10
For there is always a risk that civil life will damage the reputation of those who owe their greatness to warfare, and are ill-suited to democratic equality. They expect to enjoy the same supremacy in this new sphere, whereas their opponents, worsted by them on campaign, find it intolerable if they cannot overtake them even here. Thus they delight in taking a man with a glorious record of campaigning and triumphs, and when they have him in the forum they take care to subdue him and put him down; whereas they behave differently to a man who lays aside and yields the honour and power he enjoyed on campaign, and they preserve his authority unimpaired.
(Pomp. 23.5–6)
When Antony had taken his fill of the sight he ordered the head and hands of Cicero to be impaled over the rostra, as if this were a matter of outraging the corpse; in fact he was making an exhibition of his own outrageous behaviour at fortune’s expense, and of the dishonour which he brought on his office.
(Ant. 20.4, cf. Cic. 49.2)
Nothing brought more delight to the Romans as a whole, and nothing won them over more firmly to Otho’s side, than the fate of Tigellinus. No one had realized it, but the fear of punishment, which the city demanded as its public due, had already been one sort of punishment in itself; a second sort had been the incurable diseases which racked his body; but the wisest judges put particular weight on those impious and unspeakable cavortings with prostitutes, a style of life to which his depraved taste clung even as it came near to gasping its last. This, thought those wise persons, was the worst punishment of all, outweighing a multitude of deaths.
(Otho 2.1–2)
I. Preliminary
Plutarch, it is agreed, is a ‘moralist’, a writer who employs his persuasive rhetoric to explore ethics and point ethical truths; but moralism can take different forms. Take the three passages printed above. The first essays a generalization about human experience; the second adopts a particular ethical voice for describing behaviour, commending one mode – not a particularly controversial mode – of viewing an action; the third is similar, but this time the voice is more individual, intimating a view which Plutarch might hold but his audience might find more paradoxical.
It is good to see Plutarch so admired once again, but there is one way in which our generation is out of step. Most ages who have admired Plutarch have been appreciative of his moral content, and have found no difficulty in extracting morals from the Lives for their own day. Sometimes, indeed, this has been unnerving, as in the eighteenth century, when Rousseau and others found Plutarch’s treatment of liberty so inspiring: Macaulay, not specially tongue in cheek, even held Plutarch responsible for some ‘atrocious proceedings’ of the French Revolution.1 But the contemporary world has no taste for moralism. ‘Moralizing’ tends to have an adjective before it – ‘mere’, or ‘shallow’, or ‘hackneyed’. Plutarch’s rehabilitation as a biographer has largely sprung from an increased alertness to his artistry, but fewer critics of the Lives have dwelt on the ethical thought.
Most of us lack the instinctive understanding of moralism which previous generations enjoyed. We accept that it concerns values and conduct; it is a natural next step to assume that a moralist will be telling readers to live their own lives differently – to put it in grammatical terms, that a moral should be an imperative, ‘act like this’, ‘avoid that’. And so, of course, it sometimes is. This is the way in which Plutarch sometimes describes it himself: at Demetrius 1.6 he compares himself with Ismenias the flute-player, who would use bad examples as well as good: this is how you should play, this is how you should not. Yet this is where the modern discomfort begins, particularly when we approach those Lives which most invite ethical appraisal. Is the moral of Antony the encouragement to public men to control their sexuality, for ladies like Cleopatra might be catastrophically distracting? Is Coriolanus or Marius a simple lesson in the need for education and flexibility? Are we to assume an audience which really needed telling these things, all agog for any Cleopatra which came along, all arrogantly proud of their lack of education or their class-bound inflexibility? These, surely, were morals which everyone already knew all too well. We may feel tempted to take a step which is often rewarding in treating tragedy, and to make these moral views features of the audience rather than the writer, assumptions which the audience would already have and which the writer could therefore exploit for his own purposes. In Plutarch’s case, these purposes might then be viewed as an extension of the self-characterization which Stadter has so illuminatingly stressed,2 Plutarch’s presentation of himself as a man of sage, humane, sympathetic understanding, bonded with the audience in moral harmony. That can work simply, with Plutarch describing events in a voice which his readers would welcome as their own: thus, perhaps, the example from Antony with which we began. Or it can be subtler, as with the Otho case: not all of Plutarch’s audience would think in quite the terms he adopts, but this stronger and more mannered self-projection is still engaging rather than alienating. That is not too different from a passage in Epicurus Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible (1093c), where Plutarch has been talking about the absorbing power of literature: ‘who would take pleasure in sleeping with the most beautiful of women rather than staying awake with what Xenophon wrote about Panthea, or Aristobulus about Timocleia, or Theopompus about Thebe?’ The answer was never going to be ‘no-one’, but it is hard to dislike the captivated bookworm whom the passage projects.3
There is something in this approach, but we should also be aware how similar this Plutarchan phenomenon is to one visible in other genres, where self-projection is a less profitable approach. If we feel impatient at the simpler formulations of a Plutarchan moral, then it is similar to the impatience we feel at those who reduce Sophocles’ Antigone to a sermon on its closing lines, ‘respect the gods’ – a formulation which the audience would indeed have found unsurprising, and one which does not match up to the moral intensity of the play itself. And Antigone may be a thought-provoking example in other ways. In tragedy, as in epic, we have grown more used to thinking about moralism. We have learnt that works can be ethically reflective and exploratory, without always producing conclusions which can be reduced to a simple expository imperative ‘do that’, ‘avoid this’. The Iliad can explore war and heroism without being simply pro-glory or anti-war; tragedy can explore paradoxes of polis-life without always crudely reinforcing or crudely subverting polis-ideology.4
This distinction between ‘expository’ and ‘exploratory’ moralism is one to which we will return, though it may by then appear a little rough. The same is true of a further distinction, that between ‘protreptic’ and ‘descriptive’ moralism, with ‘protreptic’ seeking to guide conduct, ‘descriptive’ being more concerned to point truths about human behaviour and shared human experience.5 Such ‘descriptive’ moralism is suggested by such formulations as Cimon 2.5, where Plutarch includes bad qualities ‘as if in shame at human nature, if it produces no character who is purely good or of unqualified virtue’. That may not give Plutarch’s audience any firm guidance on how to behave, but it still points a moral truth of the human condition, just as it may be a human truth that men as great as Alexander or Pompey or Antony may be fragile in different ways. The Pompey passage with which this chapter began is a good small-scale example of this. It is immediately clear that descriptive moralism often involves a protreptic aspect as well: don’t go around killing people like Cleitus or drinking yourself into oblivion; if you are a military man, find out about politics too; avoid Cleopatras. But this may at least remind us that the moralism may have a range and depth which goes beyond the simpler protreptic reductions, just as Oedipus Tyrannus is better seen as a study of a great man’s fragility than as a warning against intemperate behaviour, or for that matter against intense curiosity.
II. Contemporary flavouring, or timelessness?
This chapter will explore these distinctions through a more precise question, one which centres on more narrowly political moralizing. What sort of political guidance do the Lives offer, and how close is their relevance to Plutarch’s own day? If we think of other ancient biographers, some of the most interesting recent work has centred on their moral categories, and the way in which these reflect the contemporary interests of the writer’s milieu. Wallace-Hadrill 1983 has brought out how Suetonius’ distinctive categories reflect his Hadrianic setting – the stress on civilitas and clemency, the preoccupation with spectacula and ludi, the lack of interest in military courage, and so on. Dionisotti 1988 has emphasized that Nepos’ Lives recurrently focus on the clash of freedom and tyranny, the desirability of public men’s obedience to the state, the dangers of unrestrained self-seeking, all themes which resonate with the experience of the Second Triumvirate. The famous passage of the Eumenes is a particularly explicit example:
That phalanx of Alexander the Great had crossed Asia and vanquished Persia; glory, and also licence, had become ingrained; now they presumed to issue commands to their leaders rather than obey them, just as our veterans do today. Thus there is a danger that history will repeat itself and that they too will destroy everything through their licence and lack of moderation, their victims including those who once stood on their side along with their former enemies. If one reads the history of those veterans, he will see the parallels and will judge that the differences are only those of period.
(Nepos, Eumenes 8.2–3)
The most thoughtful attempt to relate Plutarch to his political milieu, that of Jones 1971, was sceptical of such precise contemporary allusions in the Lives. He found hints of contemporary concerns with harmony and concord, but he also emphasized, for instance, that Plutarch could criticize the self-deification of Hellenistic kings without feeling that this need reflect on Roman emperor worship.6 And it is clear that Plutarch responds much less well than Suetonius or Nepos to the search for contemporary flavouring. Let us consider the qualities which most regularly excite Plutarch’s interests. If we consult Wardman’s catalogue, we find an emphasis on steering a middle path between demagogy and tyranny; on disarming the envy of opponents; on winning military victories but not abusing success; on giving a lead in battle but not exposing oneself to unnecessary personal risk; on an appropriate degree of ambition.7 If we consult Bucher-Isler, we find the thickest lists of examples for bravery, energy, prudence, justice, cowardice, arrogance, lack of self-control, and awkwardness in personal encounters.8 Of course, these virtues and vices have some relation to his own time; they have some for any time, including our own; but do they really have more relevance for Plutarch’s own day than for any other?
Take that emphasis on military qualities, bravery, keeping a cool head when successful, not exposing oneself to unnecessary danger; or, if we turn to a more ‘descriptive’ type of moralism, that type variously illustrated by Pompey and Marius and Coriolanus, the brilliant general lost in the tricks of politics. In Advice on Public Life Plutarch emphasizes that, in matters of war and peace, the world has changed:
Consider the greatest goods which cities can enjoy, peace, freedom, prosperity, a thriving population, and concord. As for peace, the peoples have no need of politicians at the present time; every war, Greek and barbarian, has disappeared.
(824c)
No wonder that Plutarch’s contemporary Suetonius has relatively little to say about warfare; yet the Parallel Lives are preoccupied with soldierly virtues and are full of wars, often with disproportionate space and emphasis – the Parthian wars in the Antony or the Crassus, for instance.
Some might seize on this same example in a different way. Wars may have vanished from the world of small-town Greece, but Plutarch knew of the wider world of Rome. Trajan may have been planning a Parthian war at the precise time when Plutarch was preparing Antony and Crassus. Was this in Plutarch’s mind?9 We should doubt it. The same line of reasoning, applied to Marius, would convince us that Trajan was planning to attack Germans and Cimbri; to Caesar, that he was turning to Gaul. If we search for references to Dacia in the Lives, they are conspicuously scarce: Caesar’s Dacian aspirations are given a couple of lines (Caes. 58.6–7).10 And at this same time Trajan was also emphasizing a connection with Hercules, pointing to the traditional Stoic associations of toil and beneficence to humanity.11 Plutarch’s Antony plays the Hercules as well, but in a very different way – a swaggering bluffness, with more than a breath of the comic miles gloriosus (Ant. 4). If any contemporary association had been caught, it would have been extraordinarily gauche, and Trajan surely never crossed Plutarch’s mind. Plutarch has other reasons for emphasizing Parthia, where so many of Antony’s frailties and virtues showed themselves so plainly; a few chapters later the Actium campaign reprises many of the same points, but this time events are even more catastrophic. Parthia can point many truths about an Antony, impetuous, valiant, irrepressible, lovable, and deeply flawed. But those are traits which might recur with other people at other times: they are points about a timeless human nature, not about AD110–15. Similarly the German fighting reveals many of the best features of Marius, which will show themselves in so distorted a form when he returns to politics; and Caesar’s fighting in Gaul marks the successful version of the energy and love of glory which will guide Caesar’s rise as well as sealing his end.
This ‘timelessness’ deserves further stress. The Lives are narratives of particular past events, but Plutarch, like so many Greek writers about the past, had a gift for extracting points of general, timeless significance from such details of narrative: often he makes such generalizations explicit, as in our initial example from Pompey. Often too the timelessness is less explicit, and becomes more a question of the categories of interpretation which he tacitly prefers. One aspect is his liking for formulating political controversy in fairly standard terms, exploiting categories which cut across different cultures and periods, such as the antithesis of demos and oligoi.12 These categories do not always sit comfortably on the periods which he is describing, but they do not fit his own day any more closely, and he is not imposing distinctively contemporary preoccupations. In particular, he frequently remoulds his material to present powerful demagogic leaders anxious to lead the demos in rebellion, and rise on the people’s shoulders to establish personal tyrannies. It is hard to imagine a political atmosphere more remote from Trajanic Rome; and it is more remote still from the Greek world of Advice on Public Life. That is not a world of fierce demos–oligoi confrontation and tyrannical aspiration. True, the demos has to be handled tactfully: leaders may have to put on a spurious show of disagreement over trivialities, for instance, but only in order to carry the really important matters with less bother (813a–c); and ‘overthrows of tyrants’ are explicitly one of the spheres of glorious activity which the world no longer admits (805a).
Critics sometimes comment on this ‘timelessness’ as a weakness of Plutarch’s historical vision. We say that he assumes every generation to be more or less the same, so that he applies the same moral categories to each period in turn; that he fails to weigh his judgements of characters against the moral norms and expectations of the societies in which they lived.13 Perhaps we have overstated this. He is certainly capable of generalizing about different societies and bringing out what was morally distinctive about each. Thus he identifies the bellicosity of Rome. ‘ “Did not Rome make her great advances through warfare?” That is a question requiring a lengthy answer for men who define “advance” in terms of wealth, luxury, and empire rather than safety, restraint, and an honest independence’ (Numa 26(4).12–13). And several times Plutarch dwells on the destructive moral decline of Rome, the greed, the selfishness, the luxury, the provincial ransacking and extortion.14 He also adduces circumstances of time or background to explain quirks of a particular character: the Spartan educational system helps to explain a Lysander or an Agesilaus (Lys. 2.2–4, Ages. 1.5); the perpetual warfare of the time can explain why Marcellus’ taste for Greek culture took such an uncomfortable form (Marc. 1.3–5). And he is certainly interested in historical change, whether on small matters (trade was once much more respectable, Solon 2.6–8) or large (the changing attitude to wealth in Sparta, a recurrent theme in Lycurgus, Lysander, Agesilaus, and Agis–Cleomenes).15
It is notable too how rarely Plutarch’s moral judgements are wholly anachronistic. Sometimes they are, as when he criticizes the Gracchi for their philotimia, their ‘love of honour’ or ‘ambition’ (Ag.–Cl. 2), but he does not attack Caesar for his intense version of the same trait. That is a Life where explicit moralism is scarce:16 such criticism would have been insensitive to the ambitious norms of Roman political life. He is more interested in tracing how Caesar’s philotimia operated, how it built him and then destroyed him, as the pressures of success forced him to measures which fed the resentment against him. That is a more descriptive style of moralism, ‘howphilotimia works’ rather than ‘avoid excessive philotimia’; and one which is both timeless in its application and a reasonable extrapolation even from the peculiar norms of Roman politics. Nor does he criticize Flamininus when he is prepared to make peace with Philip rather than allow a successor to take over the war and win the glory (Flam. 7.1–2). Plutarch is very clear in bringing out what Flamininus was doing, clearer than his source Polybius.17 Yet he does not inveigh against him, even in a Life so concerned with philotimia and the ways in which it could be corrupted. He knows that Roman politics were like that, that this is how Roman generals thought.18 He limits his criticisms of Flamininus’ philotimia to the vindictiveness in the hunting down of Hannibal (Flam. 20–1),19 and that is surely a fairer point; just as he is not anachronistic in criticizing Pompey so strongly for yielding to the pressure of his lieutenants, or Lucullus for the extremity of his hedonistic retirement (Pomp. 67.7–10, Lucull. 40–1). These are points which contemporaries too could have made, and in some of the cases clearly did make.
Plutarch’s approach, then, was not ‘timeless’ in the sense that he was insensitive to historical change; it is simply that points particularly apposite to one period or one milieu were less interesting to him. Immediately one says, ‘one can only understand Pompey by relating him to the social circumstances of Picenum in the first twenty years of his life’, one is making points less likely to be relevant to an audience of different circumstances. It was the more general, more widely applicable points which engrossed Plutarch more, and that is the sense in which he had a taste for the timeless.20
III. Philopoemen and Flamininus
Philopoemen and Flamininus provides an interesting test case for these questions of timelessness and contemporary relevance. In this pair he is treating the first important intrusion of Rome into Greece. The ‘freedom of the Greeks’ is a recurrent theme, one which is highlighted by the mirroring great central panels of each Life. After Philopoemen has killed the Spartan ‘tyrant’ Machanidas he is faced by the Greeks at the Nemean games of 205. The whole theatre turned to him as the lyre-player recited the line of Timotheus, ‘he wrought Greece her freedom, her grand and glorious crown’ (Phil. 11.3–4). Freedom recurs throughout that Life: Philopoemen’s last years are spent in trying to assert the dignity of Greece against the Roman intruders, ‘endeavouring to draw the most powerful speakers and statesmen in the direction of liberty’ (Phil. 17.3). Yet, paradoxically, it was one of these Roman intruders who finally gave Greece that liberty: Flamininus, at that proclamation at the Isthmian games of 196, a second theatrical festival which provides the equivalent central panel of his Life (Flam. 10–11). Plutarch there makes the paradox explicit: after all those great national struggles for liberty, it was now the Roman outsiders who brought them that freedom.
They thought about Greece and all the wars she had fought for freedom; and now it had come almost without blood and without grief, championed by another people, this finest and most enviable of prizes... Men like Agesilaus, Lysander, Nicias, and Alcibiades had been great warriors, but had not known how to use their victories to noble and glorious ends; if one discounted Marathon, Salamis, Plataea, and Thermopylae, and Cimon’ s victories at the Eurymedon and in Cyprus, all Greece’s wars had been fought internally for slavery, every trophy had been also a disaster and reproach for Greece, which had generally been overthrown by its leaders’ evil ways and contentiousness...
(Flam. 11.3–7),
It was the Greeks’ own ‘contentiousness’, philonikia, which had been so selfdestructive. In the context of the pair that is a most suggestive theme, for philonikia is Philopoemen’s word (Phil. 3.1, 17.7): the contentiousness that led him to take on other Greeks, eventually even destroying the ancestral constitution of Sparta. Flamininus is philotimos, Philopoemen is philonikos (Flam. 22(1).4), and the two men’s qualities have come to embody something of their two countries as well. Philopoemen was indeed the ‘last of the Greeks’, and in several senses.21
These emphases of the pair – freedom, Greek contentiousness, Roman intervention – would certainly have a resonance for Plutarch’s own generation. The ‘freedom of the Greeks’, that delicate possession which Philopoemen upheld and Flamininus bestowed, remained delicate in his own day. In AD 67 Nero had come to Corinth and proclaimed the freedom of Greece: Plutarch himself compares that announcement with the great proclamation of Flamininus (Flam. 12). Yet that freedom had turned sour. Nowadays, as Advice on Public Life stresses, the constant threat of Roman intervention lay over Greek politics. ‘As you enter on any office, you should not merely remind yourself, as Pericles did whenever he took up the general’s cloak, “Be careful, Pericles; you rule over free men, over Greeks, over Athenian citizens”; but you must also say to yourself, “You rule as a subject: the city is subject to proconsuls, the procurators of Caesar” ’ (813d–e). An important theme in Advice on Public Life is the need for Greek local politicians to act with responsibility, but also with dignity: they should develop the art of controlling their cities without constant recourse to Rome, and without allowing the sort of disorder or affray which would force Rome to intervene (814c–16a). The Greek cities had as much freedom as their masters chose to give them; that had to be accepted (824c); and that freedom was too valuable to be abused. And one of the greatest dangers was, precisely, philonikia, ‘contentiousness’: that produced the disorder which forced Rome to intervene even more actively than she might have wished (814e–15b). Nearly three centuries earlier, Philopoemen’s differences with Aristaenus centred on the degree of deference which Greeks owed to Rome, and the ways of minimizing Roman intervention (Phil. 17.2–5), Aristaenus arguing ‘that they should do nothing to oppose or offend the Romans’, Philopoemen preferring a more active independence though making some concessions; yet Philopoemen himself embodied that contentiousness which endangered the freedom he championed.
These issues clearly had their counterparts for Plutarch’s audience. The need to steer a path between dignified self-respect and provocative self-assertion was still problematic; contentiousness and greed could easily prove Greece’s worst enemies. Of course Philopoemen grazes those questions, and the issues would strike Plutarch’s audience as absorbingly familiar. But how sharp a political moral did Plutarch intend that audience to draw, and how specific were the lessons for their own political life?
Advice on Public Life again gives some guidance, and illustrates the facility which Plutarch has, and which he expects in his audience, in extracting morals from past events and applying them to new contexts. The work is full of exempla from the distant past, and its addressee, Menemachus of Sardis, is expected to draw conclusions from the worlds of Themistocles and Pericles, Nicias and Archidamus, Pompey and Cato and use them to guide his conduct in his own very different world. At the same time Plutarch expects discretion as well as facility in applying those morals.
We laugh at small children when they try to pull on their fathers’ boots and wear their crowns; but what of the leaders in the cities, when they stupidly stir up the ordinary people and encourage them to imitate their ancestors’ achievements and spirit and exploits, even though those are all quite out of keeping with present circumstances? Their behaviour may be laughable, but the consequences they suffer are no laughing matter. There are many other deeds of the Greeks of old which one may recount to mould the characters of the people of today and give them wisdom. At Athens, for instance, one might remind them not of their deeds of war, but of the nature of the amnesty decree under the Thirty; or of the way they fined Phrynichus for his tragedy about the fall of Miletus; or of how they wore crowns when Cassander refounded Thebes, but when they heard of the clubbing at Argos, with the Argives killing 1,500 of their fellow-citizens, they gave orders for a procession of purification around the whole assembly; or of the episode during the Harpalus affair, when they were searching the houses but passed by the one of the newly wedded bridegroom. Even now one can imitate these things, and make oneself like one’s ancestors; as for Marathon and Eurymedon and Plataea, and all those examples which make the ordinary people swell up and fill them with shallow ostentation – we should leave them in the schools of the sophists.
(814a–c)
Plutarch clearly hopes his audience will be too sensible to assume too close a correlation between the glorious deeds of the past and anything that might be practicable in present circumstances.
The passage in Advice on Public Life is mainly concerned with more distant and heroic events, Marathon, Eurymedon, and Plataea. Philopoemen and Flamininus relate to a period when circumstances were more similar to those of Plutarch’s own day. But even here the moral implications of the story remain at a very general level. A self-respecting, dignified stance for independence is good, though one might have to make some (unspecified) concessions; contentiousness, on the other hand, is bad: simple morals like that come out clearly enough, and would have struck Plutarch’s audience as utterly unsurprising. Everyone knew such things. But they are not enough to make this Life into a manual for contemporary statesmen, and anyone seeking more specific political advice would search in vain. Plutarch gives little idea of how the balance should be struck, of what counted as a wisely gauged line of action or what was perilous. Plutarch’s striking vagueness at 17.2–7 about those ‘concessions’ which Philopoemen made, or the way in which he tried to ‘draw the most powerful speakers and statesmen in the direction of liberty’, is here significant.22
Nor does Plutarch strain to illustrate another theme he preached in Advice on Public Life, that contentiousness can itself be self-destructive by forcing Rome into more direct intervention. He might have done: there were instances where Philopoemen acted in provocative ways which nearly inspired Roman intervention; there were several Greek appeals to Rome and her representatives to interfere with Philopoemen’s Spartan settlement in the 180s. Yet Plutarch tells us nothing of all this, though he knew his Polybius well. Sometimes Plutarch visibly shies away from making a moral too contemporary and too sharp. Philopoemen stresses Greek contentiousness and it stresses the Roman presence, but it does not bring the two themes together: one can even trace some sleight-of-hand in separating the two themes. The climax of contentiousness is Philopoemen’s destruction of the Spartan constitution (Phil. 16.4–9), but Plutarch removes this from its chronological context in order to treat it at a moment when the Romans are far from our thoughts.23 When Plutarch turns to the increasing Roman intrusion, he prefers to explain it in a different way, associating it not with contentiousness but with the sycophancy of ‘the demagogues’ instead (17.2), a phrase of great vagueness, and one of less contemporary relevance to Plutarch’s audience. That intrusion even seems to come at a time when Greek ‘contentiousness’ is fading:
Rather as diseases become less acute as the body loses its strength, so the Greek cities were becoming less contentious as they grew feebler.
(18.2)
That is no way to preach the continuing dangers of contentiousness to a contemporary audience, in a world which was immeasurably feebler still. If a moral is to be drawn, it illuminates not the Greek present, but the Greek past, just as those spectators at the Isthmian games of 196 were thinking of the Greek past when they reflected on Flamininus’ gift of freedom. Contentiousness had typified Greece for many generations, but was fading by the beginning of the second century Bc that is the moral we would draw from Philopoemen and Flamininus, and it is only Advice on Public Life which reminds us that contentiousness was a problem still, three hundred years later.
The contemporary resonance of freedom and contentiousness still matters; but it is just that, a resonance. The themes would seem particularly alive and engrossing to the audience, who would find the atmosphere disturbingly familiar; but those readers would be hard put to it to extract any specific guidance for their own political lives. We have already seen that Plutarch prefers the more timeless to the more particular, that he favours modes of historical explanation which transcend the particular period which he is describing; he likes points which transcend the particular circumstances of his own day as well. We might be reminded of the ways in which contemporary affairs impinge on tragedy. It matters that certain plays were performed during the Peloponnesian war, in a context of great human suffering, often generated by Athens herself; but to move from that to specific contemporary allusions is a more delicate matter. Such material touched a nerve, and it might enrich the way spectators pondered their own political and moral problems, but it rarely told them what to conclude or how to act.
IV. Conclusions
It is time to return to those more general questions about moralism with which we started. Several conclusions can be drawn. First, it has continued to prove profitable to relate this ‘contemporary resonance’ to Plutarch’s reception, and to think first of the audience rather than the author. The audience already know that contentiousness is dangerous and freedom is a delicate possession, and bring these assumptions to their reading: Philopoemen’s and Flamininus’ stories chime in with these pre-existent assumptions. We should not only think of the historical interpretation subserving the moralism: the moral assumptions of the audience also predispose them to accept the interpretation. There is evidently a two-way process here, with audience ready for the text, and the text affecting the audience.
Secondly, let us concentrate on the second of the two ways, the moral impact of the text on this receptive audience. It may still look as though Plutarch was telling the audience things that they knew already, and doing so in an expository rather than exploratory way, even if these expository morals are uncontroversial ones, and general rather than specific. Yet it is surely more complicated than that. By the end of the Life the audience will have found various shafts of light falling on those initial presumptions, and they will have seen them in various new perspectives; they will have seen that the taste for liberty and the contentiousness coexisted even in a great national hero; they may have sensed wider points about the Greek past; they will understand more sharply what range of actions philotimia can inspire, in Flamininus’ case as well as in Philopoemen’s. None of this will lead them to doubt their initial presumptions. Freedom is still precious and inspiring, contentiousness still a peril. But their grasp of these morals will not merely be reinforced, it will also be more nuanced. In Plutarch’s case the new perspectives are not specially challenging ones; they are piquant rather than shocking, just as it may be piquant to discover that Antony or Cleopatra can be moving in their fall, or that Aristides and Themistocles were mutually incompatible; we may never doubt that the choices made by Antony and Cleopatra were reprehensible, or that Aristides and Themistocles were both great national heroes, but the new insights are again piquant. Perhaps, too, that exploratory/expository distinction is coming to seem inadequate. These new piquancies may not lead in any particular direction; they provoke thoughts rather than command a single unambiguous conclusion, and in that sense they are exploratory rather than expository. But the initial assumptions survive, indeed are reinforced, and no doubts are felt about them: that is more clearly an ‘expository’ aspect.
Once again, it is interesting to compare tragedy.24 There too the audience bring their own moral assumptions, and these assumptions are deepened by new insights. True, those new, exploratory insights are more challenging ones. Beliefs in the superiority of Greeks to barbarians, in the ideology of the Athenian polis, in the justice of the gods – all are put to a much sterner test than Plutarch ever essays. In tragedy the new perspectives are more than piquant, they are disturbing and shocking. But there too the initial assumptions generally survive, and are deepened rather than reversed by these new insights and perspectives. Reader-response theorists tend to speak as if the ‘negation’ of an audience’s social or moral ideology is the distinctive contribution of challenging literature; as if, indeed, negation is vital to literature’s socially formative role.25 That seems crude. We might rather recall recent work on Augustan literary and artistic propaganda, which has again shifted the focus more to the audience. Propaganda only works with an audience ready to receive it, when it deepens rather than replaces assumptions;26 straightforward negation is a poor way of influencing opinion, and it is more effective to add to ideas rather than counter them; more effective still, if one thinks of great Augustan poetry rather than the more basic Augustan propaganda, to see ideology put to a stern test, and nevertheless, arguably, survive. That parallel also suggests that the moralism is still authentic in a more traditional sense, in Plutarch as in tragedy: that it does seek to affect and impress an audience, and to encourage particular moral views – even if these views were identical, or closely related, to those which the audience already held. Augustus was too accomplished a propagandist to waste time on telling his audience what they already knew unless there was some further advantage to this. Propaganda reinforces, it crystallizes, it strengthens the will. Plutarch’s interpretations too provide clear and crystallized examples of moral truths, both descriptive and protreptic, which enhance those pre-existent moral insights. Once again we have that two-way process between writer and audience.27
‘Both descriptive and protreptic’: this, thirdly, brings us back to that further initial distinction. The notion of ‘descriptive’ moralism may still be a useful one: at least, it is useful to see how some Lives, like Caesar, veer to the descriptive end of the spectrum, while others, like Aristides or Brutus or Aemilius Paullus, tend to the protreptic. But it is also now clearer that there is indeed a spectrum, that the distinction between protreptic and descriptive moralism is a blurred one, and the two forms go closely together: just as, in the exempla of Advice on Public Life, descriptions of past human experience can inspire us as we face current problems. Philopoemen gives little specific guidance for contemporary politics, but that does not mean that it has no protreptic force. The description of Philopoemen’s fighting for liberty can elucidate the dangers, it can point to certain truths of Greek historical experience, and it can also inspire: it can sensitize an audience to the issues; readers have their own moral decisions to make, and they will confront them with greater insight once they grasp how similar behaviour has worked in the past. The protreptic may consist in an invitation to recognize the importance of the issues and to explore them in a particular way, rather than to draw specific practical conclusions; but that is still protreptic. Descriptive and protreptic moralism feed off one another, and that is central to Plutarch’s moral programme.
Finally, we might return to that question of Plutarch’s self-presentation. Donald Russell has drawn attention to the way Plutarch ends On Self-praise: given that people can so easily find self-praise offensive, ‘we shall refrain from speaking about ourselves except in cases when we are likely to bring some great benefit to ourselves or to those who hear us’ (547f). Russell argues that, in Plutarch as in Horace, self-disclosure does indeed have this serious moral purpose of benefiting those who hear: it is ‘an aspect of the teaching function of literature’.28 The characterization of others can crystallize ideas of what a welllived life could be; the same goes for the characterization of self, of that narrator who is serious but sympathetic, cultured but practical, introspective but congenial, perpetually interested and perpetually wise. His moral commentary, as we have seen, is one way in which he constructs that figure of ‘Plutarch’; and that construction is itself both descriptive and protreptic, capturing both the person we read and the person we might like to be.
Notes
1 Macaulay 1898 (1st pub. 1828), 185–92; cf. p. 168, n. 72; Hirzel 1912, 160–6.
2 Stadter 1988, 292. Cf. Beck 2000 for a similar approach to Plutarch’s use of anecdote.
3 In ch.12 (pp. 277–8) I say a little more about the complicity of author and audience which such paspsages generate.
4 I say more about tragedy along these lines in Pelling 1997c and 2000, 164–88.
5 For this distinction cf. Pelling 1988, 15–16. For further discussion of it, see now Duff 1999, esp. 68–70. Duff’s whole book represents a far more sophisticated approach to ‘moralism’ than those which I was combatting in this 1995 essay.
6 Jones 1971, esp. 108–9, 123–4.
7 Wardman 1974, 49–132.
8 Bucher-Isler 1972.
9 Different answers to this question are given by Scuderi 1984, 74 on Ant. 34.9 and 80 on 37.2, and by Pelling 1988, 4. It should be stressed that the Parthian War was probably still in the future when Plutarch wrote: p. 255 below.
10 Here the same goes for Suetonius, Div. Iul. 44.3 (p. 263 n. 16). I elaborate this point in the next chapter, p. 255.
11 Jones 1978, 116–19; cf. Pelling 1988, 124 on Ant. 4.2.
12 ch.9 above; de Blois 1992, 4578–83.
13 Thus Bucher-Isler 1972, 73–4; Wallace-Hadrill 1983, 108; and above, pp. 212, 225. Here, as so often, the most perceptive judgement is Donald Russell’s (cf. n. 28 below), in this case Russell 1966b, 141–3 = Scardigli 1995, 77–81.
14 Pomp. 70, Sulla 1.5, 12.8–14, Phoc. 3.3 (on Cato), Aem. 11.3–4, Cato Mai. 4.2, 16.8, 28(1) 2–3. Cf. pp. 220 and 233 n. 91.
15 On this theme of Spartan wealth see Desideri 1985 and Pelling, forthcoming (b). On sensitivity to change, Frazier 1996, 34 and n. 58: she points also, most pertinently, to On Pythian Oracles.
16 pp. 5–6, 103–5.
17 Polybius 18.10.11–12.
18 ch.9, p. 219.
19 ch.16, pp. 350–2.
20 I say more about this ‘timelessness’ in the next chapter, and also in Pelling 2000,58–60.
21 Cf. pp. 182, 187–8 for Plutarch’s taste for making points about the cities as well as about the men, and chs. 15 and 18 for his analysis of similar ‘contentiousness’ in another military figure, Coriolanus; also Gribble 1999, 272–4 on philonikia in Coriolanus’ pair Alcibiades. On the question whether philonikos would suggest to Plutarch’s audience ‘love of victory’ (nike) or ‘love of quarrels’ (neike), cf. p. 347 n. 24: the answer is probably both.
22 Contrast Polybius 24.12–14, which has clearly influenced Plutarch’s presentation of Philopoemen and Aristaenus, but phrases the disagreement in more detail: Philopoemen’s legalism was more thoroughgoing than Aristaenus’, but he would co-operate with requests within the terms of the alliance; and so on. Polybius’ own readers could extract from that passage much harder and more illuminating guidance for their own day. In Pelling 1997a, 135–9, I say more about Plutarch’s presentation of Philopoemen and Rome, and trace his adaptation of Polybius in more detail.
23 Thus Phil. 16.4–9 describes this destruction of the Spartan constitution (189 BO) with clear disapproval (?ργον ?μ?τατον...κα? παρανομ?τατον, ‘a most savage and unprecedented deed’); then Phil. 17 turns to the Roman question, reverting to events of 192/1. The Roman question builds to a climax as Philopoemen shows his independence and contentiousness by restoring some Spartan exiles (17.6). These are in fact the same exiles as he restored in the context of the constitutional dismantling, and Plutarch has referred to them already at 16.4; but no one would have inferred this from his narrative. He has now come back to the same context, and could, if he had chosen, have delayed the constitution item till here. As it is, the dismantling of the constitution and the Roman question are left in separate trains of thought. Cf. Pelling 1997a, 145–6, 148–53.
24 In Pelling 1997c, esp. 219, and 2000, esp. 162–3, I sketch in a little more detail the ways in which the approach of this paper could be extended to fifth-century drama.
25 Cf. e.g. Iser 1974, xii–xiii; 1978, 73, 85; the train of thought is especially clear in Jauss 1983, 25–8, 39–45. Fish 1972, 1–2, prefers to talk of dialectically ‘decertain- izing’ moral assumptions, rather as the Russian formalists talked of ‘defamiliarization’. These formulations may be more fruitful for tragedy, but even these overstate the case for Plutarch. His audience remain quite certain of their original assumptions, and the persisting familiarity of these assumptions is crucial to the audience’s receptiveness to the historical analysis.
26 Kennedy 1984 has been very influential. Cf esp. Zanker 1988 for artistic aspects.
27 What I meant by this is now put better by Stadter 2000, esp. 505, elaborating the comparison of studying the Lives to looking in a mirror (Aem. 1.1, Progress in Virtue 85a–b: cf. Desideri 1995, 21–4, Frazier 1996, 59–60 and p. 273 below): ‘He invites the reader, using the life he is reading as a mirror, to consider his own qualities: “am I acting in the same ambitious way that Marius did?” The introspection might go further:recognizing the modes of self-justification employed by Marius, as present in oneself – “after all, I deserve it”. Again, the reader of the Antony might ask, “am I allowing myself to be swayed by smooth talking but pernicious flatterers?”...’ Stadter is most generous in presenting that paper as a response to my own (493–4); in fact I find myself almost wholly in agreement with it, for in these examples too the Lives may be seen as renuancing the reader’s pre-existing moral assumptions rather than inculcating new ones.
28 Russell 1993: quotation from 436; cf. 427, ‘both Plutarch and Horace seek to help their hearers, as well as to advance their own case, by talking sometimes about themselves’. Russell is talking primarily about the specific information which Plutarch gives us about his own life, but acknowledges that ‘the characteristic ways in which they talk to us’ is another reason that we seem to know both Plutarch and Horace quite well (426–7). I did not know that elegant essay of Donald Russell when I wrote this paper in 1993, and my final paragraph is an addition to the original version. It is fitting that the thought should be owed to the person in whose honour the paper appeared in 1995, and to whose own teaching and example – sometimes, though not often, conveyed by his talking about himself – I owe so much.