9

Plutarch and Roman politics

I. Biography and politics

Is Plutarch really interested in Roman politics? After all, he is writing biography, not history; and there are certainly times when he disclaims any interest in describing historical background. That sort of thing, he says, may be left to the writers of continuous histories;¹ it is often the little things, the words and the jests, which reveal a man’s character, not the great battles or the sieges of cities.² ‘Often’ the little things, we should notice: often, not always. Plutarch’s biography is a very flexible genre, and his interest in historical background is one of the things which vary. Sometimes he does write very personal Lives, sketching the historical setting in only the vaguest lines: Crassus, for instance; or Antony, which somehow or other describes the politics of the two years from summer 44 to summer 42 without even mentioning Brutus and Cassius; or Cato Minor, where he contrives to describe the formation of the triple alliance of 60 BC without naming Crassus. But there are other Lives where his interest in history is very clear indeed, and he is evidently concerned to present the same sort of analysis as those ‘writers of continuous history’ – though he naturally sets about it in rather different ways.

Caesar is a good example. As we saw in chapter 4 (pp. 103–5), Plutarch is there very concerned to explain Caesar’s rise to tyranny – the ‘absolute power’, as he says in the last chapter, ‘which he had sought all his life; and he saw only its name, and the perils of its reputation’ (Caes. 69.1, cf. 57.1). What forces carried him to this power? Plutarch’s answer is a clear one. From the beginning, Caesar is the champion and the favourite of the Roman demos. When they support him, he rises; when he loses their favour, he falls. In the early chapters, the demos encourage him to become first in the state.³ When Caesar revives the flagging ‘Marian faction’, this too is brought into the same analysis: his opponents denounce the display of Marian imagines as ‘an attempt to win over the demos’ (6.1–3), while the admirers of the display encourage him to great ambitions: the demos, they say, will support him as he goes on to conquest and supremacy (6.7).⁴ Caesar spends lavishly on the people, and they seek ‘new commands and new honours’ to repay him (5.9, cf. 4.4–9) – an interesting foreshadowing of the spectacular and odious honours they vote him, and resent voting him, at the end of his life. Plutarch comments that, at the beginning, Caesar’s outlays are purchasing the greatest of prizes cheaply (5.8, cf. 4.8); and, at first, the optimates are wholly deceived (4.6–9, 5.8). It is only gradually that ‘the senate’ comes to realize the danger; and it is indeed ‘the senate’, described like that, which is seen as Caesar’s enemy.⁵ Caesar is duly victorious, and becomes tyrant – and it is then that he begins to lose his crucial popular support. The Lupercalia outrage, for example, is carefully presented at 60–1 in a way which dwells on the people’s reactions, and especially their final dismay; and we can see, I think, that this is a passage where he is rewriting and reinterpreting what stood in his source.⁶ (Appian, Suetonius, and Plutarch’s parallel account in Antony all seem to draw on the same source-material as the Caesar – probably the account of Asinius Pollio – but none of these versions carries the same popular emphasis.) It is duly ‘the masses’, οί πολλοί, who turn to Brutus and Cassius. Caesar is now left vulnerable, and is killed; but the popular fervour then immediately erupts once more, and the victim is the luckless ‘Cinna the poet’ (68).⁷

So intense an interest in historical explanation is not of course typical; but it is not wholly isolated, either. The Lives of the Gracchi, for example, again show Plutarch very eager to relate the brothers’ policies and destinies to the attitudes of the urban demos. Marius and Cicero are both concerned to explain their subjects’ rises – what forces and what combinations of support enabled such men to overcome the obstacles which, Plutarch knew, confronted a new man at Rome.⁸ So, in a different way, is Cato Maior, though the sort of explanation he there offers is rather more sonorous and less convincing: the Roman people were greater in those days and worthier of great leaders, and so they joyfully chose a man of austerity to be their consul and rejected the demagogues who were his rivals (Cato Mai. 16.8, cf. Aem. 11.3–4). Less our sort of historical explanation, perhaps, but still a historical generalization intended to make a surprising success more intelligible. But other Lives are less interested in historical themes. Sulla is conspicuously less concerned with history than Marius : when historical points are made in Sulla, they are introducing notions which are simply useful for our moral estimate of Sulla’s character. Generals by now had to spend large sums on bribing their armies, and so it was not surprising that Sulla was harder on Greece than men like Aemilius Paullus or Titus Flamininus – though Sulla himself must equally take some blame for encouraging and accelerating the decline (Sulla 12.9–14). Rome was by now so decayed a city that Sulla found it easier to stand out there than Lysander at Sparta (Sulla 39(1).2–7). We are some way from the simple interest in making careers historically intelligible which we find in Marius or Caesar.

And, when Plutarch’s mind is not primarily focused on history, he is capable of saying some very odd things. Crassus, for example, is a peculiarly lightweight and anecdotal Life. Plutarch evidently decided – wisely enough – that it was simply impossible to write a serious historical biography of Crassus. The weight of that Life falls on the great narrative set-pieces: the exciting escape from Marius and Cinna, the war against Spartacus, then the great Parthian disaster.

The political aspects are dismissed very quickly: a notably trivial account of the consulship of 70 BC, then all the political history of 60–56 – about which Plutarch by now knew a great deal⁹ – dismissed in a single woolly chapter (14). The most substantial political analysis is in fact introduced in a digression, placed just before the Spartacus war. It is evidently supposed to provide some guide to the entire twenty years which followed.

Rome was divided into three powers [δυναμεις – a very odd phrase], those of Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus: for Cato’s reputation was greater than his power, and he was more admired than effective. And the wise and sound part of the state supported Pompey, while the excitable and reckless followed the hopes aroused by Caesar; Crassus stood in the middle, exploiting both sides, continually changing his position in the state, not reliable in his friendships nor irreconcilable in his feuds, readily abandoning both gratitude and hostility when it was expedient for him to do so.

(Crassus 7.7)

That is an extraordinary thing to say. It would be hard to find any period when this analysis – Pompey as the establishment figure, Caesar the popularis, Crassus the inconsistent trimmer – bore much relation to reality; least of all does it fit the part of the Life where we find it, when we are still deep in the seventies. Plutarch knows very well that Caesar only became important ten years later: he makes that clear in both Pompey and Caesar.¹⁰ He knows that Pompey never really enjoyed the confidence of this ‘wise and sound part of the state’ (as he puts it here): indeed, in Pompey he makes it clear that it was only late in the fifties – after Crassus’ death, and hence beyond the scope of Crassus itself – that the optimates came to any real understanding with Pompey, and that it was the popular support for Pompey which was important in the first period of his life, down to 60 BC.¹¹ The account in Pompey of the shared consulship of 70 BC makes the contrast with the Crassus passage clear. In Pompey, Plutarch is concerned to explain the historical background, and he says that ‘Crassus had the greater strength in the senate, whereas Pompey enjoyed great power among the people’ (Pomp. 22.3) – note, incidentally, that characteristic boule–demos analysis again. That is quite irreconcilable with the Crassus passage, which made Pompey the establishment figure and Crassus the trimmer. In Crassus he is prepared to give the different analysis – cruder and less satisfactory though it is – because it aids the characterization of the Life. Crassus is there the shrewd manipulator, unscrupulously exploiting everyone he can in the interests of his own ambition and (particularly) greed. ‘The middle’, now supporting one side and now the other, is the right place for him. That view of Crassus himself is, of course, not without some truth; but it is a far less plausible matter to make Caesar and Pompey the two ‘powers’ between which he oscillated. There, if he thought about it, Plutarch must have realized that he was falsifying and trivializing historical reality.

It is easy enough to find further examples of the same sort of thing. It can be shown, I think, that his view of Clodius varies from one Life to another, depending on the interests and emphases of each Life; in one Life he is an independent figure, bullying the passive Pompey into submission and disgrace; in another, he is relatively meek and subservient, demurely following the triumvirs’ will.¹² It can be shown that Plutarch’s view of the origins of the Civil War is not always quite the same;¹³ and that Pompey’s awareness of the menace of Caesar in Gaul is greater in Pompey itself than in the other Lives.¹⁴ All this makes the analysis of his political views and interpretations a delicate question. We should not expect him always to be consistent, and we must always be aware that he may be bending his analysis to suit the themes of a particular Life; and we should give more weight to some Lives than to others. It is the Lives where he is most interested in historical analysis – Caesar, perhaps, and Marius and Gracchi – which should provide the kernel of our estimation. We should not be surprised if the views developed in those Lives are muted or trivialized elsewhere.

One further difficulty should be noted. No one, I hope, would now regard Plutarch as a mere excerptor, meekly copying out the analyses of his sources. (Scholars have, in fact, been relatively swift to realize that Plutarch has a mind and a literary hand of his own. That procedure of scholarly enlightenment is only just beginning with Appian and Cassius Dio.)¹⁵ Yet it is equally clear that Plutarch sometimes adopts ideas and interpretations very closely indeed. Take the analysis of the origins of the Civil War, which we find in its simplest form in Caesar. It was not the enmity, but the friendship, of Pompey and Caesar which caused the war: the year 60 was the start of it all. They first combined to destroy the aristocracy, and their final estrangement only sealed the Republic’s fate. Cato alone saw the truth. Caesar was always ambitious for tyranny, and purchased his way to power with his Gallic wealth. Pompey was his dupe, first disingenuous, then vacillating, then the prey of conflicting senatorial interests and ambitions. The deaths of Crassus and Julia removed vital obstacles to war; and the parlous state of politics (kakopoliteia) at Rome, so acute that many recognized monarchy as the only solution, was the background which made it all possible.¹⁶ It is certainly a powerful analysis; but it is hardly Plutarch’s own. Much of it recurs in a tellingly similar form in Appian¹⁷ and elsewhere, and it is surely derived originally from the work of Asinius Pollio. Of course, we are free to criticize it. Pollio, wishing to give his work a powerful beginning, may well have exaggerated the importance of the electoral pact of 60 BC, thus giving rise to that long legend of the ‘first triumvirate’ (as we used to call it). Horace speaks of gravis principum amicitias (‘weighty [or ‘burdensome’] friendships of the leaders’) as a theme of Pollio’s work (Odes 2.1.3–4): Pollio perhaps laid too much stress on the personal relationships of the great men, and made them too far-sighted and clear-cut in their ambitions. The treatment of Roman kakopoliteia tends to confine itself to violence and bribery in Rome itself, especially the violence and bribery initiated by the great men or their followers; there is no hint that Pollio gave any wider sweep of the empire, armies, and provinces. But, whatever we say, we are really making points about Pollio more than Plutarch. Plutarch simply recognized, and welcomed, the intellectual distinction and power of the analysis.

Such passages as this certainly help us to see which analyses Plutarch found plausible and welcomed as illuminating and intelligible, and thus far they can be used as evidence for his own historical understanding. But, in the end, they will tell us less than those passages where we can see his individual judgements and assumptions at work, where we can see him imposing his own views and interpretations on the events he is describing: particularly, where we can see him reinterpreting what his sources offered – as, for instance, in the Caesar account of the Lupercalia incident, where (as we saw) he seems to be revising and rewriting Pollio’s account to concentrate on the reactions of the demos; or in the early chapters of that Life, where he goes out of his way to stress the people’s encouragement to Caesar to become ‘first in the state’.¹⁸ (We can there contrast the early chapters of Suetonius’ biography, which are evidently based on very similar source-material,¹⁹ but have no such emphasis on the popular theme.) In those passages we see Plutarch himself labouring to make his material intelligible. And in those passages, most insistently, his analysis concentrates on the demos theme, the popular support which Caesar enjoyed – a theme, incidentally, which is rather lost from sight when Plutarch is reproducing Pollio’s analysis of the causes of war.

II. Oligoi and demos

In a Life such as Caesar, what Plutarch leaves out can tell us as much about his assumptions as what he puts in. We might not expect him to say much about Caesar’s family relationship to (say) the Aurelii or the Aemilii Lepidi, two highly influential gentes at the period of Caesar’s early career;²⁰ however much importance we ourselves may – or may not – choose to attach to such links, at least in explaining a politician’s first steps, these are not the sorts of connection which ancient writers regularly stress. But Plutarch might surely have said more about Caesar’s various attempts to conciliate senatorial opinion or foster senatorial connections. At 5.7, for instance, he does not mention that Caesar’s bride Pompeia was Sulla’s grand-daughter, though this has clear biographical interest.²¹ And it is certainly striking that Plutarch has so little on Caesar’s early relations with the great men, Crassus and Pompey: nothing, in this Life, on Caesar’s support for the lex Gabinia, or his pressure for Pompey’s recall from the East, or his association with Pompey’s lieutenant Metellus Nepos; nothing on Caesar’s alleged involvement with Crassus during the Catilinarian affair. All of these are items which Plutarch certainly knew.²² But, in this Life, Caesar is his own master and agent. He gains his support – that vital popular support – wholly in his own right. At least in treating the sixties, Plutarch gives little indication of the personal attachments, alliances, and deals which most modern scholars would want to stress, however transient or however firmly based we might regard them as being. Here as elsewhere, it is the demos theme which dominates.

No-one would regard Plutarch’s analysis as wholly false.²³ Of course, Caesar was a great popularis, recognized as such in his own day,²⁴ and the support of the urban demos was important to him. What is wrong with the analysis is simply what it leaves out. It is one strand among several important for explaining Caesar’s career and success, and it is the exclusiveness of Plutarch’s focus which is so striking. And it is a type of analysis which recurs time and again. In Life after Life, in much the same way in every period, we have the urban demos against the senate, there are just these two forces in politics: they can be described as ‘both groups’, αμϕοτεροι, at for instance Marius 4.7. ‘The senate wanted peace, but Marcellus stirred up the people for war’ (Marc. 6.2); ‘Appius Claudius always had the senate and the best men with him – it was his family tradition – while Scipio Africanus was a great man on his own account, but also always enjoyed great support and enthusiasm among the people’ (Aem. 38.3); Marius ‘was a formidable antagonist of the senate, for he was playing the demagogue with the people’ (Mar. 4.6); in 70 BC people criticized Pompey for ‘giving himself more to the people than the senate’ (Pomp. 21.7), and, as we saw, ‘Crassus had more strength in the senate, while Pompey was very powerful with the people’ (Pomp. 22.3); in 66 it was the ‘favour of the people and the flattery of the demagogues’ which gave Pompey the command against Mithridates, while ‘the senate and the best men’ felt that Lucullus was being terribly slighted (Lucull. 35.9); in 59 Caesar cried out that ‘he was driven to court the people against his will, because of the violence and recklessness of the senate’ (Caes. 14.3); by 50 Cato was making no progress with the people, who ‘wanted Caesar to be greatest’, but he ‘persuaded the senate, who were afraid of the people’ (Cato Min. 5.7); in March and April 44 Brutus and Cassius ‘had the goodwill of the senate’, and turned to courting the people (Brut. 21.2–3).²⁵ These two forces or factors in politics are not quite ‘parties’: Plutarch never suggests that there was any organized group of politicians who systematically devoted themselves to promoting the people’s interests (though he sometimes talks of ‘the demagogues’ in terms which have some analogies with this).²⁶ But, at least, the senate and people almost always act each in their unified and corporate ways, and Plutarch is surprised if the two sides act in concert: if they unite to support Cicero for the consulship, for instance, or if the aristocratically minded Aemilius is as popular as any demagogue (Cic. 10–11, Aem. 38.6). Other, complicating factors – the equites, perhaps, or the Italians, or the veterans – tend to be left out of things, as Plutarch prefers to leave his picture simple and unblurred.

In some ways, Plutarch is hardly alone in this. Nothing could be more natural at Rome than to contrast ‘the senate’ and ‘the people’. This mode of analysis is frequent enough in Roman historiography (we shall see that later), and – naturally enough, given the analogies to classical Greek stereotypes of the ολίγοι and the δήμος – it proved particularly congenial to the Greek historians of Rome. The Greek equivalents are clearest in Polybius, who makes the senate and the people two of the three vital factors in his vision of the Roman ‘mixed constitution’: just as the consuls contribute the elements of monarchy, so the senate inject those of aristocracy and the people those of democracy.²⁷ It is not surprising that this schematism leaves no room for the equites, for example: at 6.17, very uneasily, he has to include the equestrian publicani among ‘the people’.²⁸ As Clemence Schultze points out, Dionysius of Halicarnassus is similarly fond of boule–demos antitheses in describing the history of the early and middle Republic.²⁹ Appian begins his Civil Wars with the remark that ‘at Rome there was frequent conflict between the senate and people, as they clashed over legislation and debt-cancellations and land-distributions and elections’;³⁰ Cassius Dio readily adopts the boule–demos antithesis as a favourite device for analysing late republican history, and equally stresses popular support as the key to Caesar’s rise.³¹

Yet with these other authors – but not really with Plutarch – there is normally more to it than that. There is often a measure of thoughtfulness in the way these categories are applied, as possibly with Dionysius and certainly with Polybius. The latter has evidently expended an extraordinary amount of intellectual effort in isolating the elements of the Roman constitution which correspond to the Greek stereotypes; and he concludes that the particular blend of monarchic, aristocratic, and democratic factors, though not necessarily any of the factors themselves, is really unlike any Greek constitution, and indeed superior to anything the Greeks could offer.³² It is hard to think that Plutarch’s application of the boule–demos categories is anything like so reflective. In the other authors, too, there is usually some sense of historical change. Polybius, like Dionysius, stresses that it took considerable time for the distinctive Roman blend of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy to develop;³³ and Appian, in his introductory survey, tends to regard boule–demos strife as the main strand in earlier Roman history – before the Gracchi. The Gracchi marked the introduction of violence into politics;³⁴ afterwards Appian concentrates much more on the theme of the ‘returning general’, with his discontented army which needed to be settled.³⁵ The analysis recurs later in Appian’s history, and his use of the boule–demos antithesis is correspondingly sparing.³⁶ He, like Cassius Dio, shows much more awareness than Plutarch that the boule–demos contrast often breaks down, and other strands of explanation need to be employed. Thus both Appian and Dio have rather more of the veterans, for example, and the equites;³⁷ thus Appian knows that Pompey can be both ‘a friend of the people’, ϕιλόδημος, and thoroughly responsible in his behaviour towards the senate;³⁸ thus Dio can introduce the interesting and revealing descriptions of Cato, and then of Brutus and Cassius, as ‘lovers of the people’ (δημερασταί);³⁹ and he can talk – admittedly in a rather bewildering way – of the various ‘associations’ (εταιρεί̑αι) which Pompey and Crassus respectively brought to the alliance of 60 BC.⁴⁰ What strikes one about Plutarch is how rarely such complicating factors are adduced, and how relentlessly and exclusively he presses the simple boule–demos antithesis – indeed, how often he reduces and simplifies other modes of explanation so that he can phrase them in these terms. We are here confronting an individual feature of Plutarch’s technique.

Particularly striking and illuminating are the Lives of the Gracchi. There we find analyses very similar to those given in Caesar, and there, too, elements which complicate the simple picture tend to be cut away. Tiberius is greeted by popular acclaim (Gracch. 7.3–4, 8.10, 10.1), and his policies are aimed at the urban demos.⁴¹ The senate – or, more usually in this Life, ‘the rich’⁴² – naturally respond with hostility. Led on by the people’s enthusiasm, Tiberius manages to depose Octavius, but at that his popular support begins to waver (15.1). He finds himself forced into policies which are more extreme (16.1), but the people remain cool: the enraged opponents of the bill seize their chance, and Tiberius is killed. Yet, by the time of his death, the popular fervour is beginning to erupt once more (21) – exactly, one remembers, as it did when Caesar was killed, and Cinna the poet became the victim. Indeed, the whole sequence is closely similar to the pattern developed in Caesar : popular support brings success, popular cooling drives a man to fatal mistakes, popular fervour reasserts itself at the end. A few years later, and the whole pattern starts again with Gaius.⁴³ We see the great initial popularity, and Gaius responding to it with a collection of popular measures; then we have the wavering of popular support, this time caused less by any mistake of Gaius than by the shrewdness of his opponents, who use M. Livius Drusus to outbid Gaius’ proposals. Gaius is forced to more extreme tactics; the opponents take their chance, and he dies; the popular fervour returns after his death.⁴⁴ Once again, all is focused on the urban demos, whose support brings success and whose indifference brings failure and death. The pattern of Caesar comes back in Gracchi, and it comes back twice.

We can also see that Plutarch has removed material which does not fit. Consider Gracch. 8, where Plutarch is setting out the background of the troubles. That chapter seems clearly to come from the same source as Appian, BC 1.7,⁴⁵ but we can see that Plutarch and Appian have selected rather different strands to stress. Appian, as is well known, makes a great deal of the Italian strand. The problem is the euandria or dusandria of the Italian race (the ‘abundance of good men’ or its opposite), and Tiberius tries to favour the poor – including the allies, it is clear⁴⁶ – throughout Italy. One particular concern is that on the large estates landowners prefer slave to freeborn labour because the freeborn are eligible for military service; this military strand is given great stress.

Plutarch does seem to know of this type of explanation, and it is reasonable to infer that something like this stood in the shared source. Plutarch does mention, for instance, that ‘the poor did not enlist enthusiastically for military service’, and that they ‘did not care to bring up their young, so that shortly all Italy would be afflicted by a shortage of free men’; and he records Tiberius’ resonant speech, proclaiming the plight of those who ‘fight and die for Italy’.⁴⁷ But none of this is brought to the centre of the analysis, and the isolated mention of ‘all Italy’ remains rather opaque. All Plutarch’s weight falls on the urban demos, whom Tiberius is trying to benefit and placate. The public land had been distributed ‘to the destitute and landless citizens’, and these had now been dispossessed: Tiberius tries to reverse the process.⁴⁸ Plutarch is clearly thinking of the citizens in Rome as the beneficiaries of his measures: a conventional ‘land-distribution’ (γη̑ς αναδασμός), in fact, in very Greek terms. (That indeed is the charge of his enemies: he is introducing a γής αναδασμός and starting a revolution, 9.3.) Later, Appian speaks of ‘the countrymen’ (1.10.41) coming to Rome to support Tiberius, and then of the country citizens who might come to vote for his re-election (1.14.58): in each case there may be some confusion in Appian’s detail, but something like these notices surely stood in the shared source.⁴⁹ Plutarch again cuts the details away, reducing everything to the urban demos.

His treatment of Gaius is very similar, again concentrating purely on the popular elements. The laws, even including the law extending the citizenship to the allies, all have one absolutely straightforward aim: Gaius is trying to win the goodwill of the demos (Gracch. 26, esp. 26.2). Once again, too, there are hints that Plutarch is recasting and simplifying his source-material. There is his casual mention that the Italians gave Gaius their support, or the notice of the accusations that he and Fulvius Flaccus were stirring up the allies to revolt:⁵⁰ those passages suggest that Plutarch’s source had rather more material on the Italians, just as Appian does. But in Plutarch this material again remains tangential and unexplained. The centre of the analysis remains the urban demos, wooed in a stereotyped way by Gaius, a stereotyped demagogue. That stress on the demos certainly fits the structure of the double pair. The Gracchi are compared with Agis and Cleomenes, and all four are seen as demagogues, even if they are initially idealistic ones: that is the whole point of the comparison (Agis and Cleomenes 2.7–11, cf. Gracch. 42(2) and 44(4) ).⁵¹ But Plutarch is drastically simplifying and recasting in order to produce this clear-cut popular focus.

This has considerable significance for the Roman historian. The tendency of Appian’s account of the Gracchi is often examined closely, and we are frequently warned to beware of the ‘pan-Italic motif’ in Appian BC 1;⁵² scholars have often sought to exploit Plutarch against Appian in order to discredit that ‘Italian’ material. Most influentially, Badian, when arguing that Tiberius’ land-grants were to be limited to Roman citizens, has explicitly defended Plutarch’s authority: Plutarch’s emphasis on the urban demos, he thinks, represents an earlier and more authentic stage in the tradition than Appian, and all these Italians were sneaked into the tradition by Appian’s imediate source (who, he thinks, was a popularis historian of the late republican or Augustan period).⁵³ Bernstein then sought to reconcile Plutarch and Appian by suggesting that Tiberius first intended to include the Italian allies in his grants (Appian), but then changed his plan and confined the distribution to Roman citizens (Plutarch).⁵⁴ What is worrying about this is how little attention is being paid to Plutarch’s methods, how often he is the dumb partner in the comparison with Appian. Once we see that it is characteristic of Plutarch to reduce complicated descriptions to the simple boule–demos categories, then it is much more likely that he is the one who is sneaking the Italians out of his account, not Appian, or Appian’s immediate source, who is sneaking them in. If it is right to assume a shared source, it is likely to be Appian, not Plutarch, who is preserving its spirit.

If this is so, it becomes much harder to discard Appian’s evidence for this ‘Italian’ strand, and harder in particular to reject his statement that Tiberius intended the Italian allies to share in the grants of land.⁵⁵ ‘Italian’ needs further definition, of course: who were these people? Not just the rural citizens, it seems, unless Appian has wildly misunderstood his source;⁵⁶ but Latins and allies, or just allies? And were they to receive the citizenship as well as their parcel of land, as Richardson suggests?⁵⁷ Those are real questions, and perhaps there is not sufficient evidence to give firm answers.

It may well be, too, that this whole ‘Italian’ strand did not figure quite so prominently in Tiberius’ propaganda and programme as Appian would suggest. It is important to Appian’s vision to stress Italian discontent, for he is already preparing and developing the themes which will return in his treatment of the Social War: all that is sensitively traced by Gabba and Cuff.⁵⁸ Appian might well want to make the most of any Italians he found. That anyway suits his way of doing history: he is not particularly ‘Italophile’, as again Cuff has shown; but he is unusually sensitive to social factors in his history, and particularly the relevance of the countryside in providing support.⁵⁹ But ‘making the most of any Italians he found’ is one thing, widespread fabrication is another. When Badian discards the ‘chatter about the opposition between “the rich” and “the poor” ’ which he finds in both Plutarch and Appian as ‘no more than a stereotype of stasis, a purely literary device of little use to the historian’,⁶⁰ that obscures the differences here between Plutarch and Appian. As far as Plutarch is concerned, we are right to be sceptical: the rich–poor antithesis is more than a stereotype, it is a version of his distinctive stereotype, and we can see that he is simplifying a complex reality in order to make it fit. But for Appian the rich–poor conflict is just one strand in a much more complex reality: town and country, Roman and Italian are in fact much more important to his analysis. The categories are of course rough ones,⁶¹ but the most complex political divisions regularly embrace contrasts which can fairly, if simply, be described in such terms. The blend of factors may be confusing, but it is not stereotyped: Gabba is indeed right to comment on the unstereotyped and unconventional nature of Appian’s analysis in this part of BC 1.⁶² It is very hard to believe that the Italian material is simply drawn from the air.

To return to Plutarch: something similar has probably happened in his account of Saturninus and Glaucia at Marius 28–30. Marius is another Life in which Plutarch is interested in historical analysis, and he is concerned at that point to analyse Marius’ wavering popular support. Once again, it is likely that he is drawing his material from the same source as Appian, who gives a parallel account at BC 1.28–33.⁶³ But, once again, the emphases of the two authors are very different. Appian is very clear that it was ‘the Italians’ who supported Saturninus, and were to benefit from his land-bill. The urban mob (πολιτικός ἄχλος, 1.30.133) oppose Saturninus fiercely, and in this they are at one with the senate. When Saturninus tries to drive Metellus into exile, the Italians again support him (1.31.139–40), and again threaten to come to blows with the city-dwellers; and, once Saturninus is overthrown, the demos and the senate, again at one, gratefully seize their chance to press for Metellus’ recall. (I take it that Appian means ‘the Italian allies’ when he speaks of the ‘Italian’ or ‘rustic’ support for Saturninus; even if, as many suppose, he means the ‘rural citizens’, the fact remains that he is drawing a firm distinction between countrymen and city-dwellers.⁶⁴) All that is much too complicated for Plutarch. He turns Saturninus, like the Gracchi, into a very conventional demagogue. Saturninus aims at the ‘destitute and turbulent mob’ (πλήθος ἄπορον καί θορυβοποιόν, 28.7, cf. 29.9): it is clearly the urban demos which supports him (29.7, 29.11, 30.2), and the senate which is opposed. The land-bill seems aimed, once again, at the urban demos : not a word of those ‘countrymen’ or ‘Italians’ of Appian. (Nor indeed, in this context, of Marius’ veterans, though Plutarch has mentioned them in the preceding chapter at 28.7; more of that later.) This leaves the final popular surge against Marius (30.5) and the popular pressure for Metellus’ recall (31.2) harder to explain – but mobs, after all, are fickle. Appian’s version of all this is more subtle and sophisticated, whatever its relation to historical reality;⁶⁵ if he and Plutarch do share a source, it is likely that it is Appian, not Plutarch, who is retaining more of the complexities of the source’s analysis. And, once again, we see Plutarch’s reductionism, his readiness to simplify the most complex events into simple demos and boule conflict, and his readiness to cut away material which would complicate and blur that simple stereotype.

III. Greekness

I suggested (p. 215) that Tiberius’ γής αναδασμός was described ‘in very Greek terms’, and it is tempting to take this further. This whole boule–demos analysis does remind one of the way Plutarch talks about Greek politics, and the stereotypes of Greek political thought: not, perhaps, the boule, but at least the oligoi, who are predictably and violently opposed to the fickle demos. Before he came to write the Parallel Lives, Plutarch evidently had an extremely thorough knowledge of Greek history and literature, whereas his knowledge of detailed Roman history was probably scanty; is Plutarch here imposing Greek concepts on Roman reality, bending Roman history to fit stereotypes which did not wholly match the reality? It is interesting to note that Gomme made the converse and equally attractive suggestion, that Plutarch sometimes imposed Roman stereotypes on Greek history: Nicias buying the goodwill of the demos with expensive shows, for instance, or Cimon as the soldier who is lost when it comes to the tricks of domestic politics.⁶⁶ And certainly the similarity of the terms was sometimes very useful to Plutarch, making his parallels all the closer. Just as Dion and Brutus have to kill similar tyrants, so Pericles and Fabius have to confront similar mobs and similar demagogues; and the corruption of good programmes into rank demagogy can link Agis and Cleomenes with the Gracchi.⁶⁷

Certainly, the similarities of Plutarch’s language to that in his Greek Lives seem very close. The opponents of the Roman demos may be described in various ways, though they can usually be seen to be equivalent to (or at least to dominate) the senate: they are the αριστοκρατικοί (the ‘aristocrats’),⁶⁸ or the γνώριμοι (the ‘notables’),⁶⁹ or the καλοί καγαθοί (the ‘good men and true’),⁷⁰ or the χαριέντες (the ‘gentlemen’),⁷¹ or the ὀλιγαρχικοί (those ‘of oligarchic sentiments’)⁷² or the αξίολογοί (those ‘worthy of note’),⁷³ or the δοκιμώτατοι (the ‘most wellknown’),⁷⁴ or the δυνατώτατοι (the ‘most powerful’),⁷⁵ or the κρατίστοί (the ‘strongest’),⁷⁶ or simply the πρω̑τοί or αρίστοί (the ‘first’ or ‘best’).⁷⁷ Those are precisely the terms in which Plutarch is accustomed to speak of Greek politics.⁷⁸ The sort of analysis he gives in Caesar or Gracchi – the hero wins popular support, then forfeits it, then it is finally reasserted – has considerable parallels with, say, Pericles.

Just as in Greece, an individual tries occasionally to become first man in the state; then, particularly if that individual is hoping to exploit his popularity with the demos, Plutarch usually assumes that he hoped for or achieved a ‘tyranny’: a τυραννίς, a δυναστέία, or a μοναρχία. These accusations were thrown around in the real world of Roman politics, and it is natural that Plutarch should say such things of Sulla, Marius, Cinna, Saturninus, Cicero, Caesar, or Pompey; it is more striking that he should casually note that ‘C. Gracchus had by now acquired a sort of monarch’s strength’, or record the suggestion that ‘Cassius was seeking to secure a δυναστέία for himself, not freedom for his fellow citizens’.⁷⁹ If a man’s aim is specified more closely, it is rarely any more informative than ‘revolution’, μέταστασίς or συγχυσίς τής πολίτέίας: so, naturally enough, of the Catilinarians and of Caesar; so also, though, of Saturninus; and even, once again casually, of the supporters of Pompey in the late sixties – ‘a sizeable part of the demos wanted Pompey’s return because they looked for a revolution’ (Cato Min. 27.1, cf. Pomp. 43.5); and during the Hannibalic War the ruling classes were accused of ‘exploiting the war to destroy the demos and introduce an absolute monarchy’ (Fab. 8.4).⁸⁰

This assumption that political aims and achievements are regularly to be explained in terms of constitutional change is very Greek. Plutarch has little idea of the characteristic Roman desire to be first within the system rather than change it. When he is treating Marius or Pompey, he writes of their ϕιλαρχία, their quest for offices or commands;⁸¹ he has no notion of an ambition for a position of prestige and respect within an appreciative state. Nor is there much feel for the importance of such ideas as dignitas or auctoritas. He does have rather more feeling for the Roman passion for gloria : he seems clear enough, for instance, that T. Flamininus was eager to avoid handing the war with Philip over to a successor, and was prepared to make peace rather than see this. ‘He was fiercely ambitious for honour, and was afraid that he might forfeit his glory if another general were sent to the war’ (Flam. 7.2, cf. 13.2): Plutarch does not find that at all remarkable or perplexing.⁸² But, usually, when he speaks of such ambition for glory, he does so with considerable bitterness and hostility: this was the decisive failing of the Gracchi (Agis–Cleomenes 2),⁸³ and it was an important aspect in which the elder Cato fell short of Aristides (Cato Mai. 32(5).4). Plutarch has not felt his way into the values of Roman public life, and gives no sense of the respect and value Romans accorded to a competitive quest for glory.⁸⁴

Where Greek analogies of Roman institutions exist, Plutarch is quite good: he does, for instance, seem to understand a fair amount about political activity in the law-courts, and his discussion of political trials at Cato Mai. 15 is sensible enough. Things in Greece were perhaps not so very different – or at least less different than they were in many other aspects of political life.⁸⁵ When Greek equivalents are absent, he is in trouble. It may be a particular institution which defeats him: the tribunate, for instance, was a curious thing to a Greek of the Roman Empire, and Plutarch several times incorrectly explains the tribunicial veto, speaking as if a tribune could veto the acts only of a fellow tribune.⁸⁶ Certain aspects of the early days of January 49 BC are therefore beyond him: at Ant. 5.10 he can only refer to the infringement by the senators (των από βουλής) of the tribunes’ freedom of speech, and gives no hint of the overriding of their veto.⁸⁷

Or it may be a convention of political life which he finds difficult, or tends to obscure. He knows the importance of the Roman political family and of family traditions: the Claudii, for instance, and the Metelli are by tradition aristocratically minded (Aem. 38.3, Cato Min. 26.4). He sees the importance of kinsmen, too, in persuading Aemilius Paullus to stand for the consulship at a time of national crisis (Aem. 10.2). But he does not seem to sense the extent of the authority exercised by the very great families, the Scipiones or the Metelli or even (despite Gracch. 1) the Sempronii. When he seeks to explain the early electoral successes of Marcellus, it does not occur to him to mention the importance of the family (Marc. 2): the answer must be found in his military promise. The senate are the aristokratikoi; Plutarch has no notion of the importance of nobilitas, and makes no attempt to distinguish grades of aristocracy within the senate itself. When the terms ευγενής or ευπατριδής do occur, they often seem rather to refer to the patriciate.⁸⁸ All that scarcely conveys the flavour of the realities of Roman aristocratic society.

Nor could Greek stereotypes accommodate so unfamiliar an institution as clientela. Plutarch’s definition of patronus at Fab. 13.6 is feeble and inadequate; and, when he mentions a cliens–patronus relationship, it is normally to explain the adhesion or obligation of one individual, normally a fairly important individual, Marius to Metellus or to C. Herennius, for example, or Mucius (if that was the man’s name) to Ti. Gracchus.⁸⁹ He has no feel for the electoral or military significance of a large body of clients.⁹⁰ Thus the senatorial opponents of Ti. Gracchus can arm only ‘their slaves and friends’ against him (Gracch. 18.3); thus – though he knows Pompey was always welcome in Picenum, that he liked being there ‘because people liked him so much’, and that his popularity was inherited from his father (Pomp. 6.1) – he can still describe Pompey’s raising of a private army in the eighties without any explicit mention of clientela. Nor is he alert to the importance of clientelae which are foreign – though he is always very interested in his subjects’ achievements in the provinces, and in particular the justice and humanity of their administration. (A rather distinctive feature, this, and one which marks him out from Greek historians more steeped in Roman life and Roman historiography, Appian and Cassius Dio; and Plutarch, incidentally, has few illusions about the savagery and rapacity which typified Roman governors.⁹¹) But, still, he can describe the links of Aemilius Paullus with various foreign nations in wondering terms, and regard his continuing concern for their welfare as a quite remarkable trait (Aem. 39.8–9); and, still, he can describe the enthusiasm shown by the Spaniards for Ti. Gracchus as simply ‘inherited from his father’, with no hint that there was any more formal bond of duty or obligation (Gracch. 5. 4–5).

Very often, he modifies unfamiliar ideas and forces to ones he can understand: again, usually to the familiar boule–demos antithesis, by the same characteristic reductionism. He of course knows that the equestrian order existed, but he rarely brings it into his political analysis: he can mention Sulpicius’ ‘anti-senate’ of 600 equites, but there is no deeper analysis of Marius’ equestrian support.⁹² He has therefore, very uneasily, to represent Marius as a curious sort of incompetent trimmer, spasmodically courting the demos ‘against his true instincts’ (28.1) but tending to drift away from them at inexplicable moments (e.g. 30). When Tiberius or Gaius Gracchus or Pompey proposes to give the knights a share in the juries for the lawcourts, in each case Plutarch knows the political significance: in all three cases, they were trying to win the goodwill – of the demos!⁹³ His treatment of the publicani is similar: resentful publicani determine to do down Lucullus in Roman politics – but the only way they can do so is by using ‘demagogues’ (Lucull. 20.5). In all this Plutarch contrasts with Appian and Cassius Dio, who both (especially Appian) have a good deal of the equestrian order – perhaps, indeed, rather too much.⁹⁴ But there is no doubt that Plutarch has too little.

We can see a similar reductionism in Plutarch’s treatment of the army, particularly the army in politics. Here he is quite good on some aspects. He knows the perils presented by the returning generals, dangerous men at the head of devoted armies: he digresses on these in Sulla (12), and the theme recurs, though not very insistently, in Pompey.⁹⁵ But what do these returning armies want? Here he is less good, and he certainly does not understand their imperative need for land. He knows that the veterans were in some way connected with the land-bills of 59 BC; he even knows that Pompey ‘filled the city with soldiers’ to pass the measure; but still he does not bring out the connection. The bills are aimed ‘to win the goodwill of the mob’; they distribute land ‘to the poor and destitute’.⁹⁶ His treatment of Saturninus’ land-bill is similar. There too he knows that Marius introduced his soldiers into the assemblies to help Saturninus (Mar. 28.7) – but the land-bill is still, as we saw, aimed at captivating and benefiting the urban demos. Just as he strips away the Italian allies from his analysis, so also with the veterans: once again, everything is reduced to a simple, conventional land-distribution (γής αναδασμός), aimed at the urban mob.

As he is so blind to the veterans’ interest in land, it is hardly surprising that he seems to miss the point of the Marian military reforms. He knows that Marius introduced a new type of recruit into the Roman army, but makes a revealing error when he mentions this: Marius is recruiting ‘destitute men and slaves’ (Mar. 9.1). He clearly does not realize that it is a different type of citizen, the man without capital or land, who is involved: his stereotype of the demos is too simple to admit of distinctions between assidui and proletarii.⁹⁷ In Sulla, similarly, when he digresses on the theme of the ‘returning general’ he does not bring out that Sulla’s army included these new, landless types of recruit. He does not see that this army was in important ways different from the forces of Flamininus, Acilius, and Aemilius Paullus, with whom he compares it (Sull. 12.8–14);⁹⁸ nor that these differences were central in explaining the new bond between general and troops, and the violent consequences this produced.

Indeed, he is not really very interested in the soldiers at all. Very often, he simply leaves them out completely when he is describing politics. In the story of the turbulent spring and summer of 44 BC he rarely mentions the veterans; it is again usually the urban demos for whose favour Brutus, Octavian, and Antony contend.⁹⁹ He has little notion that the veterans might have genuine loyalties, worth discussing and analysing. ‘The armies’, he says in an aside in the Brutus (23.1), ‘were on sale – it was just like an auction: they gave themselves to the highest bidder...’ ¹⁰⁰ When he comes in Antony to describe the treaty of Brundisium, it is simply the ‘friends’ of Antony and Octavian who urge them to come to terms, and cement their alliance with the marriage agreement.¹⁰¹ Appian, again probably drawing on similar material, makes it clear that it was the veterans who began this pressure on their leaders to agree on peace.¹⁰² Indeed, the entire history of the Triumvirate reads very differently in our other accounts, and especially in their treatment of the soldiers. Appian in particular has a great deal more on the impact of their veterans and their loyalties on political life, even though he seems to be using similar source-material. Cassius Dio has his blind spots with the soldiers, but he too knows that their loyalties were not wholly for sale; Nicolaus of Damascus, also, is more in tune with historical reality.¹⁰³ Plutarch cuts the theme away, and again it is the urban demos which matters.

IV. Greek stereotypes and Roman realities

I have been dwelling on the ‘Greekness’ of it all, and suggesting that Plutarch is imposing his own categories, drawn from classical Greek history and political thought, on Roman realities which do not wholly fit. But we must not overstate the differences between Greek and Roman political stereotypes. That boule–demos analysis, for instance: is it so very different from Sallust’s view of the duas partis of the Roman state, the pauci (or nobiles or potentes or just senatus) and the plebs?¹⁰⁴ Sallust, too, often omits the equites from his analysis, and Sallust too dwells on the plebs, the ‘artisans and rustics’, as the decisive force which carried Marius to the consulship.¹⁰⁵ The incautious reader might well assume – just as Plutarch often seems to assume¹⁰⁶ – that the poorest citizens could genuinely dominate the wealth-based comitia centuriata. Livy as well sometimes describes events in similar terms, with the senate (or the nobiles) striving valiantly to resist stereotyped popular fury.¹⁰⁷ Cicero, in his tendentious little account in the pro Sestio, feels he can get away with speaking of the two great traditions in the Roman state, the optimates and the populares; and he then describes the Gracchi in terms very similar to Plutarch, affirming that they introduced laws which were welcome to the people but hateful to the boni.¹⁰⁸ Tacitus, too, can refer to ‘continual struggles of the senate against the people’ (assidua senatus adversus plebem certamina) as a conspicuous feature of the last phase of the Republic.¹⁰⁹ And all that quest for tyranny and revolution: was this not the stuff of political abuse, and occasionally of reality, in the late Republic – ‘both men want to be king’, and so on?¹¹⁰ Is there not a real chance that here – just as in the case of Pollio’s explanation of the war which we noticed earlier – Plutarch is simply following the analysis of some Latin sources, and the similarity of his language and interpretation to the ways he speaks of Greek politics is just a fortunate coincidence?

There may be something in that objection. It is certainly true that he may not have found any very clear correctives to his natural assumptions in the Roman historical tradition, and so it is not surprising that the later Lives are not conspicuously more sophisticated in their historical interpretations than the ones which he had written earlier.¹¹¹ But it is also true that few Roman writers (and few Greek writers, as we noticed earlier) apply the boule–demos analysis quite so relentlessly and exclusively as Plutarch. Consider, for example, the wide group of people whom Cicero would class as optimates in the pro Sestio, or the various different classes of supporters who contributed to Marius’ honestissuma suffragatio (‘most honourable canvass’) in Sallust.¹¹² And there is some way between abusive allegations that individuals are aiming for tyranny, uttered by political opponents with ferocity and passion, and Plutarch’s casual assumption that such claims are regularly true.

Still, it anyway seems clear that Plutarch is not simply taking over categories which he finds in his sources; on the contrary, he is regularly reinterpreting his material in order to bring out these favoured categories, and is not the slave of the tradition. We saw a certain amount of this earlier, in examining his recastings of Pollio in describing Caesar and of an unidentifiable source in telling the story of the Gracchi. The recastings will emerge even more clearly if we go back to an earlier period of Roman history, where we can compare Plutarch with his source-material – or something very like his source-material – rather more closely.

If we had to pick a piece of Roman historiography to remind us of Greek demos and demagogue stereotypes, we might well choose Livy 22. Minucius and Varro are the Cleon-like demagogues, mobilizing the uncontrollable forces of the vulgar mob; on the other side, we have the sober and sensible Fabius and Paullus and the sober and sensible senate. This is a place where we can compare Plutarch closely, for his narrative in Fabius is often very similar indeed – so similar that we should either assume that he is using Livy directly, or an earlier authority to whom Livy, too, kept very close.¹¹³ In either case, Livy can give us a very good idea of the content of Plutarch’s source-material.

What is interesting is the way in which Plutarch takes those demos and demagogue stereotypes even further than Livy:¹¹⁴ even this very Greek passage of narrative was insufficiently reduced to the boule–demos terms which he wanted. In Plutarch, much more than in Livy, Fabius is initially created dictator by a mindless surge of popular panic, precisely the sort of mindless surge which he himself will later have to confront. Livy, like Polybius, had simply dwelt on the confusion in Rome at the time, and had not given any such popular stress.¹¹⁵ In Plutarch, Fabius gives a speech to the demos as soon as he is appointed, reassuring them and quelling their panic; in Livy it was not delivered to the demos, but to the senate.¹¹⁶ When Fabius is deceived by the oxen stratagem, and again when Minucius wins his initial delusive successes, it is the popular enthusiasm for Minucius – and the popular fears for his safety, if Fabius got his hands on him – which Plutarch stresses. On both occasions, Livy had concentrated on the attacks on Fabius delivered in the senate.¹¹⁷ When Fabius is attacked, the demagogue Metilius claims that the senate ‘had provoked the whole war to destroy the demos and impose an absolute monarchy’ (8.4). ‘To impose a monarchy’? That sounds very odd, and very much like Plutarch himself: sure enough, Livy has nothing like this. Plutarch seems in fact to be borrowing from a passage rather later in Livy, when Varro accuses the nobles of ‘using the war to gain control of the comitia’.¹¹⁸ ‘To gain control of the comitia’ is rather milder, and much more plausible. Plutarch is again rewriting the Roman original to stress his own favoured theme.

This boule–demos analysis is important to Fabius, and not just to the Life but to the pair. Stadter¹¹⁹ has shown that the comparison of Pericles and Fabius is very elaborate, and the two men’s reactions to hostile mobs and hostile demagogues are a central element in the pairing. Later in the Fabius – and this is a most interesting development – we see related themes coming back when Fabius is in decline, woefully jealous of the successes of the young Scipio. Fabius may still be urging his distinctive caution, but he is also showing exactly those characteristics which we earlier saw in the demagogues: he is overcome by petty philonikia (‘contentiousness’), scoring political points rather than prosecuting the war, ‘crying out’ (βοων) in the assembly, desperate to mobilize popular pressure against a great general.¹²⁰ As Pericles in old age gains a stature lacking from his demagogic youth, so Fabius’ demagogic decline compromises the dignity which he has won in the years of his greatness: the pair shows an extremely elegant ‘hour-glass structure’ (to use the term of E.M. Forster).¹²¹ And once again the neatness of the analysis seems to be Plutarch’s own. We would be hard put to it to find any similar thematic links between Fabius’ greatness and decline in the treatment of Livy.

In Fabius, then, Plutarch does not seem to be at the mercy of his sources. Even where they offered an analysis which must have been congenial to him, he was not content to take it over: skilfully, he took it much further. One can trace the same individuality in other passages, and can see how reluctant he was to take over blindly the themes which his Roman sources developed. We might conclude by looking at some passages where he shows his awareness of the characteristic motifs of Roman historians: the importance of metus hostilis, for example, in keeping Rome morally upright, or the nature of moral decline from ancestral simplicity, or the disastrous effect of foreign culture. As Jones has stressed,¹²² Plutarch often takes over these views himself, sometimes in a not very original way: in particular, he has some splendid passages of routine nostalgia, reflecting wistfully on the days before ambition and greed overtook the state.¹²³ But there are also passages where he gives such Roman ideas as metus hostilis a rather individual twist; and one can indeed see that some of the most cherished Roman beliefs would have been hateful to him. Metus hostilis, vital to keep the state morally healthy? Plutarch found such glorification of war extremely distasteful, surely: on a related theme, he insists that triumphs would far more appropriately be given for the arts of peace (Marc. 22.9–10, cf. Pomp. 13.10–11). And the disastrous effect of external, especially Greek, culture? He clearly knows the idea (cf. Cato Mai. 4.2)¹²⁴ – but it was hardly a theme to appeal to him. He feels that Romans should have learnt a lot more from Greece (Mar. 2), and he criticizes the elder Cato most forthrightly for his prophecy that Greek influences would be fatal to Rome. ‘Time shows that he was wrong; for the time of Rome’s greatest achievements was the time it was most ready to welcome Greek studies and Greek culture’ (Cato Mai. 23.3).Plutarch and Roman politics when it was most ready to welcome Greek studies and Greek culture’ (Cato Mai. 23.3).

When Plutarch does echo such Roman topoi he is therefore keen to adapt them, and the nature of these adaptations is again extremely suggestive. Marcellus was criticized for bringing back the treasures of Syracuse and corrupting – corrupting whom? Corrupting the Roman demos, turning them from farming and warfare to luxury and idleness, filling them with laziness and chatter, so that they spend most of the day discussing arts and artists.. .(Marc. 21.6)! It is a very mild form of criticism, and Plutarch is clearly on Marcellus’ side.¹²⁵ He has just been stressing the superiority of Greek culture, and bringing out the wretchedly primitive character of Rome at the time: as he makes Marcellus say, he is educating these people. So much for that topos of Greek influence: even that is fitted into the demos-emphasis, and given a very individual turning. The same sort of thing emerges with metus hostilis in the famous passage at the end of Cato Maior, when Scipio Nasica is arguing that Carthage should remain standing: ‘for Nasica saw that the demos was going wildly astray through their hubris, and were hard for the senate to control.; he wished the fear of Carthage to remain a bridle on the recklessness of the mob’ (Cato Mai. 27.3).¹²⁶ Again, quite characteristic: the Roman idea is given a very individual twist, and tied into the distinctive boule–demos analysis.

The emphasis on the demos is clearly Plutarch’s own: the great preconception with which he came to write about the Roman Republic. And no-one would want to suggest that he was wholly wrong. The reduction of so many other forms of analysis to this theme is disquieting, and so is the assumption that the analysis is equally applicable to every period; but few would doubt that Plutarch captured something very important about the late Republic by describing it in this way. It was not Plutarch, it was Sir Ronald Syme, who described the end of the Republic as ‘the Greek period of Roman history, stamped with the sign of the demagogue, the tyrant, and the class war’.¹²⁷

_____________

I have only lightly revised this 1986 paper. In it I wrote as if Plutarch’s ‘reductionism’ was a clear defect, to be written down as a limitation of the Greek filters through which he processed Roman realities. That may be right;¹²⁸ but there were also some advantages which he derived from this interpretative mindset, and I did not pay enough attention to these. There is the way it helps Plutarch’s comparative programme, for these Greek and Roman figures face similar political crises and have similar options for dealing with them: that is a theme which I did acknowledge in 1986, but too briefly (pp. 215, 218). It also made it easier for Plutarch to extract the moral and political points which interested him most: not points which were specific to any one society or period, but those which might most readily be applied to other cultures and milieux, provided only that those most timeless categories – the struggle of the few and the many, the quest for tyranny or for revolution, the inspiration of glory and fame – continued to obtain. These are themes which will recur in the next two chapters.

Notes

¹ Fab. 16.6, cf. Galba 2.5.

² Alex. 1.2: Frazier 1996, 17–18, here has some good remarks (not ‘petite histoire’, but a balance between small things and big things). More on this passage at p. 102–3, 259–60, 276–7, and Pelling, forthcoming (a).

³ Caes. 6.7, cf. 5.1–3, 8.4–5, 14.2–3, 14.6.

⁴ For the ‘Marianism’ see 5.2–3, 6.1–7; and then note 19.4 (with 18.1) for the continuation of the theme in the military narrative. The stress is an interesting one, and seems individual to Plutarch; neither Suet. Div. Iul. 11 nor Vell. 2.43.4 give anything like so charged and coloured an account of the Marian display as Caes. 6. For the historical importance of Caesar’s ‘Marian’ links see Syme 1939, 65, 89–90, 93–4; Strasburger 1938, 131, 136–7.

⁵ Caes. 7.4, 14.3, 21.7, 60.5, 64.2, cf. 10.6–7. His enemies may also be described as the αρίστοκρατίκοί (13.5, 14.6), or the καλοί καγαθοί (14.3), or the αρίστοί (7.4):cf. p. 218.

⁶ See pp. 5–6 and 14–15 where Plutarch’s adaptation of his source-material is analysed in more detail; also Pelling 1988, 144–5.

⁷ For the historical interests of Caesar, and some further aspects of Plutarch’s presentation of his analysis, see also pp. 5–6, 103–5, and ch. 11.

⁸ Mar. 6, Cic. 11.2–3 with pp. 55–6 above; and for a new man’s difficulties, Cato Mai. 16.4–5.

⁹ See ch. 1, where I argue that Crassus was prepared at the same time as Caesar, Pompey, Cato Minor, Brutus, and Antony. The first three of those Lives all give much more detailed accounts of the politics of the early fifties.

¹⁰ Thus, in Caesar, his authority ‘increased slowly’ (4.5), and it was only ‘late’ (4.7) that his opponents realized the danger; in 61 he flees before his creditors to Crassus, who finds him useful for his own opposition to Pompey (11.1); in 60 Pompey and Crassus are still ‘the greatest powers in the state’ (13.3). It is the alliance with Pompey in 60 which brings Caesar to real power (28.2–3, cf. Pomp. 57.6). (It is true, as Strasburger 1938, 71, 75–6, 85–9, insists, that Plutarch exaggerates the extent and importance of Caesar’s early popular support ; but this does not lead him to exaggerate Caesar’s early power as greatly as Strasburger’s discussion would suggest.) In Pompey, Caesar again only comes to prominence with the alliance of 60, which brought him ‘gratitude, and power for the future’ (47.1); it was Pompey’s power which raised Caesar against the city, and finally against Pompey himself (46.3–4, cf. 57.6).

¹¹ Optimates come to an understanding, 54.5–9, 59. 1–2, etc.: the accord reached in 57 BC (49.6) is very transient. Early popularity: 1.3–4, 2.1, 14.11, 15.1, 21.7–8, 22.3–4, 22.9, 25.7–13, 30.4. This stress disappears in the second half of the Life, for Pompey is then the tool of other, more subtle and degraded demagogues, Clodius and Caesar; it is then their popularity which is stressed (46.7, 47.5, 48.3, 48.9, 51.1, 53.6, 58.4).Cf. the firm division of the ‘two parts of Pompey’s Life at 46.1–4, with pp. 98–102 and Pelling, forthcoming (b).

¹² Ch. 4, pp. 98–100.

¹³ The analysis is set out in its simplest form in Caesar, and that Life’s treatment is discussed below. In Cato Minor, affairs are taken further back than the alliance of 60 BC, to Cato’s rejection of the proffered marriage-link with Pompey: that was the start of it all (30.9–10), for Pompey was driven to marry Julia instead. The marriage of Julia and Pompey is advanced to the very beginning of the narrative of 59 BC in order to emphasize the point (31.6, contrast Caes. 14.7–8, Pomp. 47.9); and Cato’s own insight concerning the 60 BC alliance, stressed at Caes. 13.6 and Pomp. 47.4, is here muted and delayed. Cato explains all in terms of personal factors and personal rebuffs, while Caesar represents the alliance of Pompey and Caesar in purely political terms. That treatment excellently suits Cato, which shows little interest in politics but a considerable concern with the affairs of Cato’s womenfolk (24.4–25, 13, 30.3–10, 52.5–9: cf. p. 103). Pompey is different again. Pollio’s view is retained (47.3–4, cf. 51.1–2, 53.8–10, 54.3); but Plutarch here gives the crucial importance to Pompey’s own reactions and attitudes during the fifties (see pp. 96–102). In particular, the joyous Italian reaction in 50 BC, when Pompey recovered from illness, is given extraordinary weight, for this engendered his false confidence: ‘this, so they say, was as important as anything in causing the war’ (ούδενòς μὲντοι του̑το λὲγεται τω̑ν ἀπεργασαμὲνων τὸν πόλεμον αίτίων ἒλαττον γενέσθαι, 57.5). No other Life gives such emphasis to this moment.

¹⁴ See pp. 96–7. Though more aware, he is also more passive: pp. 99–102.

¹⁵ The ‘procedure of scholarly enlightenment’, as I pompously put it in 1986, has duly proceeded since then: cf. esp. Goldmann 1988; Rich 1989 and 1990; Gowing 1992; Hose 1994; Swain 1996, 248–53 and 401–8; Bucher 2000; and the various articles in ANRW ii.34.1 (1993) on Appian and ii.34.3 (1997) on Dio. Appian will be illuminated further by work currently in progress by Luke Pitcher. I say a little more myself about Dio in Pelling 1997d, and about both Appian and Dio in Pelling, forthcoming (a).

¹⁶ Caes. 28, cf. e.g. 13.4–6, 23.5–7. For the variations in other Lives see n. 13. The analysis is clearest in Caesar because Plutarch there brings together so many of the themes in the single powerful survey (28); that analysis, returning the reader decisively to urban politics after the account of the Gallic campaigns, combines many motifs which are exploited earlier in the narratives of the other Lives.

¹⁷ Cf. esp. Gaul as the training-ground for Caesar’s army: App. BC 2.17.62 with Caes. 28.3, Pomp. 51.2. Kakopoliteia : App. 2.19.69–70, with Caes. 28.4, Cato Min. 44.3, Pomp. 54.3. Pompey’s disingenuous behaviour and true ambitions: App. 2.19.71, 2.20.73 with Caes. 28.7, Cato Min. 45.7, Pomp. 53.9–10, cf. pp. 96–7; monarchy the only remedy: App. 2.20.72 with Caes. 28.5–6, Cato Min. 47.2, Pomp. 54.7 (and also Brut. 55(2).2, an interesting variation of the idea); cf. below, pp. 258–9. For Pollio’s view, and for other ancient analyses of the Republic’s fall, see Pohlenz 1927; Syme 1950; Lintott 1971, 493–8; and now Sion-Jenkis 2000, esp. 65–126.

¹⁸ See pp. 5–6 and 103–5.

¹⁹ The uniformity of the tradition for Caesar’s early years is demonstrated by Strasburger 1938, 72–3, though his elaborate discrimination of different strands in that tradition is not at all plausible.

²⁰ For Caesar’s connection with these gentes see Suet. Div. Iul. 1.2; for their power see Münzer 1920, 312–13, 324–7 Note Aemilii Lepidi as consuls in 78 and 77, Aurelii Cottae in 75 and 74 – precisely the period when Caesar’s career was beginning.

²¹ He probably knew the item: cf. Suet. Div. Iul. 6.2, probably from the same source.

²² He mentions Caesar’s support for the lex Gabinia at Pomp. 25.8, but not in Caesar (cf. Watkins 1987); here Plutarch may well have transferred material from the lex Manilia (cf. Dio 36.43.2–4) to the context of the lex Gabinia in the manner sketched at pp. 93–4 (so Watkins 120–1 n. 6: cf. Strasburger 1938, 63, 100–1), but that does not affect the present point. Plutarch had already described Caesar’s agitation together with Metellus in the earlier Cicero (23.1–4), and makes a great deal of it at Cato Min. 27–9, but at Caes. 9.1 he blandly states that ‘Caesar’s praetorship was not at all turbulent’. At Cic. 23.5 he had also mentioned Caesar’s proposal to recall Pompey from the East, and repeats the story in a slightly different form at Cato Min. 26.2, but again does not mention this in Caes. He mentions Caesar’s involvement with Crassus at Crass. 13.4, with some pride in his learning: pp. 47 and 50. In Caesar, apart from the casual mention of Pompey at 5.7, the introduction of both Crassus and Pompey is delayed until 11.1.

²³ And since this was written the ‘popular’ strand in late Republican history has been much more stressed: see esp. Brunt 1992, 1–92 (a particularly forceful statement of views which he had stated as early as 1971b and before) and Millar 1998. This, evidently, is not the place to enter that debate: of course that strand is important, but I wonder if the balance has not now shifted too far in that direction.

²⁴ Cf. esp. Cic. Cat. 4.9, de Prov. Cons. 38–9, Phil. 2.116, 5.49; Caelius, apud Cic. Fam. 8.6(88).5. See Strasburger 1938, esp. 129–31, Meier R-E Spb. x (1965), cols. 580, 582, 590, and Mackie 1992.

²⁵ Cf. also e.g. Marc. 10.2 (Nola), Cato Mai. 16.4, Mar. 9.4, Pomp. 25.7, 46.5, 49.3–6, 49.11, 52.2, 59.3, Lucull. 38.2, Cato Min. 22.6, 26.1, 28.6, 29.3, 32.1, Cic. 33.2, 33.6, 43.4; and the detailed analyses of Caesar, Gracchi, and Fabius elsewhere in this chapter. Note the isolated exception at Mar. 34.2, where Plutarch is aware that the views of the demos were divided. On Plutarch’s portrayal of the demos see now de Blois 1992, 4578–83, esp. 4580–3 on Plutarch’s failure to bring out ‘the increasing heterogeneity of the masses’: here, as so often, a political force tends to be represented as a constant, not a variable.

²⁶ e.g. Aem. 38.6, Ant. 2.6, Lucull. 35.9, Cato Min. 31.2. Hose 1994, 286, here misinterprets me as denying that Plutarch thinks in terms of optimates and populares. As he says, e.g. Ant. 5.1 (‘the aristokratikoi supporting Pompey, the demotikoi calling Caesar from Gaul...’) could easily be translated into those terms – but that is not the same as talking of ‘parties’, which would be as misleading a way of categorizing optimates and populares as it is of aristokratikoi and demokratikoi. Cf. the forceful words of Mackie 1992, 49, ‘It is common knowledge nowadays that populares did not constitute a coherent political group or “party” (even less so than their counterpart, optimates)...’ The important point is the assumption of two sides, and here Hose and I are at one.

²⁷ Plb. 6.11–18, 43–58.

²⁸ See e.g. Walbank 1957–79 ad loc., or Brunt 1965a, 119: ‘by the people he of course means the Equites’. Nicolet 1966, 322–3, does not quite bring out the importance of Polybius’ schematism.

²⁹ Schultze 1986, 130–1, 139–40. See also Gabba 1991, 152–89, esp. 160, 186, stressing that Dionysius develops a continuity of theme in the major issues of Roman history: this entails some similar continuity in the way the contending elements are categorized.

³⁰ App. BC 1.1.1. On Appian’s categories see now Hose 1994, 283–301, and Sion-Jenkis 2000, 69–71; I say a little more in Pelling, forthcoming (a).

³¹ Boule–demos : e.g. 36.24.1–2, 36.24.5, 36.37.1, 36.38.3–5, 36.43.2–5, 36.51.3, 37.26.3, 37.29.3, 37.41.3, 37.42.3, 37.43.1, 37.51.3, 37.56.5, 38.1.1, 38.12.4–13.1, 38.15.3, 38.16.3, 38.16.6, and so on. Popular support for Caesar: 36.43.2–4, 37.22.1, 37.37.2–3, 37.56.1–2, 38.11.3–6, 39.25.1–3, 40.50.5, 45.6.1, 45.11.2. Cf. Brutscher 1958, 43–6; Pelling, forthcoming (a). But, as Strasburger 1938, 98–106, observes, he does make considerably more than Plutarch of Caesar’s associations with Pompey during the sixties.

³² Plb. 6.43–58. For Dionysius’ adaptation of Polybius cf. Gabba 1991, 201–8.

³³ Plb. 6.10.13–14, 51.5; for Dionysius see Schultze 1986, 130–2, 139; Gabba 1991, 152–89 stresses the continuity, but also brings out some elements of change.

³⁴ App. BC 1.2.4, cf. Plut. Gracch. 20.1.

³⁵ App. BC 1.1–6, esp. 1.2.4 ff.

³⁶ ‘Returning general’ theme: cf. 1.55.240, 1.60.269–70; 5.17 brings out the importance of finding a settlement of such an army. Sparing use of boule–demos antithesis: e.g. 1.21.87–9, 1.38.169, 1.69.316–17, 1.107.502. Sion-Jenkis 2000, 71, agrees that the boule-demos theme, while not disappearing, becomes less important as the work progresses.

³⁷ See p. 220.

³⁸ App. BC 2.20.72. Note also his careful discrimination of different elements in ‘the people’ after Caesar’s death, esp. at 2.120.503–7, 121.510, 125.523, and 126.527: Hose 1994, 292. There are mirroring divisions in the senate too: 2.127.528 and 531.

³⁹ Dio 37.22.3, 43.11.6, 47.38.3 (with Rawson 1986, 115 = 1991, 503). Lintott 1997, 2517 and n. 81, argues that ‘lover of Republican institutions’ may underlie δημεραστής, but also suggests interestingly that Dio may be crafting this description with an eye to the principate: ‘It may be suggested that Cassius Dio devised Cato’s character as an ideal, so that he could portray any imitations under the Principate as perversions. Since, according to Dio (65.12.2), Helvidius Priscus’ vice lay in pandering to the mob in his opposition to monarchy (basileia), it was necessary to depict Cato as a lover of the Republic...’

⁴⁰ Dio 37.54.3, 37.57.2; for the use of ὲταιρεία cf. Nic. Dam. Vit. Aug. 103, 105. On Dio’s portrayal of the people cf. de Blois 1997, 2655–60, especially 2656–7 for comparison with the stereotypes of Plutarch; Sion-Jenkis 2000, 71–2.

⁴¹ Gracch. 8.10, 9.3, 10.1, 12.6, 13.4, 13.6.

⁴² Gracch. 10.9, 11.1, 11.4, 12.6, 18.3, 20.3; cf. Sion-Jenkis 2000, 66–8. These ‘rich’ dominate the senate (11.4, though cf. 18.3), and seem closely equivalent to the political grouping which Plutarch normally describes simply as ‘the senate’: cf. 14.3, 16.2, 21.1–4. Plutarch here calls them ‘the rich’ simply to phrase the conflict in the relevant terms, i.e. economic ones; Appian’s procedure is here similar (Hose 1994, 296). When political rather than economic divisions come to be more relevant, Plutarch naturally reverts to describing Tiberius’ opponents as ‘the senate’ (20–1). Economic considerations were less central to his treatment of Gaius, and his antagonists are again usually ‘the senate’: 26.1, 27.1–2, 29.3–6, 30.1–2, 30.6–7, 32.5, 33.3, 35.2. Cf. Gargola 1997, 576 for the similar shift in Appian’s phraseology: I do not find it as incoherent as he does.

⁴³ On the similarities of rhythm between the two brothers’ Lives cf. Ingenkamp 1992, esp. 4306–19 (‘Tema con variazione’). Gargola 1997, 568–70 finds a similar recurrent rhythm in Appian.

⁴⁴ Initial popularity: Gracch. 22.7. Demagogic proposals: 24.5, 25.1, and especially 26, bills in which he was ‘playing to the demos and trying to destroy the power of the senate’ (τῳ̑ δήμω χαριζóμενος καὶ καταλύων τὴν σύγκλητον, 26.1); 27.5. People rejoice: 25.4, 27.1, 28.1. The ‘most notable men’ (γνωριμώτατοι) launch Livius Drusus: 29.4, 31.3–4. People waver: 30.7 (‘the people became more gently disposed to the senate’), 32.4, 37.7. Gaius more extreme: 33. Death: 36–8. Popular hatred of Opimius: 38.8–9, 39.2; and demonstrations for Gaius after death: 39.2–3.

⁴⁵ The sequence and selection of material in the two authors is tellingly similar. The usual view, and surely the right one, is that they share a source (cf. Gabba 1958 on App. BC 1.7.26): see esp. Tibiletti 1948, 206–9 (who seems right against Gabba 1958, 14–15 on 1.7.28); Shochat 1970, 34 ff., with extensive bibliography at n. 31; Badian 1972, 707. The principal dissenter is Göhler 1939, 74–5, but his strongest argument rests on precisely the difference of interpretation – Appian stressing the Italians, Plutarch the urban poor – which is here explained in terms of Plutarch’s individual techniques.

⁴⁶ See esp. BC 1.7.28, 1.8.32, 1.18.74, 1.21.86–7, with Gabba’s notes; Göhler 1939, 76–82.

⁴⁷ Gracch. 8.4, 9.5. Cf. Gabba 1956, 37 n. 1, Shochat 1970, 36–7, Richardson 1980, 2.

⁴⁸ Gracch. 8.1, 9.2; for the stress on the demos see n. 44.

⁴⁹ For countrymen coming to Rome in 133, cf. Diod. 34(35).6.1.

⁵⁰ Gracch. 24.1–2, 33.1 (Italian support); 24.1–2, 31.3 (accusations of stirring revolt).

⁵¹ In Pelling, forthcoming (b) I explore some further implications of this pairing, in particular the (slightly different) development of the theme of wealth in treating the Spartan and the Roman couples. On the importance of ‘love of glory’ in the pair cf. Ingenkamp 1992.

⁵² Particularly by Badian: see Badian 1958, 172, and Badian 1972, 701 n. 100, 717 and n. 146, 731 n. 183. Gabba 1956 discusses ‘il motivo alleato’ with great care, but is much more ready than Badian to believe that it may bear some relation to historical reality.

⁵³ Badian 1958, 168–74, cf. Badian 1972, 731 and n. 183; he was following and developing some suggestions of Gelzer (see esp. Gelzer 1929, 299–303). See also e.g. Earl 1963, 20–3 and Nagle 1970, 373–6 for similar arguments.

⁵⁴ Bernstein 1978, 137–59. Bernstein also argues that reflections of this change of plan can be seen in Appian’s own narrative: this is no place for a discussion, but his argument is not at all cogent. Cf. Astin 1979, 111–12, Richardson 1980, 2–3.

⁵⁵ Naturally, not all the material relevant to this complicated issue can be discussed here: any serious treatment would have to consider the terms of the lex agraria of 111 BC, as well as the various (largely enigmatic) statements made by Cicero. I here limit myself to those arguments drawn from the divergence of the narratives of Plutarch and Appian – arguments, it is true, which most scholars have felt to be of particular importance in discussing this question. For fuller discussions see Shochat 1970 and 1980; Richardson 1980 (Italians included in the grants); Brunt 1971a, 76 n. 1; Sherwin-White 1973, 217–18; and Stockton 1979, 40–6 (cautious, but not excluding Italian participation); Nagle 1970; Badian 1972 (Italians excluded); Lintott 1992, 44–5, and 1994, 63–4 (no new allotments for non-Romans, but some previous non-Roman possessions may have survived); and Bernstein 1978 (discussed at pp. 215–16).

⁵⁶ Cf. Göhler 1939, 76–82 (showing that by ‘Italians’ Appian certainly means Italian allies); Cuff 1967.

⁵⁷ Richardson 1980.

⁵⁸ Gabba 1956; Cuff 1967. See now also Gargola 1997, who argues that Appian’s account of the post-Gracchan reforms (BC 1.27.121–4) is similarly influenced by his wider thematic concerns. At 577–8 he tentatively but convincingly extends that suggestion to the entire Gracchan narrative: Appian ‘strengthen[s].. .the thematic continuity over the first episodes of civil strife by bringing forward all the central issues as early as possible’.

⁵⁹ This emerges with particular clarity in Book 5 (which, pace Gabba, is surely not drawn from the same source as the early parts of Book 1): cf. esp. 5.12–14, 5.23.90, 5.27.106. See also Cuff 1983.

⁶⁰ Badian 1972, 707; cf. the criticisms of de Ste Croix 1981, 359.

⁶¹ As Badian 1972, 717 f. and n. 149 rightly insists.

⁶² Gabba 1956, 62.

⁶³ This is likely, though less certain than in the case of the accounts of the Gracchi. The exile of Metellus is certainly described in extremely similar terms by both authors (Mar. 29, App. BC 1.29), and must surely come from a common source. It is possible that one or the other has turned to a different source for the political background, but, in view of Plutarch’s capacity for recasting material, there is no need to resort to that assumption.

⁶⁴ See Badian 1958, 207 n. 2; Göhler 1939, 80–1 (Appian means allies); Shochat 1970, 40 and n. 44; Gelzer 1929, 298; Brunt 1965b, 106 (rural citizens); Lintott 1968, 178–81 (Appian confused); Gargola 1997, 578–9 (Appian deliberately mis-states to link two major themes of his work, allies and land).

⁶⁵ Historians normally accept that Saturninus proposed some distribution to Italians, but argue (or imply) that only Italian veterans – particularly those of Marius’ army – were to benefit: Göhler 1939, 197–203; Badian 1958, 203–8; Gabba 1951, 178–9, and 1956, 75–6. I suspect that this needs reconsideration. The veterans were clearly of central importance (cf. Mar. 28.7, App. BC 1.29.132), and would doubtless be the first to be settled; but there seems no reason to assume that only veterans were to receive benefits.

⁶⁶ Gomme, HCT i. 72–4: cf. p. 134 and n. 62. For the stereotypical soldier who is lost in politics see also ch. 15 below.

⁶⁷ Cf. p. 215 and n. 51. I would now put much more emphasis on this point: see my last paragraph, pp. 225–6.

⁶⁸ Caes. 13.5, 14.6, Aem. 38.2, 38.6, Flam. 18.2, Mar. 28.6, Cato Min. 26.4, Pomp. 30.3–4, Lucull. 38.2, Cic. 10.1, 33.2, cf. 22.2.

⁶⁹ Aem. 31.2, Cato Mai. 16.4, Gracch. 24.2, 29.6, 30.7, Pomp. 4.8, Brut. 24.4.

⁷⁰ Caes. 14.3, Cic. 11.2, 29.4.

⁷¹ Gracch. 40.3, Pomp. 4.8, Brut. 24.4, Cato Min. 27.8, cf. 49.3.

⁷² Gracch. 32.4, 35.2, Cic. 9.7. Moles 1993a, 152 (cf. 1988, 160), argues that at 9.7–10.2 Plutarch distinguishes the αριστοκρατικοί from the όλιγαρχικοί: he thinks that the όλιγαρχικοί ‘here = the narrow clique within the general aristocracy, οί ἀρισ- τοκρατικοί’. I think not. The logic of the sequence is that Cicero won the favour of the δη̑μος largely by attacking Pompey’s enemies and the όλιγαρχικοί (9.7), but was supported for the consulship no less by the ἀριστοκρατικοί than by οί πολλοί (10.1). This co-operation (συναγωνισαμένων) requires an explanation: the Catiline scare. That ‘but’ (δέ) points to a change of texture in Cicero’s political tactics and support between 9.7 and 10.1, and ἀριστοκρατικοί picks up όλιγαρχικοί just as οί πολλοί picks up δη̑μος. Were ἀριστοκρατικοί and όλιγαρχικοί different, there would be less need for an explanation. As Moles says, ἀριστοκρατικοί is then picked up by ‘most of the καλοὶ κἀγαθοί’ at 11.2, but that need not point to any systematic sub-division among this ‘general aristocracy’: it just indicates that Cicero attracted enough but not necessarily universal support.

⁷³ Mar. 9.4, cf. Otho 3.3.

⁷⁴ Marc. 27.4.

⁷⁵ Fab. 8.4, Gracch. 13.2, 20.1, Lucull. 37.3, Pomp. 25.7, Caes. 10.6; cf. Mar. 9.4, 30.5, Gracch. 24.3.

⁷⁶ Mar. 30.2

⁷⁷ Fab. 8.4, Marc. 27.4, Aem. 38.2–3, Cato Mai. 16.4, Mar. 14.14, 29.7, 34.6, Lucull. 35.9, 37.3, Pomp. 16.3, 49.3, 51.6, Crass. 4.1, Caes. 7.4, Cato Min. 27.8, Brut. 27.5, 29.3.

⁷⁸ A representative selection of Greek passages: Arist. 2.1, 26.2, Cim. 10.8, 15.1–2, Nic. 2.2, 11.2, Alc. 13.5, 21.2, 26.2, Dion 28.1; and esp. Per. 7.3–4, 9.5, 10.7.8, 11.1–3 (with Meinhardt 1957, 38, and Andrewes 1978, 2), 15.1. In general see Rhodes 1981 on [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 2.1.

⁷⁹ Sulla: Sull. 30.5–6 (etc.), Pomp. 9.3, Brut. 9.2, Cic. 17.5, 27.6. Marius: Mar. 46.6, Sull. 30.5, cf. Pomp. 81(1).2. Cinna: Mar. 41.2, Sull. 22.1, Cic. 17.5, Caes. 1.1. Carbo: Sull. 22.1. Saturninus: Mar. 30.1. Cicero: Cic. 23.4. Caesar: Caes. 4.8, 57.1, 64.5, 69.1, Cato Min. 55.4, 58.7, 66.2, Ant. 12.5, Brut. 12.3. Pompey: Pomp. 25.3, 30.3–4, 43.1, 54.5, Caes. 41.2, Lucull. 38.2, Cato Min. 47.2. C. Gracchus: Gracch. 27.1. Cassius: Brut. 29.5. For Plutarch’s vocabulary here cf. Sion-Jenkis 2000, 35–8.

⁸⁰ Catilinarians: Cic. 10.2, 10.5. Caesar: Caes. 4.9, 13.4, Cic. 20.6. Saturninus: Mar. 30.1. On Fab. 8.4 see p. 218.

⁸¹ Marius: Mar. 2.4, 28.1, 31.3, 34.6, 45.4–12. Pompey: Pomp. 30.7–8. There is little on Pompey’s wishes – for commands or for anything else – in the second half of that Life: see pp. 100–1 and Pelling, forthcoming (b).

⁸² This ascription of motive derives from Polybius (18.10.11–12, 18.39.4). Livy, interestingly, finds the charge embarrassing and plays it down: see Livy 32.32.5–8 and 33.13.15, with Briscoe 1973, 22 n. 4, and notes on both passages. For a powerful modern discussion see Badian 1970, 295 ff.: note esp. 310 ff., with some trenchant remarks on Roman views of gloria. I discuss Plutarch’s adaptation and reinterpretation of Polybius more fully in Pelling 1997a, 291–309.

⁸³ On this theme in Agis–Cleomenes–Gracchi cf. esp. Ingenkamp 1992.

⁸⁴ Wardman 1974, 120 brings this out well. On philotimia in the Lives see also Frazier 1988a, 109–27, who helpfully sets Plutarch’s against earlier treatments. The awareness of positive and negative aspects is as old as Arist. NE 2.7.1107b27–1108a1. Cf. also chs. 10, 15, 16, and 18 for discussion of the positive and – especially – negative aspects of philotimia and its close twin philonikia in Philopoemen and in Coriolanus.

⁸⁵ The important political aspect which Plutarch does not see concerns the composition of the juries. To understand this he would need to show more grasp of the equites than he does: see p. 220.

⁸⁶ Ant. 5.8, Gracch. 10.3, Cato Min. 20.8 – though, oddly enough, he gets it right at Roman Questions 81 (Mor. 283c).

⁸⁷ Caes. 35.6–11, Caesar’s clash with the tribune Metellus, is another case where Plutarch does not bring out the importance of the veto.

⁸⁸ See esp. Sull. 1.1,  (‘by birth he was one of the patricians, whom one might call “nobles” ’), and Ant. 12.3. Most men so described are in fact both nobiles – whether on Gelzer’s definition or on Mommsen’s, revived by Brunt (1982) – and patricii : P. Clodius (Caes. 9.2, Cic. 28.1), Cornelius Lentulus at Cannae (Fab. 16.7), Valerius Flaccus (Cato Mai. 3.1), P. Cornelius Dolabella in AD 69 (Otho 5.1), the house of the Servii (Galb. 3.1). But the terms are clearly vague ones: cf. Popl. 18.3, Cam. 33.4, Cic. 40.2. Note Sert. 25.2, on Perperna’s ευγενεία (Perperna was not patricius, but he was nobilis, Gelzer 1969, 51 n. 457), and Cato Mai. 16.4, where the ευπατρίδαί monopolize the consulship (clearly nobiles, for he knows that one plebeian had to be elected, 16.2). Plutarch simply follows any source which refers to high birth, and has no awareness of subtle distinctions.

⁸⁹ Mar. 4.1, 5.7–9, Gracch. 13.2: cf. Cor. 21.4, Pomp. 4.7, Cato Min. 34.6.

⁹⁰ Cor. 13.5 is an exception, but relates to a very different political climate.

⁹¹ For Plutarch’s interest see e.g. Fab. 20.1, Marc. 20, Flam. 2.3–5, 5.1–2, 12.6, Cato Mai. 6.2–4, 10.4–6, Aem. 6.6–7, 28.6 ff., 39.7–9, Gracch. 3.1, 23.4, Sulla 25.4–5, Sert. 24.5, Lucull. 7.4–7, 20 and 29 (with Swain 1992, 309–11), Cato Min. 34–40, Pomp. 10.2, 28, 39, 50, Caes. 11–12, Cic. 6.1–2, 36, 52(3). As emerges most clearly from Pompey, he tends to be more interested in mildness of everyday administration and equity in routine jurisdiction than in the great administrative settlements. For his awareness of general rapacity see esp. Cato Mai. 6.2–4, Cic. 52(3).3, Cato Min. 12.3–6, Brut. 6.10–12, and the other instances collected by Jones 1971, 100.

⁹² Mar. 35.2; other casual mentions of equites at e.g. Mar. 30.4, Cic. 10.5, 13.2, 31.1, Pomp. 14.11 (where again note that Plutarch stresses the enthusiasm of the people at Pompey’s equestrian demonstration): cf. de Blois 1992, 4579. Brunt 1965a, 130, is therefore right to notice the absence of equites from Plutarch’s account of Marius, but wrong to find this surprising or significant.

⁹³ Gracch. 16.1, 26.2, Pomp. 22.3.

⁹⁴ Dio: esp. 38.12.4, 38.13.1, 38.16.2–3, 38.16.6; casual references are also more frequent than in Plutarch, e.g. 40.49.4, 40.60.4, 40.63.3, 41.7.1, 42.51.5, 43.25.1, 44.6.1, 44.9.1. Appian: esp. BC 1.22.91–7, 1.35.157–36.162, 1.37.165–8, 1.100.468, 2.13.47–8.

⁹⁵ Sull. 12.12–14, Pomp. 20.1, 21.5–7, 43.1–3. On Plutarch’s portrayal of the soldiers see now de Blois 1992, 4583–99.

⁹⁶ τò στρατιωτικόν somehow involved: Cato Min. 31.2. City filled with soldiers: Pomp. 48.1. Mob’s goodwill as the aim: Caes. 14.2. Land distributed to the poor and destitute: Cato Min. 31.5, 33.1, Pomp. 47.5. Demos enraptured: Pomp. 48.2.

⁹⁷ Cf. de Blois 1992, 4578–80, 4588.

⁹⁸ Cf. de Blois 1992, 4584–90, esp. 4587–9; then 4592 on the Sulla passage.

⁹⁹ Brut. 18.10–14, 20.1, 20.4–11, 21.2–6, 22.3, Ant. 14.5, 16.6–8. Scanty references to the soldiers: Ant. 16.6–8, Brut. 21.4, 22.3, 23.1.

¹⁰⁰ Cf. de Blois 1992, 4596–7; and, more generally, 4590–2, 4598–9, and 4612–13 on the materialist preoccupations of the rapacious soldiery. On that theme see esp. Galba 1, with Ash 1997.

¹⁰¹ Ant. 30.6–31.3.

¹⁰² App. BC 5.63–4.

¹⁰³ App. BC 2.119.501, 2.120.507, 2.125.523, 2.135.565, 3.6.18, 3.11.38–12.41, 3.21.78, and so on, esp. 5.17: a glance at the index locorum of Botermann 1968 reveals how much of the evidence for the political loyalties and impact of the veterans is drawn from Appian. Dio’s blind spots on the veterans: see Botermann 1968, 30, but note e.g. 45.7.2, 45.12–13, bringing out both their genuine loyalties and their capacity to be influenced by largesse. For Dio’s treatment of soldiers see now de Blois 1997, 2660–75, especially 2667–9 on the way they make up their own minds as a sort of extra popular assembly. Nic. Dam.: see Vit. Aug. 41, 46, 56, 95, 99, 103, 108, 115–19, 121, 130–3, 136–9.

¹⁰⁴ Cf. esp. Sall. BJ 41, BC 37–8, Hist. 1.6–13M, and (if authentic) ad Caes. 2.5.1. For Sallust’s usage see Hanell 1945; Syme 1964, 17 f., 171 ff.; Hellegouarc’h 1963, esp. 110 ff., 430, 438, 442 ff., 512. Sallust is, of course, heavily indebted to Thucydides in his use of these categories, and a certain ‘Greekness’ is unsurprising.

¹⁰⁵ See BJ73.6–7, ...plebessicaccensa...opificesagrestesque omnes (‘... the people were so inflamed.. .all the artisans and rustics’) and 84.1, cupientissuma plebe consul factus (‘elected consul to the great enthusiasm of the people’). For the general omission of the equites (though note 65.4) see Syme 1964, 173: ‘a serious omission.if nothing worse’.esp. 198–204.

¹⁰⁶ e.g. Pomp. 15.1, 22.2, Cato Min. 21.3. How far the comitia centuriata was in fact dominated by wealth is one of the questions which has become controversial since this paper was written (cf. n. 23): see esp. Yakobson 1992 and 1999, 20–64; Millar 1998, esp. 198–204.

¹⁰⁷ Though he admittedly tends to confine such analyses to the early books, where such categories are natural enough for the description of the struggle of the Orders (see e.g. Hellegouarc’h 1963, 430 with nn. 1 and 7, 436 with n. 2, 515–16). His use of such categories to describe Roman politics is extremely sparing in the third, fourth, and fifth decades (except in Book 22, esp. 22.34.1–35.3, 22.40.1–4: rather a special case, as I suggest at pp. 223–4). Such instances as 21.63.4, 31.6.4, or 43.14.2–3 are fairly isolated. Interestingly, he is far readier to use such terms for non-Roman states, e.g. Capua (23.2.3, 4.2–4, etc.), or ‘all the states of Italy’ (24.2.8), or Carthage (e.g. 34.62.1), or the states of Greece (35.34.3), or Phocaea (37.9.4).

¹⁰⁸ Sest. 103, cf. de Leg. Agr. 2.10, 81, and de Off. 2.78–81, where his language very much suggests a γη̑ς ἀναδασμóς. But, once again, this should not be overstated. Hellegouarc’h (1963, 512) could reasonably comment on the rarity with which Cicero employs patres–plebs or nobiles–plebs antitheses, or speaks of the plebs as a political group.

¹⁰⁹ Dial. 36.3. Cf. his conspectus of all republican history at Ann. 4.32–3, especially plebis et optimatium certamina (‘the struggles of people and optimates’, 32.1), ...plebe ualida uel cum patres pollerent (‘. in the days when the people were strong or when the senate had power’, 33.2).

¹¹⁰ Uterque regnare uult, Cic. ad Att. 8.11(161).2; see passages collected by Hellegouarc’h 1963, 560–5, and Seager 1972, 335 n. 11.

¹¹¹ Not that it is a particularly easy matter to establish the relative chronology of the Lives. Jones 1966 gives the best discussion, but needs to be treated with some caution: see pp. 7–10. But if the argument of ch. 1 holds, we can trace an increase in Plutarch’s factual knowledge of the late Republic; it is interesting that we cannot trace any parallel development in his interpretations.

¹¹² Sest. 97–8, 132–9, esp. 138; Sall. BJ 65.5.

¹¹³ The extreme closeness of much of Fabius to Livy is quite clear, but several passages seem to show accurate knowledge of non-Livian detail: e.g. the 15,000 prisoners at Trasimene, 3.3; the deception at Rome when news of the Trebia arrived, 3.4; the 4,000 men of 6.4. Such elements suggest either that Plutarch knew Livy’s source rather than Livy himself (so Peter 1865, Soltau 1897, etc, suggesting Coelius Antipater; Klotz 1935, suggesting Valerius Antias); or a systematic, though small-scale, supplementation of Livy from a closely parallel account. (There is larger-scale supplementation at e.g. Fab. 15, 20, 26, but those passages are not woven so closely into the Livian material, and can easily represent additions from Plutarch’s own memory and general reading: cf. ch. 1, esp. p. 16 on Livy.) Some parts of Plutarch show knowledge of those parts of Livy which are most likely to be Livy’s own contribution (e.g. the arguments of Herennius Balbus, 22.34 and Fab. 8.4; the Camillus echo at 22.3.10 and Fab. 3.1; the words of Fabius, 22.18.8 and Fab. 8.1); and it is on balance more likely that Plutarch knows Livy himself, not his source. It may well be that a slave or freedman assistant was sent to consult (say) Coelius or Polybius, and report back to Plutarch any significant variations from Livy’s account, or useful extra details: we too readily ignore the possibility of such ‘research assistants’ (see p. 24 and Jones 1971, 84–7). At all events, even if it is Livy’s source, not Livy himself, who is Plutarch’s main authority, Livy’s general closeness to Plutarch suggests that he is generally remaining very faithful to the source which, on this hypothesis, he and Plutarch share. The source-picture is similar in Marcellus : Pelling 1989, 203 n. 7.

¹¹⁴ Hoffmann 1942, 38–9, brings out this feature of Plutarch’s narrative very well, though he is surely wrong in attributing the recasting of the material to Plutarch’s source, not Plutarch himself.

¹¹⁵ Fab. 3.6–7, cf. Livy 22.8, Plb. 3 86–7.

¹¹⁶ Fab. 4.4, cf. Livy 22.9.7.

¹¹⁷ Fab. 7.5–7, 9.1, cf. Livy 22.23.5–7, 22.25.12.

¹¹⁸ Livy 22.34.9.

¹¹⁹ Stadter 1975.

¹²⁰ ϕιλονικία: Fab. 25.3–4 (cf. 22.5). For the dangers of this quality in another Life, Coriolanus, see ch. 15, especially p. 347 n. 24 on the word’s suggestions: there too the quality becomes destructive when a general turns to politics. Political point-scoring rather than fighting the war: esp. Fab. 25.3–4 (where ‘his refusal to allow money to be allocated for the war’, 25.3, closely reverses the story of 7.5–8). Shouting: 26.1, contrast 7.5, 14.2: cf. p. 392 for this as a demagogic trait. Even in his distinctive ‘gentleness’ (πρᾳóτης) he is now outdone by Crassus (25.4): that is prepared already at 22.8, when Marcellus emerges as more πρᾳ̑ος than Fabius. On the nature of the tradition see Hoffmann 1942, 92–3: the contrast of Fabius and Scipio seems well founded in the historical tradition, but the personal pettiness of Fabius seems individual to Plutarch’s account.

¹²¹ Forster 1962, 151, discussing Anatole France’s Thais.

¹²² Jones 1971, 99–100; on old frugality and new greed cf. also de Blois 1992, 4613 and Pelling, forthcoming (b).

¹²³ e.g. Pomp. 70, Cato Mai. 4.2, 16.8, 28(1).2–3, Aem. 11.3–4, Sull. 1.5, 12.8–14, Phoc. 3.3.

¹²⁴ When the theme is first introduced at Cato Mai. 4.2, Plutarch simply talks of Rome ‘not preserving her purity because of her very size: her control of so many affairs and so many peoples was exposing her to many different customs and examples of many different sorts of life’. Nothing specifically on Greece there – probably because Plutarch is so far reluctant to cast any shadow of hesitation or doubt on Cato’s moral insight. It is only at 22.4–23.2 that Cato’s hostility to Greek culture is specifically stressed and criticized: at that stage of the Life Plutarch is tracing with more subtlety the manner in which Cato’s strengths and flaws both spring from the same basic traits. By then we have come to appreciate the man’s moral force, and respect his concern for old-fashioned Roman virtue: we now see the excesses which this attitude can bring. See further Pelling 1989, 214–15. I pursue this theme further in Pelling, forthcoming (b), discussing Plutarch’s treatment of wealth in the Roman Lives: I argue there that he avoids the implication of any corrupting Greek influence (so also Swain 1990a, 126–8 = Scardigli 1995, 229–32), and that one can trace some nimble footwork as he tiptoes around the theme.

¹²⁵ Contrast the much more sombre emphasis of Plb. 9.10 and Livy 25.40.2. I discuss this treatment of Greek culture in Marcellus more fully in Pelling 1989, 199–208, especially 201–3 on the way Plutarch tilts the moral scales in Marcellus’ favour. Cf. also Swain 1990a, 131–2, 140–2 = Scardigli 1995, 239–40, 254–9; Duff 1999, 305–7.

¹²⁶ Contrast the parallel passage at Diodorus 34(35).33.4–5, doubtless inspired by the same source (probably Posidonius). Diodorus has no such emphasis on the demos, and speaks more vaguely of external fear as a stimulus to concord: indeed, his Nasica brings in concepts such as ‘the need to rule Rome’s subjects with equity and good repute’, and the threat to Rome from dangerous allies. For discussions of Nasica’s insight see Astin 1967, 276–80, and Lintott 1972, 632–8; Gelzer 1931, 272–3 and others were clearly quite wrong to see the hand of Polybius in influencing Plutarch’s stress on the boule and demos. See also pp. 200–1, where I suggest that Plutarch leaves a certain moral ambiguity on the issues, but that Nasica still has the better of the exchange.

¹²⁷ Syme 1939, 441.

¹²⁸ It is accepted in those terms by de Blois 1992, 4570 (‘Plutarch certainly viewed Roman history through Greek glasses’) and Hose 1994, 286 (Plutarch’s ‘interpretatio Graeca’). Swain 1990a, 127–8 = Scardigli 1995, 232–3 dwells more on the value of the similar political categories for the comparisons. Duff 1999, 302–3 thoughtfully develops the point in the context of ‘the politics of parallelism’: he brings out the relevance for comparison of this ‘Greek lens through which to project his Romans’, and argues that ‘by applying Greek values to Roman history, Plutarch appropriates the past of Rome into the Greek cultural tradition’. Cf. then 309, where he speaks of ‘.the imposition.of a Greek perspective onto Roman history. To this extent, the Parallel Lives can be seen as a Greek response to Roman power, a statement of resistance.’ That makes Plutarch’s Hellenism too aggressive for my taste: cf. below, pp. 259–60, in a chapter where I exploit the continuity of Plutarch’s Greek and Roman categories rather differently.