12
Narrative is a slippery thing, and Plutarch ensured that his readers knew it. Let us begin with a few passages of embedded narrative, and see how he portrays story-telling in action. Such passages are rare: Plutarch normally prefers to tell stories on his own authority. But where they come they often point the uncertain relation of narrative to the events described.
Take Proculus Iulius’ narration of Romulus’ apotheosis at Rom. 28.1–3, especially interesting because it is an embedded narrative (Proculus’) of a further narrative, Romulus’ account of his apotheosis: so Proculus is a ‘secondary narrator’, Romulus a ‘tertiary’. The narrative had given several possible explanations of the disappearance in the previous chapter. Had the senators torn him apart and concealed the fragments about their persons? Or had he genuinely been snatched up to the gods? Now Proculus tells how Romulus appeared to him and explained that this had been the gods’ will, to allow him to return to Heaven: now he will protect Rome as the god Quirinus. The story was believed ‘because of the character of the man who told it and the oath which he swore’ (so narratorial authority does make a difference, Rom. 28.3); but an important element of uncertainty remains. Plutarch as external narrator is decisive enough to conclude that there was indeed ‘something supernatural’ at play – but in the way that everyone accepted Proculus’ story, 28.3, which is not the same as saying that this divine version was true. He goes on to make his own scepticism clear, first relating the parallel ‘mythical tales’ (28.4, 7) of Aristeas and Cleomedes, then arguing that it is ‘stupid’ (28.7) to think that bodies, unlike souls, can be taken to Heaven. Something of Romulus’ apotheosis may remain, a matter of spirit rather than corporeality;1 but that is not the way Proculus and Romulus described it, or at least not the way that people at the time apparently took their story.
Plutarch’s version of the meeting of Solon and Croesus is a further, very elaborate case (Solon 27–8).2 Misreading is in the air: it is set up by Solon’s own initial misreading of the court, where he cannot tell which of the sumptuously dressed figures is Croesus himself (27.3). When questioned, Solon gives embedded narratives of Tellus, then of Cleobis and Biton: the stories are reported in indirect speech and given briefly and enigmatically, presumably because Herodotus’ original is taken as familiar. As in Herodotus, Croesus does not get the point, ‘and so Solon left: he had given Croesus pain, but left him no wiser’ (27.9). But Herodotus’ Croesus does become wiser later, and can pass on Solon’s lesson (or at least an interpretation which only mildly trivializes, 1.86.5) to the conquering Cyrus. Plutarch’s Croesus tries to do the same, and there is embedded narrative here too as Croesus tells of Solon’s advice (28.4–5). Croesus concludes that ‘it was a greater evil to lose this wealth than a good to gain it’ (28.4): that, for him, was what Solon must have ‘foreseen’ when he urged him to ‘look to the end’ (28.5). Plutarch’s readers would be unlikely to have read Solon’s wisdom quite like that. They would recall Solon’s exchanges with Thales (Solon 6–7), a case where an embedded narrative was straightforwardly false, in that case Thales’ carefully-wrought story of the death of Solon’s son. Plutarch had there pointed the folly of concluding that it is a mistake to have anything good at all, ‘wealth, or glory, or wisdom’ (7.1), simply because one might one day lose it – something like the opposite of the moral that Croesus now draws. In this case, Cyrus is ‘wiser than Croesus’ (28.6), and takes Solon’s lesson to heart: but it is not clear that Cyrus, this great man of insight and achievement, reads that lesson as simply as Croesus has done.
So the wise adviser Solon knows that telling stories is a good way of conveying wisdom; but it also emerges that stories are not easy to read, and their point can be missed – as it is missed by Croesus, certainly at the beginning and possibly even at the end.
There are implications here for Plutarch’s narrative too, but they are subtle ones. It would be wrong to suggest that his own master-narrative is infected by similar uncertainties, at least most of the time: there are many devices for establishing Plutarch’s narrative authority. But there remains a potential uncertainty about narrative: uncertainty about fact, about interpretation, about moral implication. That is one reason for the frequent nests of scholarly citation: not merely do they establish the narrator’s learning, they also point to the number of variants attested by other reputable authorities.3 If the narrator wins the narratee’s confidence, it is against a background of potential slippage, the knowledge that other narratives might be possible and that the narrator himself may not always be confident that this is the right story to tell.
That suggests a rather sophisticated brand of complicity between narrator and narratee, and in this chapter I shall explore the ways in which this complicity is established and developed. That is a vast topic, for Plutarch’s narratorial interventions can take many forms; he can convey a response and make it infectious – approval or disapproval, or simply engagement and excitement – in many ways, and we cannot look at them all here. Here I will examine only his uses of an explicit ‘me’ or ‘you’, and limit the investigation to the Lives rather than the Moralia. I begin with his first-person statements.
These are often there to explain the origin of a story.4 While ‘I’ was travelling over the battlefield of Bedriacum the consular Mestrius Florus told me of the piles of corpses (Otho 14.2); ‘I’ discover that Nicias’ shield is still on display in Syracuse (Nic. 28.6, cf. Ages. 19.10–11); Sextus Sulla of Carthage has given ‘us’ a particular explanation of the Roman wedding-cry ‘Thalassio’ (Rom. 15.3); Philotas of Amphissa told Plutarch’s grandfather Lamprias an anecdote of the feasting of Antony and Cleopatra, then Lamprias passed it on to ‘us’ (Ant. 28, cf. 68). There are times when such ‘we’s clearly extend to his narratees as well, or at least some of them. ‘Our’ fathers still tell a story of Lucullus at Chaeronea (Cimon 1.8); inscriptions of ‘Lucius Cornelius Sulla Epaphroditus’ are still found ‘among us’ (Sulla 34.4); honours are paid to Themistocles’ descendants to ‘our own day’, including one who himself bore the name of Themistocles and was ‘our’ friend in the school of Ammonius (Them. 32.6) – this last an instance of how a first-person plural can blur between the inclusive ‘we’, embracing the narratees, and the authorial ‘we’ = ‘I the narrator’. Similar references to survivals ‘to our own day’ are found elsewhere too.5
Such passages add to the narrator’s ‘authority’ by citing evidence; they also convey a world where the past has vitality, where ‘we’ still care, where stories are still told and memorials are on display. The same goes for those passages, whether or not they include ‘we’s or ‘I’s, which stress continuing controversy, with arguments still being made: was Aristides really poor (Arist. 1, including a ‘to our day’)? Should we follow the traditional version of the Megarian decree or what ‘the Megarians say’, using the Acharnians to turn the blame on to Aspasia and Pericles (Per. 30.4)?6 The past is still alive in other ways too: the Athenians’ magnanimity towards Aristides’ family was followed by later cases, and ‘even in our own day the city still produces many examples (δείγματα) of generosity and kindness, and is justly admired and emulated (ζηλοΰται) for it’ (Arist. 27.6–7). Part of the narrator’s own purpose in the Lives is to provide such ‘examples’ himself; that of Aristides has been followed by many, and the present city, true to its past, still gives examples for the future and is ‘emulated’ for it. There is a continuing process of inspiration and imitation here, one in which Plutarch’s own writings play a part. The ‘we’s and ‘our’s invite narratee as well as narrator to join in this milieu of moral and intellectual immersion in the past.
Proems and epilogues are particularly important in the narrator’s characterization of self, of narratees, and of the dynamic between the two. In proems we often find a strong self-characterization, or characterization of the reading or writing process:7 a display of critical learning (Arist.–Cato Mai., Lyc.–Numa), or moral debate (Demetr.–Ant., Per.–Fab., Ag.–Cl.–Gracchi), or a setting of a hero’s life in a wider ethical or historical perspective (Cimon–Lucull., Phoc.–Cato Min.). These herald the sorts of reflection which are expected of the narratee during the rest of the narrative too, once the narrator’s personality has receded into the background (not that it ever disappears); then similar points recur with particular frequency in the comparative epilogues. Naturally, then, first-person statements are common in proems and epilogues. Many of those are undeveloped – ‘it seems to me’, ‘I praise’, ‘I blame’, ‘I infer’8 – though even these have their point in setting the tone for the sorts of response which the narrative invites.
There are a few second-person statements too: let us start with the formal dedicatees. These can be important in setting a work’s tone. Outside the Parallels, Aratus is dedicated to Aratus’ descendant Polycrates of Sicyon, giving ‘examples drawn from their own household’ to his sons to encourage them to emulation (Arat. 1). The theme of ‘sons’ and Aratus’ descendants ‘to our own day’ recurs symmetrically at the end (54.7–8). That does not mean that Polycrates’ family are the only, or even the target, narratees: the very reading of the work tells every new reader that it extends to a larger audience. But the moralism of Aratus is more explicit than that of the Parallels, with a particular stress on education;9 and that fits a more straightforward protreptic work aimed at the young. Polycrates and his sons give a signal of the type of narratee expected, even if an extreme example of that type; they indicate narratees to which real readers may assimilate themselves, flattered and intrigued to think of themselves as moral classmates of the man’s real-life descendants.
The Parallel Lives give a more refined version of this. Their dedicatee is Q. Sosius Senecio, twice consul, perhaps himself of Greek origin, and also the dedicatee of Table Talk and Progress in Virtue.10 The series may have been initially dedicated to him during his first consulship in 99 AD.11 If so, the proem to the lost opening pair Epaminondas and Scipio would probably have made the appropriateness explicit: this is a lover of the Greeks and yet a great Roman, a military man with a taste for the past and for culture, a symbol of the interplay of different worlds and pursuits which the Lives will explore.12
Sosius’ name recurs in various ‘re-addresses’ at Thes. 1.1, Dem. 1.1, and Dion 1.1. Those placings are not random. Thes. 1 marks out Theseus–Romulus as the point where the series reaches its extreme boundary in the past. The mind-set of the critical but sympathetic narratee is also in focus, as we shall see, and a narratee of ‘ideal’ sophistication is here constructed with special care. Demosthenes–Cicero will present two figures who combine culture and a life of action, and investigate the tensions which that can bring. Sosius, as a contemporary example of the cultured man of affairs, adds a valuable further perspective. Dion–Brutus will investigate the Platonic picture of the ‘philosopher in politics’, especially the Academic philosopher: and ‘.it is right for neither Romans nor Greeks to complain about the Academy, for they both gain equally from this book which contains the Lives of Brutus and of Dion’ (Dion 1.1). That suggests a world of cultural fusion, where both Romans and Greeks learn from philosophy and are interested in its effect on political action. Sosius sums up that world too.
Sosius, however, is hardly the typical narratee. The Lives often explain basic Roman terms and institutions – the meaning of hoc age, for instance, or ‘deliciae’, or even ‘magnus’ (Cor. 25.3–4, Ant. 59.8, Crass. 7.1); or how the tribunate worked (Ant. 8.5, Cam. 5.1, Fab. 9.2).13 At other times too they seem to imply Greek narratees, for instance in his comments on the lack of Roman aesthetic taste (Popl. 15.4), uncharacteristically abrasive if aimed only at a Roman narratee but wistfully nostalgic if aimed at a Greek.14 Still, we need not narrow the real-life audience down, even there: Roman readers might feel flattered to be expected to share Greek tastes. Real-life readers doubtless extended over a wide range, from the most distinguished of Plutarch’s Roman friends to impressionable young pupils at Chaeronea. Sosius may be valuable as intimating one end of that range, rather as in Philostratus’ dedication of his Lives of the Sophists to Gordian (VS proem), or in his claim that he re-edited his Life of Apollonius at the behest of Julia Domna (1.3).15 Readers can reflect on the implications of being included along with Sosius in that range: the work is suitable for him as well, and that has its own implications on the value and applicability of what they will read.16
The proem to Demosthenes tells a tale about Plutarch as well as about Sosius. One can be virtuous anywhere: it would be odd if small towns, Ioulis or Aegina, had produced great actors or poets but could not generate people of goodness and justice (1.2–3). Plutarch himself has made his home in the small town of Chaeronea (2.2). Still, there is value for a writer too in living in a great city, where one has not merely a lavish supply of books but also hears the stories which people still tell about the past (2.1). When he was in Rome and Italy, he had not had time to refine his Latin because he was too busy with political affairs and with those who came to hear him on philosophy. Then, when he did read Latin sources, he had found it a great advantage that he was already familiar with the substance (2.2–3). He is not equipped to give a stylistic contrast of Demosthenes and Cicero as orators – people ‘who have more leisure and whose age is more suited to ambitions of that sort’ (2.4) might do that – but he can at least compare them as politicians and men of action (3.1).17
Scholars frequently quote this passage for what it tells us of Plutarch’s Latin;18 they less often ask what its function is in this pair,19 or how it characterizes narrator or narratee. Once again we have the intimation of milieu: in big cities people are still exchanging anecdotes about the past, in little ones too people are examining their moral health. As for the narrator’s own self-characterization, (a) small towns can produce great artists, and (b) Chaeronea is a small town. His distaste for self-praise – a subject on which we have his moral essay, and on which he dwells in this pair (Cic. 24, 51(2) )20 – prevents him from drawing the conclusion from the two premisses, but the self-applicability is not far to seek. Yet he is more than just a writer, and his aspirations have not been only to be the good man in private life which the first chapter of the Life has sketched. He has also been a man of affairs: those ‘times in Rome and Italy’ make a point, together with those distractions which prevented him from perfecting his feeling for Latin style. The distractions consisted in ‘political affairs’ – presumably diplomatic missions,21 though again he is diffidently vague – as well as ‘those who came to listen to me on philosophy’. This is a doer as well as a man of letters and ideas, a narrator who is well-equipped to understand the interplay of culture and politics which he will explore in Demosthenes and Cicero. And what of his narratees? As we saw, this is an appropriate place to introduce Sosius Senecio; but the wider audience is implicated too. The ‘we’s of this proem are sometimes clearly ‘Plutarch’, ‘we the narrator’: ‘we’ began to read Latin late in life and visited Italy (2.2–3), ‘we’ are writing this fifth pair of Parallel Lives (3.1). But some ‘we’s are vaguer: ‘if we fall short of thinking or living as we should, we shall ascribe this not to the smallness of our country but to ourselves’ (1.4).22 There is an intimation here of a value-scheme which narrator and narratee share, just as there will be in the epilogue to the pair – there, for instance, the valuing of wide culture (Cic. 50(1) ), the sympathy for Platonic views on philosopher-kings (52(3).4), the strong views on political venality (52(3).5–6). All have the tone of dispensing approval and disapproval among a community of morally serious people who think and feel in similar ways.
Then there is the parade of eschewing stylistic comparison (2.4). That theme too returns in the epilogue (Cic. 50(1).1), though he goes on there to do something very close to it anyway – perhaps itself self-characterization, suggesting that even though he rates substance above style he can make stylistic points as well. In each case, though, the tone suggests that the narratees are likely to feel the same way. That reference to those ‘who have more leisure and whose age is more suited to ambitions of that sort’ (2.4) is not especially warm, nor does it imply that such a project would be triggered by their own reading of Plutarch. Then in Dem. 3 Plutarch is dismissive of the stylistic criticism of Caecilius, and that too is not likely to produce any identification of most narratees with this potential stylistic critic. Or rather, perhaps, we should distinguish between two different sorts of constructed narratee. There are those whom the narrator welcomes and accepts, those whom he is writing for : his ‘target’ narratee, perhaps. Such a narratee is expected to share his assumptions, in this case a privileging of substance above style. But there is a second sort of constructed narratee as well, those who he knows will read his work but may not be so sympathetic, those who may put quite different questions to the material. They are not neglected, but not welcomed with such inclusiveness or warmth. We shall see more of this second category later.23
The inclusive techniques, though, are the more usual ones, and they can be more far-reaching. Those first-person plurals are here important. It is indeed often unclear exactly how that category of ‘us’ is envisaged: ‘we Greeks’, ‘we cultured beings’, ‘we people of humane sensibility’, ‘we who are interested in the past’?24 Does it include real readers in subsequent generations as well as those ‘in our day’, i.e. Plutarch’s own?25 But in any case it is evidently a category which includes narratee as well as narrator. Elsewhere too, as in the Demosthenes proem, a ‘we’ may begin by seeming to be Plutarch himself, but drifts into being a genuine plural ‘we’ = ‘you and I’, narratee and narrator: ‘now that we have delivered our first narrative, we have to go on to contemplate experiences and sufferings of a similar size in the Roman pair, comparing the life of Tiberius and of Gaius...’ (Gracch. 1.1). As in that Gracchi passage, it easily reaches the stage where the whole project of the Lives is envisaged as a joint investigation of narrator and narratee: when ‘we compare’ two people (e.g. Phoc. 3.6, Pomp. 81(1).1, Popl. 1.1, Ag.–Cleom. 2.7), or ‘bring on first’ one of them (Dion 2.7), or ‘contemplate’ the pair’s qualities (Pomp. 84(4).11, Ant. 88(1).1), that ‘we’ is not restricted to Plutarch himself. There are also blurred intermediate cases, sometimes very uncharged, where it is unclear whether narratee is included or not: ‘if we were to say that those writers were lying (though there are a fair number of them...)’, Cic. 52(3).6; ‘we do not have anything parallel in Pompey’s career’, Pomp. 82(2).2. These are not very different from some cases without an explicit ‘we’, such as ‘but this, I suppose, will seem to support Lycurgus’ case’ (Numa 26(4).14), or Nicias’ moneymaking ‘will seem more respectable’ than that of Crassus (Crass. 34(1).1). ‘Seem’ to whom? ‘To me’, or ‘to us’? The blurring is important in insinuating that of course narrator and narratee are people who think along similar lines.
Such ‘we’s create an impression of happy unanimity between narrator and narratee. There are fewer cases where instead of an inclusive ‘we’ there is a disjunction of ‘I’ and ‘you’, though there too the text usually suggests basic concord, or at least the likelihood of concord. One of those ‘you’s comes in the proem to Aemilius–Timoleon, which gives an interesting twist to the relation of narrator and narratee. Normally Plutarch presents himself as the model for his narratees, almost an ‘ideal’ narratee and moral respondent to the stories he tells. This time the movement goes the other way. He began his biographical project for others, he tells us, but continued it for his own sake, using history as a mirror for making up his own life on the model of those of the past (Aem. 1.1): so, instead of the narrator’s response cueing that of the narratee, the process here works the other way round. Soon there are ‘we’s that seem inclusive: ‘it is as if we were entertaining each of them in turn, welcoming them in the history and examining “how great he was and what sort of man”, and taking the most important and finest things we might see in their actions...’ (1.2). Then the ‘we’ becomes less certain: ‘we use our historical reading and our familiarity with its writing to mould our own life, welcoming always the recollection of the best and most glorious figures into our souls...’ (Aem. 1.5): is that ‘we’ narrator alone, or narratees too (as the plural ‘souls’ particularly suggests)? They too by now have ‘familiarity’ with his writings. Then the first person becomes more clearly the narrator, but that goes with a blurring of the narratee: ‘From such examples we have now taken for you the life of Timoleon of Corinth and of Aemilius Paullus...’ (1.6). Is that ‘you’ just ‘Sosius Senecio’? Or any reader? In any case, the two lives will generate a ‘debate, whether it was good fortune or good judgement which brought them their greatest successes’ (1.8), and it is a debate in which both narratee and narrator will participate.
So the debates are shared ones: there are times, too, when the text gestures towards the possibility that narrator and narratee might disagree. In the proem to Agis–Cleomenes, the text gives a summary interpretation of the Gracchi (2.7–8), and goes on ‘you will judge this for yourself from the narrative’, 2.9.26 It is up to ‘you’ to ‘judge for yourself’, and there is again an intimation that other narratives might be possible. It is at least conceivable that narratees might construct an alternative interpretation for themselves. But it is also not very probable: that summary interpretation had been given in confident indicatives, ‘they...did not realize that they were entering on a course where it was not possible to withdraw’. That mild encouragement to an independent verdict is then echoed in the pair’s conclusion: ‘you see for yourself the difference on the basis of the narrative. If it is necessary to set it out in detail, I say that Tiberius came first of them all in virtue, that young Agis made fewest mistakes, and that in action and daring Gaius was not far behind Cleomenes’ (Gracch. 45(5).7). It would not be in keeping with Plutarch’s narratorial persona to assume that so elaborate a judgement would be taken over in each particular by every narratee: hence the affectation of diffidence. Other verdicts show similar tentativeness: ‘perhaps it is time to consider whether we shall not be far off the truth, if we declare that Sulla got more things right but Lysander fewer things wrong, and give the one man the prize for self-control and restraint, the other for generalship and courage’ (Sulla 43(5).6); ‘consider whether, if we give the crown to the Greek for military skill and leadership and to the Roman for justice and generosity, we shall not seem to be doing too badly’ (Flam. 24(3).5).27 Yet, despite the diffidence, more important is the underlying assumption that this is the sort of judgement which narratees might eventually make, that they are at least playing the same comparative game. It is still that joint project of comparison which we saw earlier. And in all those cases – Agis–Cleomenes–Gracchi, Lysander–Sulla, Philopoemen–Flamininus – there is a further twist, for all make particular use of the idea of competition:28 the ‘crown’ for Philopoemen or Flamininus, the ‘first place’ for Lysander or Sulla, Tiberius ‘coming first’ and Gaius ‘not far behind’ Cleomenes. All those pairs have also made use of the idea of competition in their narratives. It was competitiveness that led to the rifts between Lysander and Agesilaus, then between Sulla and Marius; it was contention for glory which led Agis, Cleomenes, and the Gracchi astray; it was ambition for glory that drove Philopoemen and Flamininus too, and they eventually recognized it as a competition between themselves.29 In all these pairs the men are contestants, and the agonistic contests of the narrative prepare for the final synkritic competition. That is only resolved in the final words, and the judges are narrator and narratee.
The same lack of real discord is seen in those passages when an epilogue imagines an objection: ‘here someone might say that...’30 Those objections are sometimes rebutted, sometimes accepted, or at least accepted in a modified form. The implication is certainly that the narratee has been pondering the line of argument critically, and is capable of making independent steps in the argument; he or she is not wholly a follower. But the implication is still that both are conducting the investigation according to similar rules – perhaps, indeed, that the narratee has been led by Plutarch’s own example, in this and in earlier epilogues, to understand how this comparative exercise ought to be conducted. Sometimes it is the imagined interlocutor who makes the telling point: ‘yet here someone will draw a distinction between them’ (Alc. 41(2).8, cf. e.g. Gracch. 42(2).4). The effect is not very different from the rhetorical questions which often punctuate epilogues (often in close conjunction with an imaginary ‘someone-might-say’ objection): ‘or is this the first point which tells the other way?’ (Brut. 56(3).6, cf. e.g. Numa 25(3).4–5, 26(4).7, Crass. 37(4).3). Are these soliloquizing reflections of the narrator, or are they questions put to the narratee? By now the distinction does not matter: the assumption is that both are engaged, weighing issues and putting the same sorts of question. The dialogue can become more elaborate still: a reflective question about attitudes to wealth, ‘or is this the first point which could tell either way?’ (Cato Mai. 31(4).1), leads on to ‘I should like to put the point to Cato himself...’ (31(4).5).31 By now it is a three-way moral debate, with narrator, narratee, and subject all engaged.
Those engaged and sympathetic narratees – following the narrator most of the way, sharing his tastes and assumption, with an independence which remains within limits – may also be sensed when Plutarch apologizes for a digression: they are independent enough to need an apology, but are expected to be indulgent. ‘We do not think that this material is unsuited to our biography, nor that it will seem unhelpful to readers who are not in a hurry and not too busy,’ Tim. 15.11.32 Such narratees may also be felt in Plutarch’s moralism: as we saw in ch. 10, there is rarely a sense of telling them anything they might be reluctant to accept; he rather gives the impression of providing thought-provoking test-cases within an acknowledged framework of moral values. Learning as well as ethical taste is taken for granted, and such narratees will not be bewildered by comparisons with other historical events and characters.33 Sometimes those are great – ‘Agesilaus, Lysander, Nicias, and Alcibiades.. .Salamis, Plataea, Thermopylae, and Cimon’s successes at the Eurymedon and Cyprus’ (Flam. 11.5–6); sometimes more mixed, as with the ‘Fabii and Scipios and Metelli...or Sulla, Marius, and both Luculli’ (Caes. 15.2), where the lesser Lucullus brother might not be in the front of everyone’s mind. Literary culture is also assumed, enough to welcome the quotations and allusions which lace his narrative;34 enough, even, to catch allusions which the narrator does not label, confident that the narratee will be able to fill in the gap – ‘in that city of Sophocles’ (Ant. 24.3, referring to Oedipus Tyrannus 4–5), or ‘Greece that had “endured so very much” ’ (Ant. 62.1, quoting Euripides’ Heracles 1250, and the Herculean suggestions are important); and many others.35 The same goes for allusions to myths.36 At Theseus 28.3 the text has just mentioned Theseus’ marriage to Phaedra: ‘as for the misfortunes which concerned her and his son, there is no disagreement between the historians and the tragic poets, and so we must assume that it was as they have all made out’. The narrator clearly relies on the narratees to know what is meant: an important point is built on the Hippolytus story, again rather allusively, in the epilogue (Rom. 32(3).1–2).
There are moments, however, when less concordant narratees are envisaged, people whose approach is so at odds that they would be looking for, or even assuming they had found, one of those alternative and very different narratives. In Demosthenes–Cicero we noticed that a different sort of person is acknowledged, someone who might conduct the stylistic discrimination that Plutarch and his regular narratees would avoid.37 We also noted that these were not treated with the same inclusiveness: we may have to class them as ‘cross-grained narratees’, in that the text acknowledges their potential existence, but they are not proper narratees, not people entering into the spirit of the project, not the readers whom the writing is for. Dorrit Cohn has drawn a distinction between ‘consonant’ and ‘dissonant’ narrators;38 we may have to make a similar distinction among narratees. For elsewhere too such dissonant, cross-grained narratees are treated in a similarly unwelcoming way; they constitute a foil for the more appropriate response which more sympathetic narratees will develop.
It is interesting to see how they are described. At the beginning of Nicias, ‘it is time to request and call upon those who come across (τους έντυγχανοντας) these writings not to assume that I have suffered the same affliction as Timaeus’ (that is, the ambition to outdo Thucydides: Nic. 1.1). These are ‘those who come across these writings’, not even ‘my readers’ or ‘my listeners’: as in Demosthenes, they are not ‘proper’ narratees. The same phrase is used in the proem to Demetrius–Antony. The narrator there gives his reasons for including characters whose lives were less creditable, ‘not (for Heaven’s sake!) to give variation to my writing so as to give pleasure or diversion to those who come across it’ (τους έντυγχανοντας again, Demetr. 1.5): those who so misconstrue his purpose are again those who found his work by a chance encounter. The better approach is to realize that ‘we will become more enthusiastic in our contemplation and in our living of better lives, if we pay attention too to those who are bad and are censured’ (1.6). That is what ‘we’ do – and that ‘we’ gives a more regular embrace of the narratee as someone who reacts as the narrator himself does.
Or consider the famous passage which begins Alexander.39 ‘We shall ask our readers μή συκοφαντείν if we do not include everything or go into every detail of famous events, but abbreviate most of them. For it is not histories we are writing, but lives...’ (Alex. 1.1–2). There μή συκοφαντείν is usually translated as ‘not to complain’ (Perrin, Waterfield, Hamilton, Duff) or ‘not to regard this as a fault’ (Scott-Kilvert). There is more to it than that. The word always carries a notion of something disingenuous or disreputable: ‘criticize in a pettifogging way’, ‘quibble’ (LSJ I.2) is better, or ‘de ne pas nous chercher chicane’ (Chambry). Whether or not the complex suggestions of classical Athenian ‘sycophancy’ are felt, there is always a hint that the objector is not being sufficiently generous, or not saying what is really in the mind.40 Such complaints are some way from the engaged and sympathetic ‘someone might say.’ objections in the epilogues.
As we saw in ch. 7, Theseus–Romulus provides a more elaborate example where the narrator toys with a degree of narratee-independence. The proem indeed asks ‘our listeners to be indulgent and to accept ancient tales in an acquiescent mood’ (Thes. 1.5): that assumes the same sort of readerly independence as before, as if the indulgence cannot be taken for granted. The narratee would normally be critical of such unreliable material, and in ways which are not merely triggered by passages of explicit discussion in the text: thus Plutarch cannot simply avoid such criticism by refusing to question veracity himself. To ask for such discrimination among different types of material is to demand, and to assume, considerable sophistication in a narratee: in that sense there is flattery here. But it is also a sophistication which is close to Plutarch’s own, or at least to the sophistication which he temporarily affects for this pair. As in the epilogues, even the independent narratee is assumed to be conducting games which are not too distant from those played by Plutarch himself: for even if that narratee does decide that the mythical has not been made to look like history, he or she will be doing so by applying criteria similar to those which Plutarch has acknowledged he would apply elsewhere.
The same goes for the epilogue, where (if the argument of ch. 7 is right) the narratee is still not sure how serious, and how convincing, the whole exercise of ‘making myth look like history’ has been.41 Are these then narratees who are constructed as thinking differently from the narrator, who have been so perplexed by the clever moves and ironies that they are finally at a loss to work out what sort of text they have been reading? Not at all: for in the proem we also saw the diffidence with which Plutarch himself approached this singular project, uncertain whether it would come off. Now, at the end, we again have the effect of rumination, with narrator as uncertain about narrative status as narratee. Narrative is still slippery, especially in this pair, and both parties are assumed to know it. Even in uncertainty, even when the narrator has highlighted the possibility that the narratee may not be able to go with him the whole way, narrator and narratee are not so very different, and share the same sort of patience with the material and subtlety in the way they toy with it.
The same is true in those cases when the narrator reveals a moral response to his material which goes beyond those views that the narratee42 would naturally share. ‘For myself, I would not even sell a working ox because it was too old, never mind an elderly man’ (Cato Mai. 5.6). ‘I would not myself agree with Demaratus of Corinth, who said that a great pleasure had been denied those Greeks who had not seen Alexander sitting on Darius’ throne’ (Ages. 15.4). ‘The wisest judges put particular weight on Tigellinus’ impious and unspeakable cavortings with prostitutes. This, those wise persons thought, was the worst punishment of all, outweighing a multitude of deaths’ (Otho 2).43 The narratees might not go that far; some would not gibe at turning an honest drachma from an aged ox; some might even prefer the odd whorish cavorting to even a single death.44 But at least we are expected to find the authorial persona attractive rather than repellent, someone with whom we can engage and even identify, at least most of the way.
‘We are expected...’, ‘we can engage...’: those are phrases which the modern scholar uses unselfconsciously, and which have many parallels with the sort of inclusiveness for which I argued above.45 The same goes for the rhetorical questions: ‘are these then narratees who...?’: am I asking my own readers, or myself? The implications are similar too, a barely conscious attempt to insinuate the notion that reader and author are at one in a joint investigation. It is not that scholarly discourse has stayed the same: the manner is different from that, say, of nineteenth-century scholarship. It is rather that Plutarch, with his combination of learned disquisition with vitality, engagement, and genial characterization of self and audience,46 has much in common with the more informal style of much current scholarship, or at least with the scholarly persona which many of ‘us’ try to project.
Notes
1 Cf. p. 185.
2 For a close comparison of the scene with Herodotus see Frazier 1992, 4499–506: she particularly stresses Plutarch’s psychological focus on Croesus’ reactions and the contrast with Solon.
3 This is particularly striking in Theseus : cf. pp. 177–8.
4 For this sort of ‘I’ cf. Russell 1993, 428.
5 e.g. Sol. 21.7 and 25.1, with n. 26 below; Lyc. 31.4, Rom. 13.6 and about a dozen other instances in that Life, Popl. 10.7, 11.6, 15.3, 24(1).3, Arist. 1.3, Them. 22.3, Cim. 19.5, Alc. 21.3, Alex. 69.8, Phoc. 18.8, 22.2, Fab. 1.8, Flam. 16.5–7, Sulla 21.8. Cf. Frazier 1996, 38.
6 Frazier 1988b, 301–2, like Dover 1966, assumes that these ‘Megarians’ are written sources; in Pelling 2000, 272 n. 60 I give reasons for assuming that Plutarch is here conveying, and very likely constructing, what Megarians would still be saying.
7 Cf. on beginnings Stadter 1988, 292; on ends ch. 17, p. 367. See also Russell 1993, 431 on similar projections of a learned persona in the Moralia, sometimes extending to making a little fun of himself (e.g. Table Talk 675a or 731a–b): not the case, I think, in these cases in the Lives.
8 e.g. Dem. 1.1, Demetr. 1.1, Lucull. 44(1).8, Cato Mai. 32(5).3, Numa 24(2).10, Ages.–Pomp. 83(3).1–2 (‘it seems to me’, ‘I think’); Marc. 33(3).1–2, Crass. 36(3).2, Sulla 41(3).7 (‘I praise’ or ‘do not praise’); Sulla 39(1).5, Cato mai. 32(5).3 (‘I blame’ or ‘do not blame’); Sulla 41(3).7 (‘I infer’). Outside proems, e.g. Lucull. 36.6, Phoc. 4.1, Alex. 8.1, Gracch. 2.1, Per. 39.2, Solon 27.1, Marc. 21.3, 28.6: notice how many of these are close to the beginnings or ends of Lives, as the authorial persona gradually recedes or re-emerges.
9 Cf. below, pp. 288–91.
10 Jones 1970, 103 and 1971, 55; but the eastern origin is doubted by Halfmann 1979, 211 and Swain 1996, 426–7.
11 Thus Jones 1966, 70 = Scardigli 1995, 114.
12 Wardman 1974, 39: ‘Sosius is...the reader who already exemplifies by his life and achievement the kind of activity to which the Lives exhort us’.
13 Ziegler and Gärtner 1980, 200–3 give a list of Latin terms which Plutarch explains. For other instances where the audience seems Greek, cf. Wardman 1974, 39–40; Duff index s.v. ‘audience, constructed as Greek’, esp. 302 on the Parallel Lives. Stadter 1994 494 n. 4 objects that ‘Plutarch frequently explains Greek terms and institutions’ too, ‘especially those of Sparta and Athens. His practice is more a feature of his literary technique than an indication of a restricted audience.’ I agree that the practice does not give a firm guide to the real audience, but it does give a guide to the constructed audience, the narratees: where Greek institutions or terms are explained they tend to be distinctly more arcane, the sorts of thing where even a Greek might flounder.
14 For similar cases of a Greek viewpoint on Roman issues, cf. Swain 1996, 139–45.
15 For similar dedications of narrative works cf. Marincola 1997, 52–7, pointing out that they are less frequent in what he calls ‘Great historiography’ than in related, smaller-scale genres – autobiographies, memoirs, monographs, works with a strong panegyric element. Those genres are also more ‘personal’ than historiography in that the narrator too often emerges as more of a character, either as more ‘self-conscious’ about the writing process (as in Plutarch, or, say, in Sallust: for the term, Booth 1961, 155; de Jong 1987, 46) or as a figure in the narrative itself. The two points go together, with both narrator and narratee being in sharper focus.
16 Cf. p. 85 above, on the dedication of the Apophthegmata Regum et Imperatorum to Trajan. – Swain 1996, 144–5, argues ‘that Plutarch probably looked on.. .Senecio.. .as a man who needed encouragement towards attaining the peace of mind that comes from Greek philosophy’. Swain bases this particularly on the dedication to Sosius of Progress in Virtue. I should put this less in terms of Plutarch’s view of the man and more in terms of the rhetoric of the dedication, the suggestion that even a Sosius might be improved: but the basic point is similar.
17 Cf. Cato Mai. 7.3, on the comparison of Cato’s style with Lysias’: ‘This is a matter for those with a greater feeling for Latin style to decide, but we will include a few of his bons mots, for we think that human character appears more clearly from what people say than (as some think) from how they look.’ That intimates the narrator’s distance from the physiognomists as well as from the stylistic critics.
18 As I did myself in ch. 1, p. 2 and n. 10.
19 An exception now is Mossman 1999, who dwells particularly on the contrast of substance and style and its resonance in the later narratives. Rosenmeyer 1992, 221, does address the question, but reaches the opposite conclusion: ‘The arguments of the first two chapters.. .are largely unrelated to what follows’. Russell 1993, 428, has some good remarks on the self-characterization here: ‘this is both apology and self-recommendation.’
20 On the problems of narratorial self-praise cf. Marincola 1997, 175–82, and see above, p. 249.
21 Jones 1971, 20–1.
22 For similar blurrings of ‘we’ see pp. 272–3, 278.
23 See p. 276.
24 Cf. e.g. Dem. 22.5, the actors playing kings and tyrants ‘whom we see in the theatres crying and laughing not as they themselves wish, but as the plot demands’; Per. 8.9 (quoting Stesimbrotus), ‘we do not see the gods either, but we infer that they exist from the honours they receive and the goods which they give us’. Per. 39.2, ‘...just as we think it right that the gods, as responsible for good things but not for bad, should rule over and control all reality, not in the way that the poets terrify us...’; Cor. 32.6, Homer attributes everyday responses ‘to us’ but more irregular ones to the gods; Arist. 6.5, ‘our’ nature does not allow immortality. In the proems, e.g. Per. 1.4–5, ‘we often despise the craftsman but admire the work,’ etc, and 2.3; epilogues, cf. e.g. Ant. 90(3).4, ‘as we see in paintings’. Russell 1993, 427, observes that even an ‘I’ can often amount to ‘I, as a typical rational being...’.
25 For this complication cf. de Jong 1987, 36.
26 Cf. Solon 19.4–5, discussing whether there was an Areopagus before Solon. The text weighs various learned arguments and inclines towards the view that there was, though allowing that the crucial evidence could be taken another way: ‘well, then, consider this for yourself’ (ταυτα μεν ουν καί αυτός επισκοπεί). The addressee is taken as engaged and discriminating, one who might conceivably disagree but one who will accept that this is the way to approach the problem. The atmosphere of debate there continues into the next few chapters, with vigorous discussion of the rights and wrongs of several laws: notice the ‘someone might say...’ at 20.8, with n. 30 below; and the continuation of the principles into ‘our own laws’ at 21.7 and the preservation of the cylinders to ‘our own time’ at 25.1, with p. 269 above.
27 Cf. Duff 1999, 203–4 (Lysander–Sulla), 268–9 (Ag.–Cl.–Gracchi), and more generally 286 (though these are not all necessarily ‘court-room metaphors’, as he says at 286 n. 45). For some related points about the complicity of narrator and narratee in the epilogues see also p. 361.
28 Pelling 1997a, 329–31.
29 Esp. Lys. 2.3–4, 23.3 and 7, Sulla 4.6, 5.10, 13.1, 39(1).7, cf. Stadter 1992, Duff 1999, 179–80; Ag.–Cl. 2.8 (‘contesting’, αμιλλ?μενοι); Phil. 15.1–3, Flam. 13.1–4, and Pelling 1997a, 91, 220 n. 93.
30 e.g. Sol. 20.8 with n. 26 above; Marc. 32(2).2, Rom. 32(3).1, 2, 3, Numa 23(1).10, 26(4).13, Brut. 57(4).5. Ant. 90(3).2 (an imagined objection which ‘one could not make’), Tim. 40(1).3, Popl. 27(4).4. Such a τις-intrusion may not always be an objection, of course: ‘if one examined their battles’, Flam. 22(1).3; ‘one might particularly think Lucullus fortunate in the time of his death’, Lucull. 44(1).1; ‘one should not wholly excuse Lucullus for this’, 45(2).5; also e.g. Brut. 56(3).5, Mar. 1.4, Ant. 91(4).5, Cic. 54(5).1, Crass. 34(1).1, 38(5).1, Fab. 30(3). 6, Alc. 44(5).2, Cato Mai. 29(2).5, Ages. 15.3, Pomp. 84(4).4, Gracch. 42(2).4. Such concordant ‘someones’ reinforce the impression that the narratee is assumed usually to be in mental tune with the narrator. This has something in common with the Homeric ‘anonymous focalizers’ analysed by de Jong 1987, 57–60, who often cue and correspond to the response of primary narratees – though, as Irene de Jong kindly points out to me, those ‘anonymous focalizers’ are typically viewing the events of the story, whereas these Plutarchan imagined interlocutors are commenting on the implications of the story itself. As she points out, this links these imagined interlocutors even more closely with the narratee: the Homeric cases are of the type ‘here you [or ‘a person’] might see...’, yet narratees could of course not literally ‘see’ in this way, whereas Plutarch’s narratees could literally form a ‘view’ on the issue. For related phenomena in Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon see Hornblower 1995, 148–9: some of those ‘someones’ are rather less concordant, e.g. the viewer of Athens and Sparta at Thuc. 1.10 who will not believe in Sparta’s greatness, or the doubters of the constitutional debate at Hdt. 6.43.
31 For further discussion of this passage cf. pp. 163 n. 12, 200, 312, and Pelling 1989, 214–15.
32 Cf. also e.g. Per. 39, building to the Life’s elevated ending with an excursus on the moral goodness of the gods, suggesting that Pericles is indeed ‘Olympian’: ‘but these things will perhaps seem appropriate to a different type of enquiry’. The narratee has a feeling of appropriateness to context, but will also not mind too much (otherwise the emotional rhythm of the closure would be wrecked), and may not mind at all (‘perhaps’). Rom. 12.6 is similar but more elaborate. The text has just mentioned an attempt to fix Rome’s foundation date by reverse astrology, reading back from its future greatness: ‘these things, perhaps, will attract by their strange and far-fetched character rather than alienate those who come across them because of their air of myth’. But there the possibility of a more cross-grained reaction (‘alienate’) is more explicit: the formulation ‘those who come across them’ (τούς έντυγχάνοντας) fits this possibility of a grumpier response (below, p. 276).
33 On these cf. Duff 1999, 251–2.
34 They are usefully collected by Helmbold and O’Neil 1959.
35 e.g. the Homeric cases now collected by Alexiou 2000.
36 And also for an appreciation of some finer points of philosophy and mathematics: Wardman 1974, 41–2.
37 Above, p. 272.
38 Cohn 1978, 26–33, discussing the degree of ‘consonance’ a third-person narrator shows with the psychology of a central character. In this case the ‘consonance’ or ‘dissonance’ will be not with the psychology of any agent within the narrative, but with the self-presentation of the narrator himself. (I am again grateful to Irene de Jong here.)
39 Discussed from different viewpoints also at pp. 102–3, 207, 259–60, and in Pelling, forthcoming (a).
40 Perhaps non-coincidentally, the word recurs twice at the end of the narrative at Alex. 74.4–5, where the issue is whether those accusing Antipater are doing so falsely. At Numa 9.3 the lawgiver does not συκοφαντεί ν in the case of a genuine impediment in conducting sacrifices, that is ‘does not make unreasonable objections’. At Cato Min. 11.4 some critics έσυκοφαντούν at the expense of the funeral of Cato’s brother, failing uncharitably to realize the depth of his capacity for emotion. At Pomp. 2.10 Pompey έσυκοφαντείτο as neglecting public affairs because of his wives. The narrative will show there is some truth in this, but for the moment the critics are stigmatised as ungenerous: Pompey is ‘careful and guarded’ about his love-life, but ‘nonetheless was blamed by his enemies’. Naturally, Plutarch also uses the word in contexts of classical democracy: Sol. 24.2, Arist. 26.2, Per. 37.4, Alc. 13.6, 19.7, 34.7, Tim. 37.1, Phoc. 12.3 etc. It is never friendly or neutral. See more generally on the word’s range Harvey 1990, singling out the suggestions of monetary motivation, false charges, sophistical quibbling, slanderous attack, taking people to court, and raking up old scores; ‘sophistical quibbling’ is the nearest to the present use.
41 See p. 187.
42 Or perhaps we should here speak of ‘implied reader’, as in such cases the text does not construct a narratee explicitly: the response remains one of the narrator, a matter in Genette’s terms of ‘voice’ (Genette 1980, 212–62). But one cannot evade the assumption that this ‘voice’ will not grate on the narratee, and this time the ‘implied reader’ is not unsympathetic.
43 Cf. p. 238, and also the passage from Epicurus Makes a Pleasant Life Impossible which I quote there (1093c).
44 Contrast Booth 1961, 157: ‘From the author’s viewpoint, a successful reading of his book must eliminate all distance between the essential norms of his implied author and the norms of the postulated reader.’ Not ‘all distance’, if the argument here is correct: the remaining distance should not be large, but it may exist. The important point is that any disjunction of views should not be genuinely alienating, and those of the ‘implied author’ should be found attractive even if not irresistible.
45 Compare the response of a modern philosopher to friends who had questioned his use of the ‘ubiquitous “we” ’ (e.g. in phrases like ‘our ethical ideas’ or ‘what we think’). ‘It refers to people in a certain cultural situation, but who is in that situation? Obviously, it cannot mean everybody in the world, or everybody in the West. I hope it does not mean only people who already think as I do. The best I can say is that “we” operates not through a previously fixed designation, but through invitation. (The same is true, I believe, of “we” in much philosophy, and particularly in ethics.) It is not a matter of “I” telling “you” what I and others think, but of my asking you to consider to what extent you and I think some things and perhaps need to think others’ (B. Williams 1993, 171 n. 7). It is hard to better this description of the ‘invitational “we” ’, and it fits closely on to what I have been suggesting here for Plutarch.
46 And a degree of self-referentiality too: this final paragraph is sufficient testimony to that.