as Plutarch's Lives. Plutarch's original title was Parallel Lives of Famous Greeks and Romans, and that describes his unique approach: the biographies are presented in pairs, the life of one Greek contrasted with that of a similar Roman. Plutarch's subjects were statesmen, generals and public figures including Alexander the Great, Solon, Pyrrhus and Marc Antony, and together the biographies present a basic history of all Greece and Rome up to Plutarch's times. Hence Plutarch has been a favorite of scholars and schoolteachers for centuries. Plutarch's other famous work is the Morals, a collection of essays on topics ranging from religion and zoology to marriage.

Plutarch was for many years a priest at the famous oracle at Delphi.

The Greek biographer, historian, essayist, and moralist Plutarch (ca. 46-ca. 120) has been described as one of the most influential writers who ever lived.

Paradoxically, Plutarch the man who was the biographer of many others, had no biographer except for a scant notice in Suidas. What we know of his life is reconstructed from casual references in his own works. Plutarch was apparently born of a wealthy family in Chaeronia in Boeotia, had two brothers, Timon and Lamprias, and a grandfather named Lamprias. His parents' names are uncertain. Some say his father's name was Autobulus, some say Nicarchus, and we do know of a great-grandfather named Nicarchus. Plutarch is believed to have had a liberal education at Athens, where he studied physics, rhetoric, mathematics, medicine, natural science, philosophy, Greek, and Latin literature in 66. Ammonius of Lamptrae, a Plato scholar with religious and Neoplatonic interests, may have been his tutor. To complete his education, Plutarch traveled extensively in Greece and Asia Minor and visited Alexandria, Egypt.

Plutarch married Timoxena, daughter of Alexion (ca. 68), who bore him four sons, Soclarus, Chairon, Autobulus, and Plutarchus, and one daughter, Timoxena. Only Autobulus and Plutarchus survived Plutarch. All evidence indicates a happy marriage and a close family. Other relatives by marriage mentioned as members of the family in the Moralia are Craton, Firmus, and Patrocleas.

Plutarch taught in Chaeronia and represented his people before the Roman governor and in Rome. In Rome he made important contacts and lectured on philosophy and ethics in various parts of Italy. He spent much time in Italy between 75 and 90; he apparently never mastered the Latin language, though he gained the friendship of notable Romans. The latter half of his life, Plutarch enjoyed the intellectual benefits of the Pax Romana, mostly in Chaeronia. He held many civic positions, both high and low; the most notable one - that of head priest of Delphi - he held with distinction for 20 years and elevated to an importance it had not had in his time. During the latter part of his life he is thought to have written most of the Lives and some portions of the Moralia.

His Works

Plutarch is perhaps best known for the Moralia and the Lives, works which have much in common and have had enormous influence on later writers and the literatures of Europe and even America. He was very much concerned with men's moral conduct and individual moral guidance in an age when men were losing their faith in religion and philosophy. The Moralia, written as dialogues, letters, and lectures, is really a collection of 83 treatises on diverse subjects such as vegetarianism; superstition; Epicurean, Stoic, and Academic philosophy; dietetics; divine justice; prophecy; demonology; conjugal relations; family life; mysticism; and helpful precepts.

The Lives (often called Parallel Lives) are biographies of soldiers and statesmen of repute, generally presented in pairs of lives, first a Greek, then a Roman, followed by a comparison. Twenty-three of these have survived and four single lives; that is, four comparisons are lacking. There is no detailed chronology, but the Lives were probably published between 105 and 115. Plutarch utilizes Greek sources primarily and is interested in providing pleasure and guidance for moral and political behavior. Plutarch's language is generally lucid and crisp.

Plutarch was not a profound philosopher but a popularizer in the best and most enduring sense of the word. He did not establish a philosophic system but was eclectic in his use of various systems. He warmly admired Plato and knew Pythagoras and other Greek philosophers. He severely criticized Epicureanism and stoicism but used these systems as it suited him. One critic finds him a humanist par excellence; others see him inclined toward mysticism and monotheism. He was an author of uncommon common sense who influenced Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, John Dryden, John Milton, Robert Herrick, George Chapman, Jonathan Swift, Walter Savage Landor, William Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Mary Shelley, and H.G. Wells in England; Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville in the United States; J.W. von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller in Germany; and French drama of the late 16th and the entire 17th century. Sir Thomas North's English translation of the Lives (1579) provided Shakespeare with the sources for three plays, and it was the translation (1559) by Frenchman Jacques Myot that made Plutarch available to North and through North to the English-speaking world.

Further Reading

The Loeb Classical Library's Plutarch's Lives, translated by Bernadotte Perrin (11 vols., 1914-1926), is indispensable, as is the Loeb's Plutarch's Moralia, translated by Frank Cole Babbitt and others (15 vols., 1927-1969). An exhaustive and still essential study is Bishop Richard C. Trench, Plutarch: His Life, His Lives and His Morals (1873), which remained the primary study until Reginald Haynes Barrow, Plutarch and His Times (1967). C. J. Gianakaris, Plutarch (1970), is a convenient synthesis and appraisal which contains an extensive bibliography. A work on Plutarch's moral interests is George D. Hadzsits, Prolegomena to a Study of the Ethical Ideal of Plutarch and of the Greeks of the First Century A.D. (1906); and on religion, John Oakesmith, The Religion of Plutarch (1902).

Special studies provide powerful evidence of Plutarch's widespread influence: Frederick Morgan Padelford, trans. and ed., Essays on the Study and Use of Poetry by Plutarch and Basil the Great (1902); Roy Caston Flickinger, Plutarch as a Source of Information on the Greek Theater (1904); Charles Frederick Tucker Brooke, ed., Shakespeare's Plutarch (2 vols., 1909); Roger Miller Jones, The Platonism of Plutarch (1916); Edmund Grindlay Berry, Emerson's Plutarch (1961); and Terence John Bew Spencer, ed., Shakespeare's Plutarch (1964). Recommended surveys of classical historiography which include discussions of Plutarch are Michael Grant, The Ancient Historians (1970), and Stephen Usher, The Historians of Greece and Rome (1970).

For more information on Plutarch, visit Britannica.com.

Plūtarch (Ploutarchos) (c. AD 46–c.120), Greek biographer, historian, and moral philosopher.

1.

Plutarch was born at Chaeronēa in Boeotia, of a wealthy and cultivated family, and spent most of his life there. He studied philosophy at Athens under the Platonist Ammonius, a man of practical as well as philosophical ability. He visited Egypt and Italy, lecturing and teaching at Rome, and had a wide circle of influential and cultivated friends. But the last thirty years of his life were centred on Chaeronea and Delphi; he was a citizen of both, and served them with devotion for many years. Neither Pliny the Younger nor Tacitus (his contemporaries) mentions him. Plutarch is one of the most attractive and readable of ancient prose authors, writing with charm, geniality, and tact. An ancient catalogue of his works exists, ascribed to Lamprias. His surviving writings (half his complete works) consist of (i) a series of fifty biographies known as Parallel Lives (Bioi parallēloi) in which he relates the life of some eminent Greek (statesman or soldier) followed by the life of some similar Roman offering some points of resemblance, and then adds a short comparison of the two; and (ii) seventy-eight miscellaneous works now known as the Mōrālia (Gk. Ēthika).

2.

Parallel Lives. These consist of twenty-three pairs of lives, nineteen of them with comparisons attached, and also four single lives. They include lives of Solon, Themistocles, Aristeides, Pericles, Alcibiades, Nicias, Demosthenes, Philopoemen, Timoleon, Dion, Alexander, Pyrrhus, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Mark Antony, Brutus, Julius Caesar, and Cicero. Of the Roman emperors, only the lives of Galba and Otho survive. Plutarch's object is to bring out the moral character in each case, rather than to relate the political events of his time; hence his full treatment of the subject's education and natural disposition, and his relation of anecdotes calculated to reveal the nature of the man, ‘a light occasion, a word, or some sport’ which ‘makes men's natural dispositions more plain than the famous battles won, in which ten thousand men may be killed’. Although Plutarch distorts the truth in order to exemplify virtue or vice, in general he is as reliable as his sources, and sometimes very valuable. He shows no bias or unfairness in his treatment of Greeks and Romans, no flattery of the now dominant power of Rome or vanity in the past glories of his own nation. He believed in the compatibility of Rome the ruler and Greece the educator.

The Lives contain, besides interesting anecdotes, many memorable historical passages: the catastrophe in the Peloponnesian War of the Athenian expedition to Syracuse (Nicias), Pompey's defeat by Caesar and subsequent murder, the death of the younger Cato, and the suicide of Otho. There are also great battle-pieces: the victory of the Roman general Marius over the German Cimbri, the victory of the Corinthian general Timoleon over the Carthaginians at the river Crimisus, the siege of Syracuse (when Archimedes was there) by the Roman Marcellus; and striking descriptions of a quite different kind, of the happy state of Italy under Numa, of Sicily pacified by Timoleon, and of Cleopatra sailing up the river Cydnus in her barge to visit Antony. The most famous translation of the Lives into English was that of Sir Thomas North (1579) made not from Greek but from the French version of Jacques Amyot (1559). It was Shakespeare's major source for Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, and a minor source for A Midsummer Night's Dream and Timon of Athens.

3.

Moralia. These treatises are usually referred to by their Latin titles and their subjects are varied. There is one group of rhetorical works and another on moral philosophy (treated in a popular style) on themes such as ‘On Busy-bodies’ (de cūriōsitāte), ‘On Garrulity’ (de garrulitāte), ‘On the Restraint of Anger’ (de cohibenda ira), ‘How to Distinguish a Flatterer from a Friend’ (quomodo adūlātōr ab amico internoscatur). Plutarach's warm and sympathetic personality is apparent in his ‘Advice to Married Couples’ (coniugalia praecepta) and ‘Consolation to My Wife’ (consolatio ad uxorem) on the death of their infant daughter. There is a religious group, in which Plutarch appears as the interpreter and defender of the old beliefs. It includes the treatise ‘On Superstition’ (de superstitione), in which he regards superstition as the opposite extreme to atheism, and piety as the mean between the two. Plutarch was a (not altogether orthodox) Platonist and was opposed to some of the doctrines of the Stoics, and still more to the Epicurean school and its encouragement of withdrawal from the duties of social life: see his treatises on ‘The Unnoticed Life’ (an recte dictum sit latenter esse vivendum), ‘Advice on Public Life’ (praecepta gerendae reipublicae), and ‘Not Even a Pleasant Life is Possible on Epicurean Principles’ (non posse suaviter vivi secundum Epicurum). There is an interesting treatise ‘On the Delays of Divine Justice’ (de sera numinis vindicta) in which he explains the puzzle of the apparent prosperity of the wicked, and another ‘On the E at Delphi’ (de E apud Delphos), i.e. on the letter E inscribed in the temple of Apollo there (for which he offers a Pythagorean explanation, that it is the Greek for ‘Thou Art’, identifying the one eternal principle of the universe); also interesting is ‘On the Cessation of Oracles’ (de defectu oraculorum), which contains a discussion of demons (see DAIMONES), beings intermediate between gods and men, and refers to the legend of the genii of the British Isles.

Plutarch used the dialogue form extensively and often to great effect. The nine books of ‘Table Talk’ (quaestiones convivales) are dinner-party conversations of wise men (rhetoricians, physicians, etc., some of them historical characters) on a multitude of subjects. The treatise ‘On Socrates' Sign’ (de genio Socratis) combines many elements: exciting narrative (the liberation of Thebes), philosophical conversation, and an elaborate myth, in the manner of Plato, on the fate of the soul after death. A different kind of treatise is that ‘On the Face in the Moon’ (de facie quae in orbe lunae appāret), a speculation on the cosmos. Several important antiquarian works have also survived: the ‘Greek’ and ‘Roman Questions’ (quaestiones Graecae, Romanae) are a mine of information about religious antiquities. Plutarch wrote some literary criticism, including a comparison of Aristophanes and Menander, and an essay ‘On the Malignity of Herodotus’ (de malignitate Herodoti; see HERODOTUS), in which Plutarch's complaint seems to be that Herodotus did not conceal the pro-Persian sympathies of the Boeotians. It is noteworthy that Plutarch, in spite of his familiarity with Roman society, history, archaeology, and religion, almost completely ignores Roman literature (his knowledge of Latin appears to have been limited). In his Life of Lucullus he gives a Greek version of a passage from Horace, but never mentions Virgil or Ovid.

4.

Among the Moralia have survived several slightly later works not written by Plutarch but of great importance: ‘On the Education of Children’ (de liberis educandis) was very influential in the Renaissance; ‘On Fate’ (de fato) is valuable as a work of Middle Platonist philosophy; ‘The Lives of the Ten Orators’ (vitae decem oratorum) is an important source for ancient knowledge of the Attic orators from Antiphon to Deinarchus; ‘The Doctrines of the Philosophers’ (de placitis philosophorum) is another important source book; and ‘On Music’ (de musica) is one of the principal sources of modern knowledge about the history of Greek music and lyric poetry.

5.

Plutarch's Moralia were widely read in medieval times and studied by many later authors. They were translated into French by Amyot in 1572, and into English by Philemon Holland in 1603. These and the Lives, perhaps more than the work of any other ancient writer, transmitted to Europe knowledge of the moral and historical traditions of the classical world, and influenced immeasurably its ways of thought.