11

Plutarch’s Caesar: a Caesar for the Caesars?

When Plutarch wrote his Lives of the Caesars, probably under Domitian,¹ he found it natural to begin the series with Augustus. When Suetonius wrote his similar series, presumably under Hadrian, he began with Julius. Nor is that just a reflection of the two authors’ tastes: something has changed. It does seem that it was under Trajan himself that Caesar became recognized as the first of the Caesars, as Geiger argued twenty-five years ago:² in his Numa, written under Trajan, Plutarch himself refers to Augustus as ‘the second of the Caesars’ (Numa 19.6). A generation earlier, Augustus counted as the first of the Caesars for the elder Pliny (N.H. 9.143); now Tacitus in the Annals can include Caesar among the line of Nero’s predecessors as he gauges their eloquence (Ann. 13.3.2); a generation and a half later, Appian would be emphatic that Caesar founded the monarchy (Proem 6). Perhaps this was a matter of the emperor’s own initiative: in 107 Trajan issued a commemorative series of coins celebrating Caesar.³ Or perhaps it was something springing as much from below as above, as subjects recognized parallels or origins for contemporary features in Caesar’s reign: ‘the epoch of Trajan felt the attraction of a Caesar who was also a conqueror’, as Syme put it.⁴ Most likely it was a little of both, as top responded to bottom and bottom to top.

In any case it is tempting to explain it by assuming that Caesarian themes were particularly hot for contemporary audiences. ‘Trajan looked like a general of the Republic’ (Syme again);⁵ ‘as general and conqueror, [Caesar] furnished an important model for Trajan himself’ (Bowersock).⁶ That is doubtless partly correct; but Geiger was also right to emphasize that some Caesarian themes, and particularly Caesarian sensitivities, had gone not hot but cold.⁷ Forty or fifty years earlier Brutus, Cassius and Cato could still be inspiring figures to people like Thrasea Paetus and Helvidius Priscus; even under the Flavians it could be dangerous – or at least Tacitus in the Dialogus could portray it as dangerous – to praise Cato (Tac. Dial. 2–3); things were now much blander. Remember Pliny’s acquaintance Titinius Capito, that patient and loyal functionary of the Caesars, fulfilling a series of administrative imperial posts – and seeing nothing incongruous in posting busts of Brutus, Cassius, and Cato in his hall or writing about the ‘Deaths of Illustrious Men’, presumably the ostentatious martyrs like Thrasea Paetus (Plin. Ep. 1.17, 8.12.4).⁸ In 107 Trajan issued coin-types with Republican heroes, including Pompey and Brutus, as well as Caesar,⁹ and Pliny in Panegyricus compares Trajan not merely with previous emperors but also with great Republican names from the past (Pan. 55, 57.4–5, 88.6). ‘Republicanism ended in the year 98’ (Syme again).¹⁰ In fact, the two points go together. The reduction in libertarian sensibility meant that Caesar was no longer so delicate a figure, and there was no barrier in seeing him as the founder of the dynasty which bore his name; and that name, indeed, is vitally important, perhaps as important as Caesar’s exemplary potential as the greatest conqueror of them all.

If Caesar had a special resonance for Trajan, that poses a problem of interpretation for the Parallel Lives too. Is Plutarch intent on exploiting that contemporary interest? If he is, it ought to be possible to notice. We might compare Shakespeare, and the way he angled his Roman themes (owed to Plutarch as they of course were) to whatever issues were most topical in his contemporary world. Thus at the beginning of Coriolanus Shakespeare gives the differences over grain even more prominence than Plutarch had done, and these become the touchstone of the rift between rich and poor (with Menenius, well-fed and preoccupied with ‘dining’ as he is, less than tactful in telling the fable of the stomach and the other parts of the body to famished men).¹¹ The play dates perhaps to the year before, more likely to a year or so after, the Midlands revolt of the ‘Diggers’ or ‘Levellers’ in 1607;¹² but that revolt was in any case provoked by a series of bad harvests and famines over several years, and the relation is not far to seek. Or take Julius Caesar itself. The traditional moral issue of the tyrannicide was the one Shakespeare found foregrounded by Plutarch,¹³ the problem of ingratitude. ‘The greatest charge they lay against Brutus was that he was saved by Caesar’s favour, was allowed to rescue as many of his fellow-prisoners as he wished, was regarded as his friend and was favoured above many others, then became the assassin of his saviour...’, Brut. 56(3).4. But Shakespeare deflects attention from that, and concentrates on the different, more general issue of the justifiability of rebellion: the affront to a free people of having anyone so powerful; the contrast between the weak, frail old man and the ‘Caesar’, the position and the idea as much as the person, described by the man himself in the third person – ‘Caesar shall go forth’; the jealousies which this can inspire in the young and strong Cassius; but the terrible forces then unleashed when a Caesar-shaped hole is left at the top of the state. All this is again not hard to relate to 1599, the date of the play, with a government already nervous of the Earl of Essex two years before his open rebellion against the aging Elizabeth, and with a vibrant contemporary debate on the merits and dangers of autocracy and those of republicanism.¹⁴ Now that new historicism has made this sort of thing respectable again, we surely can see how Shakespeare shapes his themes to the preoccupations of his own day. The only issue is how far we should push the historicizing and how much it matters, not whether the approach works at all.

Can we see Plutarch doing the same thing? That is my question for this chapter, and my answer is no. I do not argue that Plutarch’s themes have no relation at all to his contemporary world; as I argued in the last chapter, they have relevance to every period, including our own; but he does not make his narrative any more relevant to his own times than to any other. Indeed, the opposite is true. Whenever he comes near to stressing a theme with a particularly contemporary application, he shies away, and we can see some nimble footwork in the way he avoids making his narrative too specifically contemporary in its resonance. This is a resolutely uncontemporary narrative.

Let us take some test-cases. Above all, Trajan would have meant Dacia. (Dacia, probably, rather than Parthia: to judge from the relative chronology of Plutarch’s production, the most likely date for Alexander–Caesar is around 110, and in that case Trajan’s Parthia would still be in the future.) Dacia becomes extremely relevant at one point of the Caesar, where Plutarch is talking about Caesar’s last plans. That is a theme of great potential for Alexander–Caesar. The pattern would seem irresistible of Alexander’s last plans, with the great Eastern conqueror now pointing west, mirrored by Caesar’s counterpart, the great westerner pointing East. But in fact less is made of this in the pair than we would expect (there is surprisingly little on Alexander’s last plans, though the theme figured large in the tradition¹⁵). And the way Dacia is treated is stunning. Other authors make no bones about it: Caesar was going to attack ‘the Dacians’ (Suetonius, twice¹⁶); if they do not use the actual word ‘Dacus’ or ‘Dacia’, then at least they use ‘Getae’, regarded by so learned a judge as the elder Pliny as the Greek ‘for’ Dacians¹⁷ (thus Appian, and also the Latin Velleius¹⁸). But Plutarch puts it much more obliquely:

He planned and prepared an expedition against the Parthians; once he had conquered them, he intended to march through Hyrcania along the Caspian and the Caucasus; then he would make his way around the Pontus and invade Scythia, then overrun Germany’s neighbours and Germany herself, and finally return through Gaul to Italy, thus completing the circle of an empire which would have Ocean alone as its boundary.

(Caes. 58.6–7)

That misses out Dacia, and misses it out twice. As those passages of Suetonius, Appian, and Velleius all make clear, the plan was to attack Dacia first and then go on to Parthia: so Dacia is passed over right at the beginning. Then we are taken all the way around the Black Sea and back into Scythia, then into ‘Germany’s neighbours and Germany herself’. ‘Germany’s neighbours’: that is Dacia; and the beginning of Tacitus’ Germania talks of Dacia in similar terms (1.1). But in this context it is a remarkable way to put it, rather as if we were to talk of a traveller moving northwards ‘through Guatemala, then Mexico, then Canada’s neighbours, then Canada herself’. It is clear what trouble Plutarch is taking in order to avoid the word.

Or consider another case. At the beginning of his reign, Trajan famously showed reluctance to accept the title parens patriae or pater patriae, but finally and graciously allowed himself to be persuaded. Pliny makes a great deal of this in the Panegyricus (21). Caesar, again famously, was pater (or parens) patriae.¹⁹

Appian specifies the title for Caesar; so do Dio, Nicolaus of Damascus, Livy’s perioche, Suetonius, and Florus.²⁰ Of our major sources only Plutarch omits the detail. He is interested in Caesar’s titles and the sensitivity of the issues – but leaves them vague, several times.²¹ And it is not that he failed to realize the importance of this title. Contrast the following passage, from Cicero and dealing with 63 Bc:

He [Cato] so extolled Cicero’s consulship in his speech when he harangued the people that they voted him the greatest honours ever and acclaimed him father of his country. It seems that he was the first to receive this title, Cato having so acclaimed him before the people.

(Cicero 23.6, tr. Moles)

‘The first to receive the title’: thus ‘P[lutarch] unobtrusively links C[icero] and the emperors’, as Moles comments.²² That theme of Cicero as imperial forerunner is of some interest in that Life (Moles on Cic. 2.1), perhaps indeed in the whole pair Demosthenes–Cicero, dealing as it does with these great libertarian wordsmiths and their dealings with tyranny. But which is the more obvious forerunner of empire, Cicero or Caesar? And yet it is in Cicero, not Caesar, that a point of this sort is made and the detailed honour is specified.

It is not difficult to add further examples, big and small. Let us take three more.²³ The first is adoption. Nerva’s adoption of Trajan saved the world from civil war, so it could be claimed. Certainly the theme was a hot one, as Pliny (Panegyricus 6–8) and Tacitus (Histories 1.16) illustrate in their different ways, Pliny with bland encomium, Tacitus with thought-provoking incisiveness. (Syme²⁴ is magnificent on how Tacitus exposes the disingenuousness of Galba’s rhetoric.) Adoption might well have come into Caesar too, with the Life’s final three-page foresnap of the wars which will follow. And there is indeed a passage where Plutarch talks about the importance of Caesar’s adoption of the young Octavius, and singles out its importance for giving the young Caesar his name, that name which I emphasized earlier as so important to the Trajanic perspective.²⁵ Yes, Plutarch does make the point – but in Brutus, several times (22.1, 22.3, 57(4).4), not in Caesar itself, which does not mention the adoption at all.

Secondly, the power of the legions, especially the legions of the north; and particularly the power of the soldiery when it was crying for revenge. That theme was relevant to the events of 97–8, with the praetorians pressing for revenge for Domitian.²⁶ It was relevant too, doubtless, to the realities of Nerva’s adoption of the powerful general Trajan, with all those Rhine legions at his command. It is a theme which even Pliny cannot avoid: ‘Will later generations believe that a man whose father was a patrician, a consular, and celebrated a triumph, a man who himself was commanding the bravest and finest and most loyal of armies, that this man was made emperor by anything other than that army?...’ (Pan. 9.2). Pliny’s embarrassment might suggest one reason why Plutarch should omit the theme, that it was simply too delicate. But we should not press that point: Nerva and Trajan, and Caesar before them, could readily be presented as saving the world from all those other legions, and military might could be seen as protection rather than threat. Evidently this was a theme of relevance to Caesar, and the power Caesar gained in Gaul is not concealed: but neither is it analysed, and usually Caesar’s power is seen in political rather than military terms.²⁷ It is not Caesar, but again another Life, this time Sulla, which treats the power of the legions in greater depth (Sulla 12.12–14). And legionaries crying for revenge? That theme is very relevant to the last chapters of the Caesar, but in fact we get nothing on the theme at all: there the force for vengeance, as so often the force for everything in this Life, is the Roman people, and the focus is once again wholly political.²⁸

My final point. Many will remember the story of the young Caesar seeing a statue of Alexander, and weeping because at that age Alexander had conquered the earth and so far Caesar had achieved nothing. That is the way Suetonius (Div. Iul. 7.1), and Cassius Dio (37.52.2) tell it: and both of them specify that the statue was in the temple of Hercules at Cádiz – a feature of the story which has real point, for Cádiz was conventionally one end of the earth, that earth which Alexander had traversed to east and Hercules to west.²⁹ And the theme is Trajanic. Not merely did Trajan himself favour Herculean motifs;³⁰ it is usually said that the ‘Hercules’ type which he included on his coinage was, precisely, Hercules Gaditanus, with all the point which that carries for our Spanish emperor.³¹ That is how the story is usually told; but in Plutarch it is not like that at all (11.5–6). There is no statue, and no temple. Caesar is simply reading something about Alexander, and inspired by what he has read. Now Plutarch may well be up to something here. The point can be metatextual, with the Caesar suggesting – just as Caesar is about to reach Ocean for the first time³² – the inspiring power of reading about Alexander, just as his own readers have just read about Alexander in the paired Life, and just as Plutarch’s Alexander looked forward to writings about himself (Alex. 14.9). The beginning of Pericles is explicit on the way in which written narrative is a more powerful incentive to virtue and achievement than any statue. But whatever Plutarch is doing there, it is nothing Trajanic. Once again, a Trajanic motif looms – and Plutarch deftly sidesteps, turning the story into something quite different.

So far I have been dwelling on specific parallels in historical events and actions, potential points of contact between what Caesar did and what Trajan did. The inquiry could be pitched more generally, to look at points of ideology as well as ‘doings’. We can look, for instance, at the themes of Pliny’s Panegyricus, or more especially of Dio of Prusa’s kingship orations. Are there any links between the touchstones of good kingship there and things which Caesar did – or perhaps more significantly, with things which Caesar did not do, errors which Caesar made and which Trajan wisely avoided (or, perhaps we should say, dangers which Dio of Prusa assumes that he is wise enough to recognize, and thus listen indulgently to the advice)? Here, certainly, we get a little further. Dio offers various themes which might have a Caesarian resonance: the play between rule of law, autocracy, and a democracy which (there is a heavy hint) was failing in practice; the value of friends to support the burden of rule; the careful steering of a path close to the gods but not infringing their realm.³³

Some of those are indeed insistent in the Caesar. Take friends. One of Plutarch’s themes, a highly intelligent one, is the debt which Caesar owed to his friends, and the damage they went on to do to him by their excesses when he and they were in power. Yet he could do nothing about it, for he was trapped by his own past.

Dolabella’s madness also started tongues wagging against Caesar, and so did Matius’ avarice; so too did Antony’s drunken excesses, and Corfinius’ (?) ransacking and rebuilding of Pompey’s private house, as if it was not big enough already. The Romans did not like all this. Caesar himself knew what was going on, and it was against his will. But he had no choice. The political conditions forced him to make use of the men who were willing to be his agents.

(Caes. 51.3–4)

Not that the parallels with the realities of Trajanic Rome are close: but ‘friends’ at least is a theme which links the two reigns. But that does not take us far. I am not claiming that Caesar’s themes have no relevance to his own day, only that they have no more relevance to his day than any other; and it is in the nature of ideology that Dio too treats those themes in a ‘timeless’, generalized way, not making the topicality precise. In Plutarch’s case, there are other reasons for the theme, in particular the pairing with Alexander, where the two men’s relations with their friends become a vital theme in plotting their fall. (As so often, the second Life provides a more interesting variation on the first:³⁴ one way that Alexander traced the man’s decline was in his treatment of his friends, and there the reasons lay in Alexander’s own personality; Caesar’s treatment of his friends is dictated by external necessities, but is no less disastrous.) Anyway, friendship is a recurrent preoccupation of Plutarch himself, in all sorts of context where thoughts of Trajan are far away.

What of those other Dio themes? I listed the play between rule of law, autocracy, and a democracy which was failing in practice; and the careful steering of a path close to the gods but not infringing their realm. ‘A democracy which was failing in practice’: there is something of that in Caesar, noticeably the emphasis on the parlous state of politics, that kakopoliteia (Caes. 28) which formed the background to the civil war.³⁵ But even there the treatment is interesting. In Caesar the kakopoliteia is what affords Caesar his ‘excuses’ (προϕάσεις): it is a matter of propaganda and rhetoric. Plutarch certainly had the notion that this was more than mere talk, that Rome had reached a state where it needed healing, and the best doctor in the circumstances was Caesar.

Caesar’s rule caused trouble for its opponents during its genesis, but once they had accepted it and been defeated it seemed no more than a name and idea, and nothing cruel or tyrannical sprang from it. Indeed it seemed that the state needed monarchy, and Caesar was God’s gift to Rome as the gentlest possible doctor. (Brut. 55(2).2)

But that is the Dion–Brutus.³⁶ There are similar remarks at Antony 6.7, and even Pompey himself says something along the same lines at Pompey 75.5. In the Caesar itself the only mention of a ‘gentlest doctor’ is in the same ch. 28, and it is there something that people were saying about – Pompey (28.6); it is not about Caesar at all. And ‘divine honours’? The notion of Caesar as king is important in Caesar, notably at the Lupercalia; but the only divine honours are at 67.8, when the senate vote ‘to honour Caesar as a god’ on the 17th March, after he is dead. That seems to be an error, in fact, as no other source mentions divine honours granted at that juncture.³⁷ But if so the error is an illuminating one, bringing out how little interest Plutarch has in the subject, and how he neglects every opportunity to bring out the divine honours Caesar had accepted while still alive.

So if Trajan in Plutarch’s Caesar is significant, it is in the sense that Sherlock Holmes’ dog in the night is significant, the one that did not bark. Trajanic themes are significant precisely for not being there.

Why? There is one possible explanation which immediately offers, something ‘generic’. The most-quoted passage in Plutarch is surely

Alexander 1:

For it is not histories we are writing, but Lives. Nor is it always the most famous actions which reveal a man’s good or bad qualities: a clearer insight into a man’s character is often given by a small matter, a remark or a jest, than by engagements where thousands die, or by the greatest of pitched battles, or by the sieges of cities.

(Alex. 1.1–2)

– usually, and perhaps too readily, quoted as the key to all Plutarch’s biographical technique.³⁸ We should remember where it comes, precisely to introduce this pair; and, like the similar passage in the Pompey (8.7), it is particularly relevant to a pair which deals with so many big public actions, engagements indeed where thousands die. Is that the key to this problem? The big Trajanic themes would be ‘public’ ones: if Plutarch is inclined to dwell on small matters, words or jests, is he then writing a more intimate, individual, personal portrayal, and eager to distract attention from those grander and more public matters? If one goes down that route, it would be possible to extend that generic point into something more political. We could, if we chose, make Plutarch imply that the important thing about history and culture is not these big, Roman, public conflicts, but something more concerned with individual fulfilment, knowledge perhaps and personal satisfaction rather than surface achievement. Caesar ‘had sought dominion and power all his days, and after facing so many dangers he had finally achieved them. And the only benefit he reaped was its empty name, and the perils of fame amid his envious fellow-citizens’ (69.1). Is that path of achievement and ambition really worth it? Those who make Plutarch an anti-Roman ‘resistance’ figure (I am not one of them myself)³⁹ could easily annex this argument to make this uncontemporary tone a setting of face against the obvious Roman ways of seeing Caesar. In that case, Plutarch will be suggesting that the lessons of Caesar’s life are quieter and more universal.

That route is a tempting one, but ultimately I would reject it, partly because it is too unsubtle in the way it takes Alex. 1. The passage is so familiar that we ask too few questions about it, even after we have remembered to take it in the particular context of this pair. For does Alexander–Caesar really dwell on all those ‘little things’? Not altogether. Caesar in particular has very little time for the ‘smaller things’ of Caesar’s life: even his love-life is given very little space,⁴⁰much less space than the equivalent themes in Pompey. In fact, one important story in Caesar’s love-life, his alleged affair with Servilia, is mentioned in Cato and in Brutus but not in Caesar itself (Cato Min. 24.1–3, Brut. 5). And when Caesar is allowed a ‘remark or a jest’, it is hardly on the private and more intimate themes: ‘this is what they wished’ on the battlefield of Pharsalus (46.1), or ‘today the enemy had victory in their grasp, if only they had had a victor to command them’ at Dyrrhachium (39.9), or indeed ‘let the die be cast’ (32.8). This is pre-eminently a Life, and a pair, which dwells on ‘engagements where thousands die.’.

It is better, I suggest, to see that preface to Alexander as introducing a polarity of ‘small things’ and ‘big things’ which prepares for a variety of interactions through the pair, and as we go on it proves more difficult to keep small things and big things so separate. In Alexander it is the little things, the ill-judged remarks and jests, that mark his decline, even destroy him: the exchanges with Cleitus or Callisthenes, then the bizarre and macabre goings-on at Babylon at the end. In Caesar it may be more that Caesar has so little time for anything other than ‘big things’, no time for instance for love,⁴¹ no time to become the great orator which his nature would have allowed him to be (Caes. 3). Instead it is Cicero who becomes the topmost orator, and Caesar can only be second-best; and, if we look for ‘remarks and jests’, it tends to be Cicero’s remarks in the final weeks which chart and even orchestrate the growth of opposition to Caesar. Initially things are good: ‘by raising Pompey’s statues he has firmly fixed his own’ (57.6); but before long ‘let us hurry to greet the new consul before he demits office’ (58.3), and the calendar is ‘obeying orders’ (59.6).⁴² Little things have a way of biting back, and affecting those big things after all. We certainly cannot say that Caesar avoids the big public themes; indeed this is in many ways the most ‘historical’, least intimate and personal of all the Lives.⁴³ Our knowledge of Caesar’s more personal side comes not from Plutarch but from Suetonius, whose category-approach is so well suited to providing a ‘rounded’ portrait. In Plutarch it is precisely the public man whom we see.

So that generic explanation does not work. I suggest a different explanation, one that is more conceptual. I have elsewhere argued that Plutarch’s interpretative categories tend to be ‘timeless’:⁴⁴ he avoids the explanatory themes which are specific to the particular times and places he is talking about, and thus, for instance, has little to say about the equites at Rome or the hetaireiai in Athens. He prefers the big themes which are more transcultural: themes like the perennial clash of ‘few’ and ‘many’; or the search of the powerful individual for tyranny;⁴⁵ or the failures of the military man to adapt to the intricacies and subtleties of political life.⁴⁶ Similarly, I have argued, in other Lives too he does not make the political implications very specific. In Philopoemen–Flamininus he grazes the need for concord among Greek states, the dangers of ‘contentiousness’; he also points the dangers of exciting Roman intervention, and the difficulties of plotting a political path which combines self-respect and dignity with prudence. The natural thing would be to bring these two themes together, as he does in the Advice on Public Life, and emphasize that it is precisely the contentious squabbling which is in danger of provoking the Roman intervention: it happened with Philopoemen, and it could happen again now. But there too Plutarch avoids making the moral specific, and develops the two points, contentiousness and Roman intervention, in separate trains of thought.⁴⁷Plutarch likes his focus to be soft; he prefers to leave the points as contemporary resonances, no more. This is not unlike the points which we have grown accustomed to making about Greek drama: it is comedy which makes the immediate, sharp points about particular figures and events; tragedy is more general, exploring the strengths and weaknesses of democracy or the rule of law, the sufferings of war, the problematic of international compassion rather than focusing sharply on particular issues and characters.⁴⁸ Plutarch aligns there with tragedy rather than comedy, keeping his distance from the specific and preferring the bigger and more timeless themes.

That is what tells us most about the intellectual climate of the reign of Trajan: that Plutarch could think that the points he was extracting would remain valuable and relevant for all time, not just for the here-and-now, and that there was no need for him to strive assiduously to hang them on particular contemporary themes. For it did not have to be that way. I am arguing not merely the weaker thesis that Plutarch does not dwell on contemporary issues, but also the stronger one that he goes out of his way to avoid them. If I am right, that tells us more than we have so far seen. It suggests that he is writing for an audience who, there was a danger, might seek (or at least include people who sought) to read him in that way: an audience who were on the look-out for such relevance, who unless he avoided the word ‘Dacia’ might think he had something to say about Trajan’s campaigns, who might look for parallels to contemporary debates about parens patriae, and so on. Plutarch was eager not to let his audience go down that track. Not everybody who read him, even among his immediate audience, need be so topically minded; it is hard to think, for instance, that young readers in Chaeronea would be quite so agog for pater patriae points as his powerful Roman friends at Rome. But at least distracting attention from such topicality would do something to ensure that all those readers would start equal, and would be directed towards those other, more timeless themes.

John Dillon has suggested a parallel between Plutarch’s view of the Roman Empire and Fukuyama’s view of all world history: that history had reached its end, that just as for us western liberalism leaves nowhere else to go, so for Plutarch the Roman Empire marked a settled world which would continue in more or less the same way.⁴⁹ In that case, we may add, themes could indeed be timeless, and there was no need to tie things to the evanescent preoccupations of the present. Dacia would not last as an issue; tyranny might. If Dillon is right, then a first reflection might be ‘so much for Fukuyama, and so much for Plutarch too: look what happened to the Roman Empire; that did not last for ever, and neither will western liberalism’. But a second reflection might be that Plutarch was not so wrong as all that, and that his transcultural preoccupations have ensured a lasting relevance for his moralism and his historical analysis which a superficial topicality could never have achieved.

It is a lazy habit of critics to talk about what ‘we’ might be expecting or assuming from a text, or how ‘we’ feel or think about the issues it raises.⁵⁰Perhaps it is a less bad habit with Plutarch than with other authors, if his themes and focus are as ‘timeless’ as I have argued here. We should indeed think of this as a ‘possession for ever’, a κτη̑μα ές αίεί; of an audience which could stretch forward through time and respond to timeless themes, themes whose relevance and interest for later generations need not be so very different from the relevance and interest for the immediate audience. Even talk of ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ audiences may oversimplify the picture, as the target audiences blur into one another. If we also posit an immediate audience who looked hard for contemporary themes and an author who needed to deflect that tendency, even that does not make a modern audience totally different. ‘We’ are still inclined to look for the same things. The collection for which this essay was written, exploring ‘Sage and Emperor: Plutarch and Trajan’,⁵¹ is testimony to that.

Notes

¹ Thus Bowersock 1998, following Jones 1971, 72–3: or possibly under Nerva (Geiger 1975) – but that window is very tight.

² Geiger 1975.

³ BMC Imp. III², pp. 141 nos. 30–1, 142 nos. 696–7: cf. Geiger 1975, 450, Bowersock 1998, 197; cf. Syme 1958, 250, 434.

⁴ Syme 1958, 434.

⁵ Syme 1958, 218.

⁶ Bowersock 1998, 197.

⁷ Geiger 1975, 449.

⁸ On Titinius cf. the trenchant remarks of Syme 1958, 92 (possibly overstated: cf. Sherwin-White 1966, 124–5 on Plin. Ep.1.17.1).

⁹ BMC Imp. III² pp. 132–45 nos. 673–706 (Brutus: 684; Pompey: 693); cf. Syme 1958, 250.

¹⁰ Syme 1958, 434 n. 1, cf. 28.

¹¹ For the themes which Shakespeare suppresses – the usurers, for instance, of Cor. 5, or the patricians’ desire to send plebeians to plague-torn Velitrae (Cor. 12–13), cf. pp. 389–90; for Menenius’ food-preoccupations, p. 389 and n. 8.

¹² See e,g, Patterson 1989, 135–46; Bliss 2000, 17–27; and now especially George 2000, who shows how expensive corn became, especially in 1608, and argues for a late 1608 date for Coriolanus (so also Bliss 2000, 7). Notice the summary of the approach at George 2000, 72: ‘While Shakespeare relied on Plutarch for his narrative and his main military and political events, he filled in passage after passage with Jacobean England. This is not so much a question of “relevance” as an artistic method of creating immediacy for his audience and of winning their involvement.’ That seems very fair, and is exactly what Plutarch does not do.

¹³ On this as the traditional moral issue posed by the tyrannicide, see Rawson 1986, 101–9 = 1991, 488–507.

¹⁴ On this background cf. e.g. Daniell 1998, 22–9.

¹⁵ Only really Alex. 68.1–2 (with Hamilton 1969, 187–9 ad loc.): for the interest elsewhere cf. esp. Arr. Anab. 7.1, Diod. 18.4, Curt. 10.1.17–19, and Plutarch himself in On the Fortune of the Romans (326a–c).

¹⁶ Suet. Div. Iul. 44.3, ‘to repress the Dacians, who had encroached into Pontus and Thrace; then to invade Parthia by way of Lesser Armenia, but not to attack them without first getting used to their tactics’ (Dacos, qui se in Pontum et Thraciam effuderant, coercere; mox Parthis inferre bellum per Armeniam minorem nec nisi ante expertos adgredi proelio);Div. Aug. 8.2.

¹⁷ Plin. N.H. 4.80, ‘the Getae, whom the Romans call “Dacians” ’ (Getae, Daci Romanis dicti); cf. Sil. Ital. Pun. 1.329; App. Proem 4, ‘the Getae beyond the Danube, whom they call Dacians’.

¹⁸ App. BC 2.110.459, 3.25.93, Ill. 13.36–7; Vell. 2.59.4.

¹⁹ Weinstock 1971, 200–5.

²⁰ App. BC 2.106.442, 144.602; Cass. Dio 44.4.4; Livy per. 116; Nic. Dam. vit. Aug. 80 (FGrH 90 fr. 130); Suet. Div. Iul. 76.1, 85; Flor. 2.13.91.

²¹ Caes. 57.2–3, 60.4–5.

²² Moles 1988, 171 ad loc.; cf. 148 on Cic. 2.1. App. BC 2.7.25 makes the same point more explicitly: ‘some think that this honorific title began with Cicero and passed on to those emperors who were thought worthy of it.’. There is irony there, for in that book devoted to the conflicts of Caesar and Pompey (2.1.1–3) the first forerunner of the emperors is – Cicero!

²³ A fourth might be Plutarch’s treatment of clementia in 57.4. On this see the perceptive remarks of Schettino, forthcoming: Plutarch uses the less charged έπιείκεια, ‘moderation’ or ‘mildness’, which raises none of the explosive issues which had become connected with ‘clemency’. Schettino may well be right in saying that in this ‘Plutarch shows himself sensitive to the issues of his age’ – but, if so, it is again precisely in avoiding terminology which would carry too heavy a contemporary loading.

²⁴ Syme 1958, 207–8, 219–20. For bland praise of adoption cf. also Cass. Dio 68.4.1, praising Nerva for adopting Trajan even though Nerva had living relations, and even though Trajan was Spanish.

²⁵ Above, p. 254.

²⁶ Cass. Dio 68.3, 68.5.4: cf. Syme 1958, 10.

²⁷ See esp. Caes. 28–9. Caesar ‘trained’ his power at 28.3, and that does sound quite military. But that ‘power’ is defined as much by the Gallic wealth which Caesar can use for political bribery, 29.3, and the soldiers returned to Pompey have most impact by spreading pro-Caesar propaganda among ‘the people’, 29.5. Pompey, over-persuaded by this that the rest of the army will come over to him readily, consequently makes errors which are as much political as military, 29.6.

²⁸ Caes. 67–8: on Plutarch’s general neglect of the veterans in the aftermath of the Ides cf. pp. 221–2. The importance of the soldiers comes out more in Brutus (21.4, 22.3, 23.1) and Antony (16.6–8).

²⁹ One end of the earth: Juv. 10.1 etc. Its relevance: della Corte 1989.

³⁰ On this cf. e.g. Jones 1978, 116–19.

³¹ Hercules Gaditanus on coins of 100: cf. Strach 1931, 95–105, followed by e.g. Syme 1958, 57–8 and 58 n.1; Jones 1978, 117. H. Mattingly, BMC Imp. III² (1966) lxvii–lxviii is more cautious, but does not reject Strach out of hand. Early in his reign Hadrian too issued coins of Hercules Gaditanus, in one case named as such (BMC Imp. III² pp. 253–4 nos. 97–9, and esp. 273 no. 274), which might in itself make more likely the identification of Trajan’s Hercules as Gaditanus; the pose however is different, and this inspired Mattingly’s caution. Jonathan Williams of the British Museum kindly tells me that he shares Mattingly’s hesitation.

³² Caes. 12.1, where as quaestor in Spain Caesar drives through in conquest ‘to the outer sea’ (ἄχρι τη̑ς ἔξω θαλάσσης); that theme is then picked up at 23.2, where in invading Britain Caesar ‘was the first man to sail the western ocean with a fleet, and convey an army into battle through the waters of the Atlantic’, and at 58.6–7, quoted above – ‘thus completing the circle of an empire [cf. Alex. 68.1] which would have ocean alone as its boundary’.

³³ Friends: cf. Dio Prus. 1.28–32, 3.86–118; Plin. Paneg. 85–7. Different forms of government: Dio Prus. 3.45 ff. Gods: Dio Prus. 1.12–14, 2.72, 3.51–7, 4.39–45, Plin. Paneg. 52.

³⁴ As I argue in ch. 16.

³⁵ See p. 210 and n. 16.

³⁶ Cf. p. 376.

³⁷ Cf. p. 37 n. 90.

³⁸ On this passage see also Duff 1999, 14–22; pp. 102, 207, 276–7; and Pelling, forthcoming (a).

³⁹ Cf. the formulation ‘a statement of resistance’ which (with some qualifications) Duff 1999, 309 adopts at the end of his book: see p. 236 n. 128. But I have no reason to think that Duff himself would argue in this way, and he would certainly (1999, 21–2) not use Alex. 1 in the way I have here set up. Note also the suggestive title of Boulogne 1994, Plutarque: Un aristocrate grec sous l’occupation Romaine : true, Boulogne himself presents Plutarch as a cultural harmonizer rather than a resistance hero, but ‘Roman occupation’ is a misleadingly loaded phrase. For ‘resistance’ in Roman Achaea in a blander sense cf. Alcock 1997, esp. 111.

⁴⁰ This theme is the subject of a most interesting unpublished paper by Jeff Beneker, who is completing a Chapel Hill doctorate on the Roman Lives. Cf. also my own remarks in ch. 4, pp. 104–5.

⁴¹ Above, n. 40.

⁴² On this theme cf. Pelling 1997e, 219–20, 225.

⁴³ And hence I took it as the paradigm of a ‘historical’ Life in ch. 4: cf. Duff 1999,20–1.

⁴⁴ In interpreting Roman history: ch. 10. In interpreting Greek history: Pelling 2000,58–60.

⁴⁵ Ch. 9, esp. p. 218.

⁴⁶ Chs. 15 and 18.

⁴⁷ See pp. 243–7.

⁴⁸ Cf. for instance Taplin 1986. I have said more about this myself in Pelling 2000, chs. 7–9, esp. 164–6.

⁴⁹ Dillon 1997, building on Fukuyama 1992.

⁵⁰ Cf. below, p. 278, and especially the passage from Bernard Williams quoted at p. 282 n. 45.

⁵¹ Stadter and van der Stockt (eds.) forthcoming. I hope however that this will not be seen as a subversive anti-keynote contribution to that inquiry: if the argument here is right, it is still illuminating for the worlds of ‘Sage and Emperor’, but in a broad sense of intellectual climate. On Plutarch and Trajan see also p. 85, on the dedication of the Apophthegmata of Kings and Generals.