Plutarch

• 1. Introduction

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  Plutarch, the Greek philosopher and biographer born in the small town of Chaeronea in the region of Boeotia, left behind a body of work that shaped how Shakespeare wrote his plays and how the American founders understood republican virtue. He attended the games at Delphi where the emperor Nero himself competed. He served as a priest at the Temple of Apollo. He was eventually appointed nominal procurator of an entire Roman province. The questions worth asking about him are not simply who he was, but how a man from a town of no great consequence became one of antiquity's most widely read authors, and why rulers, revolutionaries, and poets kept returning to his pages for nearly two thousand years.

• 2. A Life in Two Worlds

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  Chaeronea sat about thirty kilometers east of Delphi, and Plutarch's family had been rooted there for generations. His father was Autobulus and his grandfather was Lamprias, a name the family would use again and again across the following decades. His brothers Timon and Lamprias appear throughout his essays and dialogues, and he wrote of Timon in notably warm terms.

  Plutarch studied mathematics and philosophy in Athens under a teacher named Ammonius from AD 66 to 67. At the games of Delphi during that same period, he was present when the emperor Nero competed, and he may have encountered prominent Romans there including a man who would later become the emperor Vespasian. That connection mattered. Plutarch received Roman citizenship, and his sponsor was Lucius Mestrius Florus, an associate of Vespasian; the evidence for this is Plutarch's new Latin name: Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus. As a Roman citizen he would have ranked in the equestrian order.

  He visited Rome around AD 70 alongside Florus, who also served him as a historical source when Plutarch later wrote the Life of Otho. He cultivated friendships with Roman nobles of the highest rank, including the consulars Quintus Sosius Senecio, Titus Avidius Quietus, and Arulenus Rusticus, all of whom appear by name in his writings. Yet he chose to spend the greater part of his life back in Chaeronea, not in the imperial capital.

• 3. Priest, Magistrate, and Builder

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  Around AD 95, Plutarch was made one of the two sanctuary priests at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, a site that had declined considerably since the height of classical Greek civilization. His arrival coincided with a period of renewed activity: in the 90s, Delphi underwent a construction boom financed by Greek patrons and possibly by imperial support as well. Plutarch worked to help revive the Delphic shrines, and a portrait bust was dedicated to him in recognition of those efforts.

  A fragmentary stone stele found at the site bears an inscription in Greek recording that the Delphians and the Chaeroneans together dedicated an image of Plutarch, following the precepts of the Amphictyony. He served as epimeletes, or manager, of the Amphictyonic League for at least five terms between 107 and 127, organizing the Pythian Games. He mentioned this service himself in a work called Whether an Old Man Should Engage in Public Affairs. Back home he also served as archon of Chaeronea, an annual office he likely held more than once, and he represented his hometown on diplomatic missions abroad during his earlier adult years.

  Late in his life, the emperor Hadrian appointed him nominal procurator of Achaea, a title that carried the right to wear the vestments and ornaments of a consul. The historian George Syncellus, writing in the eighth or ninth century, is the source for that appointment.

• 4. Family and Loss

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  Plutarch and his wife Timoxena had at least four sons and one daughter together, though two of their children died in childhood. A letter Plutarch wrote to Timoxena survives; in it he urged her not to grieve too deeply over the death of their two-year-old daughter, who had been named Timoxena after her mother. The same letter mentions the loss of a young son named Chaeron.

  Two sons named Autoboulos and Plutarch appear in a number of his works, and his treatise on Plato's Timaeus is dedicated to them. A third son, Soklaros, named after Plutarch's confidant Soklaros of Tithora, probably survived to adulthood, though he disappears from Plutarch's later writings. A man named Lucius Mestrius Soclarus, sharing Plutarch's Latin family name, turns up in a Boeotian inscription from the time of the emperor Trajan, which suggests a connection.

  The catalog of Plutarch's surviving works has traditionally been credited to yet another son, named Lamprias after the grandfather. Most modern scholars believe this attribution is a later addition to the historical record rather than a reliable ancient tradition. Plutarch's family remained in Greece at least through the fourth century, producing philosophers and authors across the generations. The novelist Apuleius, author of The Golden Ass, even made his fictional protagonist a descendant of Plutarch.

• 5. Parallel Lives

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  Plutarch's best-known work pairs a Greek life with a Roman life, then in most cases adds a brief comparison of the two subjects. His stated aim, as he laid it out in the opening of his Life of Alexander, was not to write history in any conventional sense. He cared about the influence of character, whether good or bad, on the lives and destinies of men. He devoted space to charming anecdote and incidental detail on the grounds that small moments often revealed more about a person than their most celebrated deeds.

  He likened his craft to that of a painter, seeking rounded portraits and drawing connections between physical appearance and moral character. The surviving Lives contain twenty-three pairs, each consisting of one Greek and one Roman life, plus four unpaired single lives. Among the extant subjects are Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Pompey, Cicero, Pericles, Alcibiades, Demosthenes, Mark Antony, and Marcus Junius Brutus, alongside figures from Rome's earliest centuries such as Romulus, Numa Pompilius, and Coriolanus. Lives that no longer exist include those of Heracles, Philip II of Macedon, Epaminondas, Scipio Africanus, and Scipio Aemilianus.

  The Romans valued the Lives enough to copy them in sufficient numbers that most of the texts have come down to the present day. An ancient list of works attributed to Plutarch, known as the Catalogue of Lamprias, records 227 titles; of those, 78 have survived. Traces of twelve more Lives exist in the form of references and fragments, even though the full texts are lost.

• 6. Notable Lives in Detail

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  Plutarch's Life of Alexander is one of five surviving ancient sources on the Macedonian conqueror. It contains anecdotes found in no other text, and it draws on the work of Lysippos, Alexander's preferred sculptor, to give what is probably the fullest description of the conqueror's appearance left from antiquity. Plutarch highlights Alexander's self-control and his contempt for luxury, quoting Alexander directly: "He desired not pleasure or wealth, but only excellence and glory." As the Life proceeds, Plutarch's admiration for his subject gradually dims. The killing of Cleitus the Black, which Alexander reportedly regretted immediately and deeply, is one of the turning points Plutarch dwells on.

  The Life of Caesar stands alongside Suetonius's Twelve Caesars and Caesar's own military memoirs as one of the primary ancient accounts of that figure. Plutarch opens with Caesar's refusal to dismiss Cornelia, the daughter of Cinna, showing his characteristic interest in audacity as a form of character. The Life ends with an account of Caesar's assassination and then traces the fates of his killers, closing on the scene in which a phantom appeared to Brutus at night.

  The Life of Pyrrhus has a more specialized importance. For the period from 293 to 264 BCE in Roman history, the texts of both Dionysius and Livy are lost; Plutarch's account of Pyrrhus is the main surviving historical source for those decades.

• 7. Moralia and Philosophy

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  The Moralia collects seventy-eight essays and transcribed speeches under a title that translates loosely as Customs and Mores. The range is striking. One essay examines the face visible in the moon's surface and became a source for Galileo's own work on the same subject. Another, "On the Worship of Isis and Osiris", serves as a major source for what is known about ancient Egyptian religion. The collection also contains "On Fraternal Affection", philosophical treatises on oracular decline and divine justice, and a comic dialogue called "Odysseus and Gryllus" in which Homer's hero converses with one of the pigs created by the enchantress Circe.

  Philosophically, Plutarch was a Platonist who remained open to influence from the Peripatetics and, in certain details, from Stoicism. He rejected Epicureanism entirely. He was less drawn to abstract theoretical problems than to moral and religious questions, and he believed that the gods of different peoples were simply different names for a single divine being. He defended freedom of the will and the immortality of the soul, and he elevated God above the material world while relying on the concept of daemons as intermediaries between the divine and the human.

  He was also a vegetarian, and he addressed the ethics of eating meat in two discourses within the Moralia. He was the teacher of the philosopher Favorinus, and some editions of the Moralia include texts now attributed to a writer known only as Pseudo-Plutarch, a figure believed to have lived somewhere between the third and fourth centuries AD.

• 8. Centuries of Influence

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  Jacques Amyot traveled to Italy and studied the Vatican manuscript of Plutarch's writings, then published a French translation of the Lives in 1559 and of the Moralia in 1572. Those translations became widely read across educated Europe. Sir Thomas North based his English translation of the Lives, published in 1579, on Amyot's French rather than on the original Greek. Shakespeare then paraphrased parts of North's translation in his plays and occasionally quoted from it verbatim.

  The complete Moralia reached English readers in 1603 through Philemon Holland's translation from the Greek. In 1683, John Dryden began a life of Plutarch and coordinated a new translation of the Lives by multiple contributors, also working from the Greek. That translation was later revised most recently in the nineteenth century by the English poet and classicist Arthur Hugh Clough, whose edition first appeared in 1859.

  Montaigne's Essays draw on the Moralia extensively and are consciously shaped by Plutarch's ranging, discursive approach to inquiry. The Essays contain more than four hundred references to Plutarch and his works. Jean-Jacques Rousseau quoted Plutarch in his 1762 treatise Emile, citing a passage in which Plutarch asked why Pythagoras abstained from eating animal flesh. In America, Plutarch is the most frequently named ancient historian across the Federalist Papers. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his introduction to a five-volume nineteenth-century edition of the Lives, called that collection a bible for heroes, a phrase that signals how Plutarch's portraits of character continued to function as moral instruction long after the ancient world had passed.