Any ambitious young academic knows what to do. You pick an interesting but manageable topic, polish off the thesis, write it up promptly into the first book, then start on the second book – on a different topic, but not too different – before you are thirty. I, however, am still on my thesis topic after thirty-one years of research. That thesis was a commentary on Plutarch’s Caesar, completed between 1970 and 1974 under Donald Russell’s supervision. Except that neither ‘commentary’ nor ‘completed’ is quite the word: had I but known it, I was challenging in a pre-post-modern way any notion of organic unity, coherence, or closure, but sadly only in execution, not in conception. It turned out to be more introduction than commentary, with the bones of five chapters of this book (1, 2, 4, 6, and 9) lurking in two hundred and fifty pages of prolegomena and appendices, and the commentary not reaching even half way into the Life.
The examiners (Ewen Bowie and David Stockton) were indulgent, and I am thankful. A generation or so later publishers are being indulgent too, and I am most grateful to Anton Powell for suggesting and encouraging this collection; as a Welshman who learnt my Greek and Latin at Cardiff High School, I am particularly proud and delighted that it should be published by the Classical Press of Wales. At the same time I am completing a commentary on Caesar for the O.U.P. Clarendon Ancient History series. This second project explains some of the absentees from this book, as the material of several papers seemed more suited for the commentary: a short piece in which I tried to identify two fragments from the lost end of Alexander and beginning of Caesar (1973), two papers of varia on Caesar (1984a and 1984b), one discussing Plutarch’s presentation of Caesar’s fall (1997e), and two forthcoming pieces, one exploring the difficulties of writing about Caesar without crossing generic boundaries and one discussing Plutarch’s presentation of wealth in Roman politics (forthcoming, a and b). A further article on Plutarch’s presentation of Hellenic culture (1989) has, I think, been rendered obsolete by distinguished work by Simon Swain, and that too is omitted. I have also left out material which first appeared in book form, not merely my two commentaries on Antony (1988) and Philopoemen–Flamininus (1997a) but also my introduction to Francesca Albini’s edition of Coriolanus–Alcibiades (1996) and the chapter on Plutarch in my Literary Texts and the Greek Historian (2000).
Doubtless anyone interested could plot something like intellectual development. It is no coincidence that the early papers tend to form the first chapters: they were more concerned with basic questions of how Plutarch worked, how far he manipulated his sources, what freedoms he took with what we might reasonably call the truth. As time went on my interest turned more to questions of conceptualization and self-presentation, and the influence of narratology began to be felt (that will be especially clear in ch. 12). Instead of sources I became more interested in intertextuality, allusion, and reception. Shakespeare too came into the field of vision, and as a way of recovering points about Plutarch as well as about Shakespeare himself. The style changed as well, to something rather less crabbed and formal: a symptom is the growing acknowledgement of subjective input with lots of ‘I’s and ‘we’s, a usage which, in an even more self-absorbed way, I at one point explore and deconstruct (p. 278). But the development has been anything but linear, and the most recent paper to be written (chapter 3) reverts to the interests of the earliest; nor, I am sure, will the cross-grained reader (p. 276) find it difficult to collect crabbed formalities in papers old and new. I see no reason why the interests in substance and in rhetoric should not co-exist, and the less inhibited criticism of the later papers often goes back to exploit some of the earlier findings. A reviewer of Scardigli 1995, where several of these papers (1, 4, and 9) were reprinted, was kind enough to suggest that ‘Pelling’s early papers’ (now there’s a sign of age) were of interest to historians as well as to literary critics. I am glad if that is so, but I would be even more pleased if the later ones were of interest too, as the ways in which Plutarch fashioned himself and read his audience are seen to be of conceptual importance for the intellectual history of imperial Greece.
I have revised all the papers to take into account more recent work, adding a paragraph or a sentence here and (many) a footnote there. But I have resisted any temptation to rewrite completely; often this would have been just as easy, but that provides a nightmare for anyone citing a paper or looking up a particular point, and I did not think users would thank me for it. In two cases I have added postscripts to respond to important new research, one to Christopher Gill’s fascinating work on Greek conceptions of personality (pp. 321–9) and one to several recent publications on synkrisis (pp. 359–61). In one further case (ch. 7) I have expanded the original paper so substantially that it is virtually a new publication. Three of the papers (chs. 3, 11, and 12) appear here for the first time.
It would be thoroughly depressing if I had not changed my mind on anything in the course of those thirty-one years. It would be just as depressing if I were confident that these changes of mind were always for the better, and therefore in some cases I have allowed the initial formulations to stand, while adding a footnote to express the reservations I now feel; this is particularly true when those statements have provoked responses and corrections from others. I suppose that most of my changes of mind have been in the direction of crediting Plutarch with greater subtlety, and I can at least claim that most of my rasher statements figured in papers which, at the time, were already arguing for more subtlety than was usually allowed. In one or two cases I was trying to head off scepticism by granting that in some Lives a feature was indeed not very interesting, whereas in others – the ones I was interested in – it was more so; that was particularly true in some things I said about synkrisis in 1986 (pp. 349–53). The direction of later research has been towards finding that feature more interesting everywhere; hence I now regret the concession, but some of the best criticism (e.g. that of Larmour 1992 and Duff 1999) has taken what I said as its target, and it would be weak-spirited to try to suppress it now. In early articles I also tended to take statements in Plutarch’s text at face value, for instance the suggestion in the Comparison of Nicias and Crassus (35(2).3) that he had simply forgotten to include an item in the narrative. Perhaps I was right; or perhaps this is a more disingenuous piece of self-fashioning by Plutarch, conveying the impression of a more informal and extemporizing approach than he in fact pursued. There were in fact good reasons for omitting that item from the narrative of Crass. 15: see p. 42 n. 142. But I suspect that more readers may agree with my earlier simplemindedness than with my present doubts, and I have again allowed that passage to stand (p. 21), adding my reservations in a footnote. The same goes for my airy confidence in 1979 that the preparation of twelve elaborate Lives would take months rather than years (p. 25). That was written by a bright-eyed young person who had yet to realize what barriers life tends to place in the way of steady research. This tattered middle-aged man knows better.
Most of the material here was first delivered as lectures or in seminars; it would take too long to list these various locations or count the miles where Plutarch has paid for my ticket, but I am still most grateful to countless audiences for hospitality and discussion. One particular type of occasion does call for special mention, as no fewer than ten of these chapters were delivered in some form to meetings of the International Plutarch Society or to conferences closely linked with it; two more were written for I.P.S. collections to replace papers I had given at the conferences but already promised to publish elsewhere. Over fifteen years the work of Frances Titchener (Utah State University) has kept this society vigorous, and produced a genuine international Plutarch community; we have all learnt a great deal from the scholarly assumptions and habits of our various cultures, and without Frances’ long-suffering, patient, and (almost always) good-humoured organization none of it would have happened.
Other friends have been very generous with their time. Writing on Plutarch has never been the same since Donald Russell’s seminal articles in the 1960s, and my own work would certainly not have been the same without his supervision; he must take a lot of the blame for how it has turned out. I am immensely grateful, and I hope he has noticed that my interests have gradually grown more like his own. Something like half of the chapters were also read before publication by Philip Stadter and Judith Mossman, and have been greatly improved by their suggestions. I have been fortunate too in having close contact with the work of an extraordinary sequence of scholars when they were graduate students. Only a few of them have worked on Plutarch, but all have affected the way I think about historical writing: Peter Scott, Owen Watkins, Richard Burridge, Alison Sylvester, Carolyn Hammond, Matthew Fox, David Levene, Simon Swain, Franco Basso, Philip Moore, Thomas Schmidt, David Gribble, Rhiannon Ash, Emily Whitehead, Peter O’Neill, Tim Rood, Chris Burnand, Lynn Fotheringham, Luke Pitcher, Karl Woodgett, Charles Smith, and Mathieu de Bakker. Other friends and colleagues have been very helpful for one or another paper, and in many cases for several: alphabetically, Francesca Albini, Ewen Bowie, Frederick Brenk, George Cawkwell, Katherine Clarke, Michael Comber, Helen Cooper, Tim Cornell, Carolyn Dewald, Francis Dunn, Irene de Jong, Tim Duff, Harriet Flower, Michael Flower, Don Fowler, Christopher Gill, Miriam Griffin, Edith Hall, Simon Hornblower, Richard Jenkyns, Lisa Kallet, Barbara Kowalzig, Chris Kraus, Mansur Lalljee, David Lewis, Andrew Lintott, John Marincola, Mary Ann McGrail, Lynette Mitchell, John Moles, Teresa Morgan, Tasos Nikolaidis, Peter Parsons, George Ray, Deborah Roberts, Richard Rutherford, Scott Scullion, A.N. Sherwin-White, Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood, David Stockton, Fran Titchener, Mark Toher, Luc van der Stockt, Catherine Whistler, Thomas Wiedemann, Jonathan Williams, Tony Woodman, and Alexei Zadorojnyi. I owe much to all of them. Finally, Anton Powell and Ernest Buckley have gone far beyond anything which can be expected of publishers in helpfulness and forbearance when faced, yet again, with an author behaving badly.
A book’s first victims are always the author’s family; a book which collects the work of thirty years has certainly grown through others’ suffering, and from spousal and paternal grumpiness as much as from absenteeism. In those years the two whose childhood coincided – though it was doubtless no coincidence – with my interest in paideia have grown, one turning into a philosopher (perhaps a disputatious nature was predictable since his first word was ‘no’), and one about to read social anthropology. The third, my wife and partner, has moved from research astrophysics through public service into, now, creative literature. It is a commonplace that critics grow more like the authors they work on – a commonplace normally uttered in hope by the critics themselves, and usually all too false. Plutarch in any case has a range of interests which no critic could match. But Plutarch approved of families too, and, as a family, we may come a little closer. To those three comrades in battle (inevitably in several senses) the book is dedicated.
C.B.R.P.
1 September 2001
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The original versions of the papers appeared – or, in the case of chs. 3, 11, and 12, are due to appear – in the following publications. I am most grateful to all the editors and publishers for their permission to produce revised versions here.
Ch. 1: Journal of Hellenic Studies 99 (1979) 74–96: repr. here by permission of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies. Postscript: Essays on Plutarch’s Lives (ed. B. Scardigli, Oxford 1995, 312–18; repr. here by permission of Oxford University Press.
Ch. 2: Hermes 113 (1985) 311–29: repr. here by permission of the Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart.
Ch. 3: to appear in the Proceedings of the Leuven Symposion on Plutarch’s compositional methods, 5–7 July 2001, edited by L. van der Stockt and P.A. Stadter. This version appears by permission of the editors.
Ch. 4: Journal of Hellenic Studies 100 (1980) 127–40, repr. here by permission of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies.
Ch. 5: Plutarch and the Historical Tradition (ed. P.A. Stadter, Routledge, 1992) 10–40; repr. here by permission of Routledge.
Ch. 6: Antonine Literature (ed. D.A. Russell, Oxford 1990) 19–52; repr. here by permission of Oxford University Press.
Ch. 7: expanded version of ‘ “Making myth look like history”: Plato in Plutarch’s Theseus–Romulus’, in Plutarco, Platón y Aristóteles (Acta of Madrid/ Cuenca Plutarch conference, May 1999) ed. A. Pérez Jiménez, J. Garcia López, and R. Ma. Aguilar (Madrid 1999) 431–43. This version appears by permission of the editors of that volume.
Ch. 8: Plutarco, Dioniso, y el vino (ed. J.G. Montes, M. Sanchez, and R.J. Gallé, Madrid 1999) 359–68; repr. here by permission of the editors.
Ch. 9: Past Perspectives; Studies in Greek and Roman Historical Writing (ed. I.S. Moxon, J.D. Smart, and A.J. Woodman, Cambridge 1986) 159–87: repr. here by permission of Cambridge University Press.
Ch. 10: Ethics and Rhetoric: Classical Essays for Donald Russell on his Seventy-Fifth Birthday (ed. D.C. Innes, H.M. Hine and C.B.R. Pelling, Oxford 1995) 205–20: Italian version (‘Il moralismo delle Vite di Plutarco’) in Teoria e Prassi Politica nelle opere di Plutarco, ed. I. Gallo and B. Scardigli (Napoli, 1995) 343–61. Repr. here by permission of Oxford University Press.
Ch. 11: to appear in Sage and Emperor: Plutarch and Trajan (ed. P.A. Stadter and L. van der Stockt). This version appears by permission of the editors.
Ch. 12: to appear in vol. I of History of Ancient Greek Narrative (ed. I. de Jong and A. Bowie). This version appears by permission of the editors.
Ch. 13: Illinois Classical Studies 13.2 (1988) 257–74: repr. here by permission of the editor of Illinois Classical Studies.
Ch. 14: Characterization and Individuality in Greek Literature (ed. C. Pelling, 1990) 213–44: repr. here by permission of Oxford University Press. The postscript incorporates some material from the closing pages of ‘Plutarch: Roman heroes and Greek Lives’, in Philosophia Togata I (ed. M. Griffin and J. Barnes, Oxford 1989) 191–232, repr. here by permission of Oxford University Press.
Ch. 15: ‘Rhetoric, paideia, and psychology in Plutarch’s Lives’, in Rhetorical Theory and Praxis in Plutarch (ed. L. van der Stockt, Leuven 2000) 331–9: repr. here by permission of Luc van der Stockt.
Ch. 16: Miscellanea Plutarchea (ed. F.E. Brenk and I. Gallo, Ferrara, Quadernidel Giornale Filologico Ferrarese 8, 1986) 83–96: repr. here by permission of the editors.
Ch. 17: Classical Closure: Endings in Ancient Literature (ed. D.H. Roberts, F.M. Dunn, and D. Fowler, Princeton, 1997) 228–50: repr. here by permission of Princeton University Press. Ch. 18: Plutarch’s Shakespeare (Poetica 48 (1997) ) ed. M.A. McGrail, 3–32: repr. here by permission of Poetica and Mary Ann McGrail.
Ch. 18: Plutarch’s Shakespeare (Poetica 48 (1997) )ed. M.A. McGrail, 3–32: repr. here by permission of Poetica and Mary Ann McGrail.