14

Childhood and personality in Greek biography

I

Everybody notices when a great man dies; it is more difficult to notice when one is born, or when one is growing up.¹ It is not surprising that ancient biographers often faced a dearth of reliable material on their subject’s childhood and youth; and, for writers of a certain sort of biography, the temptation to fill this gap with the telling, fictional anecdote was difficult to resist. This is clear in biographies of literary figures:

When Pindar was a boy, according to Chamaeleon and Ister, he went hunting near Mt Helicon and fell asleep from exhaustion. As he slept a bee landed on his mouth and built a honeycomb there. Others say that he had a dream in which his mouth was full of honey and wax, and that he then decided to write poetry.

(Life of Pindar 2, tr. Lefkowitz²)

Similar tales were told about Plato, Homer, Hesiod, Lucan, Ambrose, and others.³ Or stories could be less supernatural: stories, for instance, of Homer’s travels as a young man to Ithaca, or of his studying poetry with a schoolteacher named Phemius; or of Sophocles’ magnificent appearance in the chorus celebrating the victory of Salamis.⁴ Some philosophers were similarly embroidered, though they tended to become interesting when a little older, at the stage of adolescence when they were ripe for conversion. Epicurus, for instance, turned to philosophy in disgust at a schoolmaster who could not explain the meaning of ‘chaos’ in Hesiod; Metrocles was so embarrassed when he farted during a declamation that he tried to starve himself to death, until Crates visited him and won him over by dropping a casual fart himself. (He had thoughtfully prepared himself by eating some lupins.⁵) Admittedly, even literary figures do not always get this sort of elaboration: it is remarkable how little is told about the early years of Socrates, for example, given his central importance for the development of biography. But there are still a fair number of such stories to be found.

It is unclear how many of these stories were made up by the biographers themselves, and how many figured in the tradition – often oral – which the biographers were using. Either way, it is remarkable how little of this anecdotal elaboration one gets when biography treated ‘political’ figures.⁶ Of course, literary biographies are peculiarly susceptible to such embroidery, where influences and inspiration can be engagingly rephrased in anecdotal terms. Still, it was ‘political biography’ that more often favoured the ‘cradle-to-grave’ form, in which awkward childhood gaps would be more visible; and more was usually known of the adult lives of political personalities, including their private lives, and there were correspondingly more qualities which one could, if one wished, retroject into childhood. We do occasionally find something of the kind: Alexander hears of Philip’s successes, and says in vexation to his friends that ‘my father will leave nothing for me to do’; Cato is held out of a window by a playful Poppaedius Silo, but still will not ask his father to support the citizenship proposals.⁷ And many stories were told of the young Alcibiades, for instance the tale of a wrestling-match when he bit his opponent’s arm. ‘Alcibiades, you’re biting like a girl’, said the indignant opponent; ‘No,’ said Alcibiades, ‘like a lion.’⁸ Indeed, it seems that material on childhood featured quite prominently in that fifth-century precursor of political biography, Stesimbrotus of Thasos: he evidently had a considerable amount to say about the youth and education of Themistocles, Cimon, and probably Pericles, not without a tinge of malice.⁹ That was in keeping with the tradition of invective, which often concentrated on childhood and family background: we can indeed see that the childhood of all three of those fifth-century figures was already the subject of partisan controversy.¹⁰ But it seems that Stesimbrotus’ lead was rarely taken up, and later writers and audiences found the childhood of political figures much less interesting – particularly outside Athens, away from the democratic tradition of vigorous invective.¹¹

Plutarch is a very useful guide here, for we can tell that he was very interested in youth and education. When he has the material, he does make a great deal of it – in Alexander, for example, or Demosthenes, or Philopoemen, or Cato Minor :¹² clearly, there were no generic rules to outlaw such material; but remarkably often he obviously has none. He has no childish squabbles of Romulus and Remus, usefully though they might have prepared the fratricide; no schoolboy infatuations of Antony with any schoolgirl Cleopatra; nothing on Camillus or Flamininus to match the material about their pairs Themistocles and Philopoemen. And it is not simply his Roman biographies – nothing on Nicias (how he was frightened by an eclipse in his youth, perhaps? It is the type of story one might expect to be made up); no stories of the young Agesilaus bending truth and justice to help a good-looking friend; nothing, or hardly anything, on Pelopidas or Lycurgus or Lysander or Timoleon or Eumenes or Phocion.¹³ Plutarch himself does not fabricate to fill the gaps; but this is also revealing about his sources, for it is not likely that Plutarch is suppressing anything here, nor that there was a mass of material that escaped his notice: he was too well informed for that. This sort of anecdotal tradition simply did not exist for him to know.

Nor, indeed, did it really exist in Roman biography. Why don’t we find stories of Augustus hearing of Caesar’s conquests in Gaul, and dreaming of similar glory for himself ? And one could do so much with stories of Caligula’s youth – how he got on with his sister Drusilla in the nursery, for example. (Suet. Cal. 24.1 has a story of their being discovered in bed together by their grandmother Antonia, but by then they were in their late teens.) Why not a few colourful stories about the most colourful emperors, Elagabalus or Gallienus? But what we mostly find is generalizations about youthful promise or excess; or a routine collection of omens, portents, or prophecies of greatness. The emperor whose youth is treated most extensively in the Scriptores Historiae Augustae is Marcus Aurelius: that Life gives quite a full treatment of the various instructors and the honours he paid them, and tells for instance of his early penchant for sleeping on the ground and wearing a rough cloak.¹⁴ It seems to be the affinity with literary biography, and Marcus Aurelius’ status as an intellectual as well as an emperor, which makes the difference. We also have something on Commodus’ youth, where the point is rather the converse – Marcus did all he could to educate him, and it did no good at all; and on the Gordians, where the size of the library features heavily.¹⁵ It was intellectual figures, or at least figures where the intellectual register was appropriate, which stimulated this interest: political figures usually did not.

This is the more remarkable because neighbouring genres elaborated politicians’ childhoods in precisely the ways which biography did not. Among the closest genres to biography were, first, encomium and its inverse counterpart invective, and secondly, the biographical novel on the model of Xenophon’s Cyropaedia.¹⁶ These genres treated public men more often than literary figures,¹⁷ and they certainly encouraged attention to childhood, describing it in very predictable, and often fictional, ways. In the Cyropaedia Xenophon lays great emphasis on Cyrus’ youth, and it is full of elaboration: 1.3 is especially telling, the sequence of precocious (and utterly infuriating) remarks he made when first brought to Astyages’ court. Invective again favoured tales about its victim’s youth, this time of course scurrilous ones:¹⁸ Aeschines helped his father in the schoolroom and his mother in her initiation rites (Dem. 18.258–9, 19.199), Demosthenes was called ‘Batalos’ because of his lewd habits (Aesch. 2.99), Alcibiades once ran off with one of his lovers (Antiphon fr. 66), Cicero handled filthy clothes in the family laundry (Dio 46.5.1). Encomium tended not to develop such specific material, and hence was less anecdotal,¹⁹ but it equally dwelt on its subject’s youth. We can already see this in Isocrates’ conventionalized picture in Evagoras,²⁰ and Polybius’ later encomium of Philopoemen ‘explained who his family were and described his training when young…setting out clearly the character of his education’: that work has evidently left its mark on Plutarch’s Philopoemen.²¹Encomium, invective, and the biographical novel were familiar genres in the Hellenistic age. There were various works on Alexander and his successors, for instance, which seem to have been modelled on Xenophon’s Cyropaedia (though it is true that we know very little about them):²² in particular, perhaps, Onesicritus’ work How Alexander was Brought up, which Diogenes Laertius specifically connects with the Cyropaedia.²³ That work’s extravagant qualities are clear; less is known of Marsyas of Pella who wrote On the Education of Alexander, or of Lysimachus’ Paideia of Attalus.²⁴ Such works presumably did not confine their interest to childhood: like Xenophon, Onesicritus carried the story some way past his subject’s youth, and the emphasis on paideia embraced ‘culture’ as well as ‘education’. It was he, for instance, who told the story of Alexander keeping the Iliad by his bedside, and the exchanges with the Gymnosophistae.²⁵ But childhood was surely central to the theme, and it is no surprise that some romantic material has filtered into the early chapters of Plutarch’s Alexander.²⁶

Yet such Lives as Alexander and Philopoemen remain exceptional. With encomium, invective, and the biographical novel all developing this interest in childhood, we might have expected to find similar material with other figures too; but on the whole we do not. Even with such men as Demetrius and Pyrrhus, figures who might well have inspired such encomia or novels, Plutarch’s early chapters do not really suggest that he knows this type of material. He dwells on Pyrrhus’ unprepossessing appearance, for instance, and an early military failure of Demetrius (Pyrrh. 3.6. Demetr. 5), not very tactful themes for the encomiast or novelist. And there remain those other figures who seem clearly to have remained unembroidered – Nicias, Lysander, Agesilaus, Timoleon, Phocion, Eumenes. This is not the place to enter the controversial debate on any ‘political biography’ in the Hellenistic age;²⁷ perhaps Lives of Nicias or Eumenes were being written, but their authors eschewed such fictional childhood material; more likely, such biographies were not really being written at all, and even the novelistic and encomiastic traditions were not so rich or extensive as we might have expected.²⁸ Either way, the interest in politicians’ childhoods remained stunted; and Plutarch, when he came to write genuine political biography, chose to do it in a style which, in this as in other ways, contrasted with those neighbouring genres.

Why should there be this difference in treatment between cultural and political figures?

First, there genuinely seems a difference in the attitude to truthfulness, as we saw in ch. 6. In political biography no tradition of systematic mendacity seems to have developed. That point is fundamental, and there is no need to labour it again here; but it remains a point about political biography, the narrative genre, and that takes us only so far. If audiences had been interested in politicians’ childhoods, the stories would still have been made up, and, as we have seen, there were other genres to transmit the gossip; anecdotes could readily have survived in oral tradition too. On the whole, that did not happen. That illuminates the taste of the public as well as of the biographers, and that public taste invites discussion.

A second explanation goes deeper. It is striking that interest in childhood was almost confined to interest in education; given that limitation, then of course the most intellectual figures were likely to be the most embellished. Even Plutarch helps to illustrate this: so much of the material he does have focuses on the teachers of Pericles or Themistocles or Philopoemen, for instance, or Alcibiades’ relations with Socrates, or Cicero’s or Lucullus’ early intellectual prowess;²⁹ and focuses on those themes in a fairly unimaginative way, as we shall see. Youthful behaviour, the development or prefiguring of later traits, features largely in modern biography, and can be telling with unintellectual figures too – even politicians. In the ancient world this receives much less anecdotal embellishment. It is not wholly neglected – there are the stories of Cato or Alcibiades, for instance – but on the whole such points tend to emerge in a much less colourful way, with vague generalizations about early promise or early concern for justice or glory.

One further reason for modern biographers’ interest in childhood is the element of social mobility in modern society.³⁰ It is fascinating to muse on one Prime Minister (Mrs Thatcher) being a grocer’s daughter, or another (Harold Wilson) being photographed on the steps of No. 10 as a lad, or another (Tony Blair) wanting to be a rock-and-roll star; or on a pop musician being just an ordinary boy in Form 3B, getting into all the usual scrapes and not getting very good marks. The ordinariness gives the reader a strange frisson of intimacy: such paradoxical success could have happened to people like ourselves. In the ancient world ordinary people did not on the whole become politicians, but they did sometimes become literary figures. And – a related point – ancient politicians did not feel the same need as their modern counterparts to play on the public’s interest in their youth, and conspire in creating a sort of mythology of their own childhood. A striking example of that is Churchill’s famous description of his first Latin lesson.³¹ He cared about portraying himself as an early dullard, knowing that his audience would love it. Ancient political audiences were not so bothered about such things, and the politicians were less concerned to create this feeling of intimacy. They had no use for such myths.

This has brought us on to self-portrayal, and indeed in ancient autobiography we can see a similar, but more elaborate, contrast.³² Egyptian and Near Eastern dynasts might talk about their childhoods, sometimes in a very individual way. Thus the Egyptian Amen-hotep II (c. 1447–1421 Bc)wrote proudly of his youthful horsemanship, how he trained the best steeds of Memphis, how he was charmed by his visits to the pyramids; and the Assyrian Assurbanipal (668–626 Bc) described his schooldays with enthusiasm – the difficulties of learning division or multiplication, or the way he was made stupid, even perhaps ‘addled’ (the reading is admittedly uncertain), by the beautiful script of Sumer or the obscure Akkadian.³³ Greek and Roman politicians were more reticent.³⁴ It is notable, for instance, that Plutarch knew little of Aratus’ youth and virtually nothing of Sulla’s, though he probably knew both men’s autobiographies. ‘Annos undeuiginti natus…’ (‘When I was nineteen…’), begins the Res Gestae; and though Augustus certainly said more of his youth in his Autobiography than he did in the other work – he did discuss his family, and seems to have mentioned Cicero’s dream that he would one day be Rome’s salvation – he was still well into the complicated history of 44 by Book 2.³⁵ Political autobiography does seem to have been largely res gestae, the record of a man’s achievements, with all the limitations that suggests. That was the way politicians wished to be remembered.

Literary self-portrayal came to strike a different note. At first the tone is similar enough: Plato’s Seventh Letter begins with events when Plato was in his twenties.³⁶ Isocrates’ Antidosis has a great deal to say about the value of his form of paideia, defending his role as a moulder of the minds of the young, but of his own youthful development he says not a word. Such works are still distinctively apologies, defences of a man’s career: childhood material would not have sat very comfortably here (just as both Aeschines and Demosthenes attack each other’s childhood with specific charges, but defend their own with brief, dignified generalizations).³⁷ By the Augustan period Nicolaus of Damascus was fuller, including the admiration of his contemporaries for his remarkable educational prowess (FGrH 90 fr. 131.1) – not that there is much individuality in such conventional self-praise: it is indeed very similar to Nicolaus’ account of Augustus’ childhood in the Life of Caesar, or to Josephus’ portrayal of himself in his Autobiography.³⁸ But Nicolaus adds some anecdotes about his various early wise remarks, and those are a little more distinctive: about Aristotle and the Muses, for instance, or about ‘education being like a journey through life’ (fr. 132.2–3). In later authors the individual note becomes more marked. Lucian, with whatever degree of seriousness, tells of his early skill at wax-modelling, and how it let him down when he was apprenticed as a sculptor.³⁹ Galen goes further, not merely representing himself as a singular figure but also introducing an element of analysis and explanation: he talks of his luck in being educated by a father who was skilled in communicating mathematics and grammar, then at fifteen led him to philosophy, then allowed him at seventeen to switch his talents to medicine when warned to do so by a dream; and he sets out to analyse what exactly he learnt from philosophy, and comment on the value of that early mathematical training in saving him from Pyrrhonian scepticism.⁴⁰

Galen’s analysis recalls Horace’s tribute to his father (Satires 1.6.67–92), and that is one of several ‘autobiographical’ Latin poems (if that is quite the right word) which leave very personal pictures of schooldays. Just as Horace strikingly recalls the school where the sons of centurions swung their satchels (Satires 1.6.72–3), so Ovid tells how he tried to write prose, and the words naturally fell into verse (Tristia 4.10.23–6). Once again, Marcus Aurellus seems to fill a special position, and his ‘autobiography’ – if, once again, that is the right term for his To Himself, είς έαυτόν – finely describes those early days and early influences, as he analyses precisely what he owes to his great-grandfather, grandfather, parents, and various tutors, and finally to the gods:

Thanks to Diognetus I learnt not to be absorbed in trivial pursuits; to be sceptical of wizards and wonder-workers with their tales of spells, exorcisms, and the like; to eschew cockfighting and other such distractions… It was the critic Alexander who put me on my guard against unnecessary fault-finding… Alexander the Platonist cautioned me against frequent use of the words ‘I am too busy’ in speech or correspondence… To the gods I owe it that the responsibility of my grandfather’s mistress for my upbringing was brought to an early end, and my innocence preserved.

(To Himself 1.6, 10, 12, 17, tr. Staniforth)

Marcus really analyses the formation and development of his character. That is some way from a Josephus or even a Nicolaus;⁴¹ this is an individuality which probes the mind, analyses the ways it is different (not merely superior), and seeks to explain the differences. One begins to feel some intimacy with someone who writes like this, just as one later comes to know St Augustine, with his pictures of the miseries of his schooldays, or his reading Virgil and weeping for the woes of Dido, or his robbing a pear-tree, or the profound effect when he read Cicero’s Hortensius, or his engaging habit of setting on passers-by and turning them on to their heads.⁴² But such self-revelation and self-analysis is developing a tendency which is already visible in Marcus, even in Lucian and Galen, and indeed in Horace and Ovid too – and of course in the poets’ case in a way which goes far beyond the explicitly autobiographical poems. There is no hint that politicians’ autobiographies were anything like so personal or so intimate, and childish stories and influences would have sat far less well with their dignity, their gravitas. And this note of intimacy gives an important contrast with politicians’ biographies, not just autobiographies. This intimacy of psychological portrayal, this revelation or analysis of the ‘real person’, is not something which became part of the generic tradition, any more than it became conventional to invent a fund of early anecdotes.

II

So far we have been exploiting Plutarch for what he can tell us about the biographical tradition; if he did not include childhood material, we have been provisionally assuming that the stories did not exist for him to know. That assumption is a fair one, but only because Plutarch was both extremely well informed, particularly about Greek heroes, and extremely interested in childhood and education.⁴³ We can indeed often see him making the most of whatever slight information he does know – in the Sulla, for instance, where he strains to extract large inferences from two insubstantial anecdotes; or in the Gracchi, where (despite an extreme paucity of material) he puts great stress on the influence of the mother Cornelia, emphasizing that the paideia she gave the boys was even more influential than their inherited nature in forming their characters (1.7); or in Lysander and Agesilaus, where again he has little information, but tries hard to relate both men’s personalities to their Spartan training. The precise qualities thus explained are admittedly very different: it is Lysander’s ‘ambition and contentiousness’ (2.4), but Agesilaus’ ‘common touch and kindliness of manner’ (1.5);⁴⁴ but at least Plutarch’s interest in the subject is clear and insistent.

That prompts further questions about his technique. These examples already suggest that he was concerned to explain character-development; elsewhere he stresses that such development is normal with all individuals.⁴⁵ But how effectively does he trace that development? What sorts of points does he try to extract from childhood? Does he even try to investigate the ‘real person’, in the way that Augustine and Marcus Aurelius and even Horace reveal themselves and analyse their debts to others? Evidently, we shall find some differences; and here it may be interesting to explore the distinction Christopher Gill developed between ‘character’ and ‘personality’, in particular his suggestion that Plutarch’s approach is typified by an interest in ‘character’ whereas modern writers more usually adopt the viewpoint of ‘personality’.⁴⁶ Childhood is a promising area to test that distinction, for modern biographers so typically exploit childhood influences and experiences in explaining their subject’s personality; and they are characteristically both individuating their subject, isolating the ways in which he or she is different from other people, and trying to understand and explain those differences. That certainly fits Gill’s ‘personality-viewpoint’; in what ways is Plutarch’s approach different?

The most usual sort of item we find is what one could call ‘the routine generalization’.

Romulus seemed to be more intelligent and politically shrewd than Remus; in his encounters with his neighbours in the countryside he showed that he was more a leader than a follower…

(Rom. 6.3)⁴⁷

Aemilius was rather different from many of his contemporaries: he had no time for judicial oratory, and the greatest distaste for demagogic techniques; it was not that he could not do such things, but he preferred to seek a reputation for bravery, justice, and good faith, in which he immediately outshone everyone.

(Aem. 2.5–6)

Timoleon was patriotic and unusually gentle – except that he nourished a peculiarly intense hatred for tyranny and for evil people. In his military campaigns he showed such a finely balanced character that he displayed great understanding as a young man and great bravery in his old age.

(Tim. 3.4–5)

Cleomenes was ambitious, large-spirited, and no less well-endowed than Agis for living a disciplined and simple life. But he lacked Agis’ extraordinary caution and mildness: by nature his spirit was easily goaded, and he was inspired to pursue his ideals with peculiar ferocity. He thought it best to dominate people if they were willing, but honourable even if they were not, and even if he had to force them in the proper direction.

(Ag.–Cl. 22.4–5)

Cyrus had from his early youth a sort of vehemence and extreme intensity, whereas the other one [Artaxerxes] seemed gentler in everything and naturally less violent in his impulses.

(Artax. 2.1)

This sort of thing is not limited to Plutarch, incidentally – the beginning of Suetonius’ Titus is very similar; and such generalizations are indeed so routine that we can surely sense the biographer’s own hand. He is simply retrojecting aspects of the men’s later careers, and inferring what sort of boy the man must have been. And in these cases at least, the biographer is not fabricating, even if no such material stood in his sources. He is simply inferring what must have been true: this is ‘creative reconstruction’, not fiction.⁴⁸

Sometimes the reconstruction is more elaborate. It may make negative points: Marcellus was basically a soldier, but he ‘had enough enthusiasm for Greek paideia and literature to make him respect and admire those who excelled in them, though he himself had never had the leisure to study or learn these subjects as much as he would have wished’ (Marc. 1.3). Once again, that is surely no more than an inference from Marcellus’ later career: this was the man who enthusiastically carried off the Greek treasures from Syracuse, but had to devote most of his life to Rome’s perpetual wars (1.4–5); and he also showed some of the weaknesses which Plutarch associates with the uneducated soldier, in particular a lack of self-control.⁴⁹ Or the reconstruction may be fairly circumstantial, even though it is not anecdotal. Agis had been brought up in luxury by his mother and grandmother, but even before he was twenty ‘he tore off all the bodily decoration and adornment that suited his beauty, and stripped himself of all extravagance and escaped from it, priding himself on the rough cloak, and went on in search of the Spartan food, baths, and way of life’ (Ag.–Cl. 4.1–2). Plutarch knew of the famous ladies (cf. 7.2–4, 19–20) and of the prominence of female wealth in this degenerate Sparta (6.7, 7.5–7);⁵⁰ it was clear that Agis did pride himself on his rough Spartan cloak (14.3–4); at some time he must have abandoned foppery for asceticism; and it would surely have been in adolescence. Further circumstantial reconstruction is found in Coriolanus, where we hear of the envy of his youthful rivals, ‘so that they excused their inferiority by attributing it all to his physical strength’ (2.2). Similar envy emerges later in the Life, and it seems that this again is part of an extensive retrojection.⁵¹

Coriolanus is indeed interesting here. There are other occasions when Plutarch dwells on his heroes’ relationships with their mothers – in the Lives of Agis and the Gracchi, as we have seen, and also Sertorius and Demosthenes. One does not want to make Plutarch into a mantic pre-Freudian, and his treatment does not normally go very deep; but the perspective of Coriolanus is more enterprising.

Others do this in search of fame and glory; Marcius’ aim was his mother’s approval. Nothing could make him feel more honoured or happier than for her to hear him being praised, or see him being crowned, or to embrace him in tears of delight… Marcius felt he owed his mother the joy and gratitude which would normally fall to a father as well, and could never be satisfied with giving Volumnia pleasure or paying her honour. He even chose his wife according to his mother’s wishes and request, and he continued to live in the same house with her even after his wife had borne their children.

(Cor. 4.5–7)

This is one case where we can be sure what Plutarch was doing to his sources, for it is clear that he is dependent on Dionysius of Halicarnassus here;⁵² and it is interesting how little Dionysius offers to support Plutarch’s recasting. From Dionysius he knew the famous scene where his wife and mother, together in the same house, were persuaded to set off to urge Coriolanus to give up his campaign against Rome (AR 8.40.1, etc.): thus Plutarch knew that ‘they continued to live in the same house even after marriage’. But the psychological recasting, ‘he even chose his wife according to his mother’s wishes and request’, seems to be his own inference. Coriolanus was that sort of man, his wife and mother were evidently close – of course the mother must have approved, and of course her approval must have been the decisive factor. From a speech of Dionysius Plutarch also knew that Coriolanus was an orphan. But that speech reads very differently (8.51.4): ‘when have I ever been free of grief or fear from you, from the moment you reached manhood? When have I ever been able to rejoice, seeing you fighting war upon war, battle upon battle, gaining wound upon wound?’ That really is very limp, and it is hardly Plutarch’s (or Shakespeare’s) Volumnia: Plutarch’s Volumnia weeps with joy at Coriolanus’ martial successes.

In chapter 6 (pp. 152–6) I discussed what Plutarch thought he was doing when he rewrote his source-material like this, and again argued that it was creative reconstruction: he was working out what sort of background and experience must have built the strangely impressive but dysfunctional figure whom he knew. If that is right, we might not regard it as a particularly unrespectable or uninteresting thing to be doing. Erikson’s influential biography of Martin Luther, for instance, is not playing wholly different games: he is reconstructing Luther’s early relationship with his father rather than his mother, and admits frankly that his method is to start from later events and read back what the childhood relationship ‘must have been’ like.⁵³ It is vastly more elaborate than in Plutarch, with its extensive Freudian psychoanalytic apparatus: but not, perhaps, conspicuously more convincing.

Such an analysis leads us back to Gill’s distinction of ‘character’ and ‘personality’. In this case it is surely hard to deny Plutarch a considerable interest in ‘personality’: is Plutarch not really trying to get inside Coriolanus’ skin, to work out why he acted in a way which was so distinctive, and to relate it to what was individual in his personal background? It indeed demonstrates Plutarch’s capacity to draw an exemplary moral from a very individual case, for at Cor. 4.1 he has already distinguished an easily quenched and a more stable form of ambition; these are evidently types which will recur in others, but the genesis within Coriolanus of this type of firm, stable ambition is related not merely to his nature but also to his individual circumstances and motives. Alcibiades, too, develops an intensely individual figure.⁵⁴ It is true that Plutarch initially describes Alcibiades’ character in a disappointing way, as embodying ‘the desire for honour and to be first in the state’ (2.1) – as Russell says, ‘one of the commonest passions in Plutarch’s repertoire’.⁵⁵ So far that suits ‘character’, subsuming to an exemplary class and inviting ethical judgement rather than identifying what is individual and different. But ancient authors often begin by stating a truth in a very general way, then gradually correct and complement and redefine, so that we are finally left with a subtler picture. And as Alcibiades progresses the man becomes much more singular: no one else could behave with this charming outrageousness, or with such versatility and flair. Here we clearly have the individuation which one associates with a ‘personality’; as we also do in, say, Lysander, where the man gradually emerges as an extremely unspartan figure, running counter to normal expectations in several interesting ways.⁵⁶

Whether in these cases we quite have the psychological understanding is a different point; we shall return to that. But there are other portraits where the psychological register is surely present. Consider for instance Theseus. The impact on Theseus of Heracles, whose heroics were so recent, is immediately made a psychological point. Theseus was related to Heracles, and this, he felt, put a special burden on him; Heracles’ successes would not let him sleep; the desire for such glory ‘inflamed’ him; he learnt from Heracles how to make a punishment fit the crime or the criminal… (6.8, 8.2, 11.2).⁵⁷ If one compares earlier treatments of this relationship, Isocrates for instance only talks of Theseus doing things ‘that were fitting to their kinship’;⁵⁸ it seems to be Plutarch who moves into the psychological register, and helps us to understand Theseus’ own view of his debt. Similarly in Cleomenes : it is Plutarch who reconstructs the effect on the young Cleomenes of marrying Agis’ widow. ‘He would ask her often about what happened, and listen carefully as she told of Agis’ plans and purposes…’ (Ag.–Cl. 22(1).3). In Cleomenes’ case that was combined with the influence of the shrewd philosopher Sphaerus (23(2).3–6). As with Theseus and Coriolanus, we have a very individual set of circumstances and influences, and an analysis of the external pressures on the men: all this fits Gill’s category of ‘personality’, with the individuation, the psychology, the concern to understand. Exemplary morals can doubtless also be drawn, but we have already noticed Plutarch’s capacity to use individual cases to point general ethical truths.

Yet Gill does of course have a case, and we may still feel that Plutarch’s analysis does not go very deep, that it takes disappointingly little empathy to understand a Theseus or a Cleomenes. The men’s youthful circumstances may be singular; the men themselves, less so. Take another aspect of Theseus. Plutarch knew something about Theseus’ early erotic adventures: he mentions one at 29.1, his rape of a girl called Anaxo when he was still at Troezen, and adds that he tended to rape all the daughters of the monstrous figures he killed. Theseus’ taste for women will become an important theme later in the Life, and will in fact be the climactic point in the epilogue comparing him with his pair Romulus. Theseus carried off Helen too when she was just a girl, he had this disturbing tendency to get involved with Amazons, and so on. Had Plutarch wanted to sketch in as much as possible of Theseus’ personality at the outset, he would certainly have found room for those early rapes; that is what modern political biographers would do, if they happened to find themselves writing a Life of Theseus. Plutarch preferred to hold it back: he thought it artistically superior to begin by dwelling on Theseus as a great hero, then gradually introduce the various darkening shades to fill out and qualify the picture.⁵⁹ Again, it is the technique of gradual redefinition, which means that ancient writers often hold back important information till later than a modern would expect.⁶⁰ Here Plutarch wants to collect all the shady affairs together towards the end of the Life to prepare the path for the final downfall.

We can see something similar in Cato Maior. When Plutarch first introduces Cato’s proud hostility to Greek culture, he does so in rather appreciative tones. It is only later, after he has established the grander and more impressive aspects of Cato’s personality, that he will revert to this, and begin to trace how this attitude had weaknesses as well as strengths, and in important respects Cato was diminished by such antihellenism.⁶¹ All that is certainly still an interest in personality: these are individual figures, and one comes to comprehend them fairly well. But it means that, in the early chapters, Plutarch is not pulling out all the stops all the time to help us to understand people. That is not his only concern, and other literary considerations may carry more weight.

That said, one often feels that Plutarch is simply not doing as much as he can to understand people anyway – it is not just a question of holding things back, but of not doing it at all. Indeed, we are now close to the real paradox of his technique. For all his stress on education and character-development, Plutarch’s own presentation of the childhood of particular heroes is often extraordinarily banal: so banal, indeed, that distinguished critics can claim that he gives no idea of development at all ⁶² – an overstatement, but an understandable one. Antony, for instance, is one of the Lives which generates a real interest in psychology, as Antony’s mental torment becomes so clear. Given his make-up – that blend of susceptibility, simplicity, bluffness, and nobility – we can certainly understand why he was so peculiarly vulnerable to Cleopatra, and then so agonized and torn. It is once again an individual portrait, a ‘personality’. But Plutarch makes no real attempt to explain why Antony came to have that particular make-up: that is precisely what a modern biographer would regard as the first priority.

Influences are indeed a major preoccupation of a modern biographer; Plutarch too is interested, as we saw when he related traits of Lysander and Agesilaus to the Spartan educational system. But the way he introduces the point in Lysander is eloquent. ‘His ambition and contentiousness were derived from his Spartan education, and we should not greatly blame his nature for this’ (2.4).⁶³ The point, it seems, is not introduced primarily to explain: the explanatory force is a means to an end, to guide our moral judgement and dissuade us from too hasty a condemnation. Similarly, in Marcellus it is important to know that Rome was so beset by wars, but mainly so that we should not be too harsh on Marcellus for neglecting his literary education. Explanation is again at the service of ethical assessment. The treatment of family, too, is uneven. Sometimes the analysis of family background can genuinely illuminate hereditary traits (Antony, Brutus) or important aspects of youthful environment (Gracchi, Cleomenes, Coriolanus); but just as often the treatment of lineage is simply casual and curious, as in Fabius, Pyrrhus, Phocion, or Aemilius.

Nor is the quest for understanding pursued insistently elsewhere. We saw this in the last chapter, where we toyed with some of the psychological reconstructions Plutarch might have made, had he so chosen (pp. 284, 294–5): what Lysander would have felt when he first saw foreign luxury, how the country boys Marius or the elder Cato would have felt when they first met those smooth men of the city. How, too, must Demosthenes have reacted when his mother denied him the chance to study (4.4)? What must Pompey have felt to have such a harsh and unpopular father (Pomp. 1)? Did that affect his own quest for popularity (esp. Pomp. 57), or even for love (Pomp. 2, 53, 74–5)? Plutarch could make that sort of psychological reconstruction – we have seen that from Theseus, Coriolanus, and Cleomenes – but, usually, that was not his way.

Even the crucial aspect of education is presented rather than explored. Only very rarely does Plutarch analyse precisely what a figure has derived from his particular tutors or particular philosophical school. When Cicero himself talks of his philosophical education, he can explain how he acquired some useful dialectical skills from the Stoic Diodotus (Cic. Brut. 309): when Plutarch treats Cicero’s early Life, he is interested not in what Cicero got from philosophy, but in introducing the idea of a choice between two lives, the life of learning and the life of achievement, between which Cicero had to choose.⁶⁴ Brutus is presented as the philosopher in action; but there is little interest in isolating what he learnt from being an Academic rather than any other sort of philosopher, and the Platonism adds little more than some extra point to the linking with Dion.⁶⁵ It is in fact most typically when education is deficient – in Coriolanus, for instance, or Marius, or even Marcellus – that the point really helps us to understand their personalities, for it then helps to explain their distinctive flaws.⁶⁶

Pericles is particularly interesting here, for this is one of the few cases where Plutarch does try to discriminate what his hero learnt from his tutors. Anaxagoras specifically taught him to be above superstition, for instance (6), and how to include impressive natural philosophy in his rhetoric (8.1). Still, even here all his educators tend to be telling him the same things, in particular guiding him towards a specific political style: Anaxagoras gave him ‘a majesty and mental spirit (ϕρóνημα) that was too weighty for demagogy’ (4.6); Zeno then defended that dignified public demeanour (5.3); Damon at least encouraged and guided his political ambitions, and was suspected of helping him towards tyranny (4.3, 9.2). That gives a hint of Plutarch’s reasons for developing the theme so fully. It matters a lot to him that Pericles had so good an education, but only because with so many good tutors he must have developed a particularly high intellect and character, ϕρóνημα. It does not go any deeper than that: but this was itself deep enough to land Plutarch in terrible difficulties over his characterization. It was a great trouble to him that in his early years Pericles adopted various disreputable popular techniques to establish his position; and Plutarch comes up with the uncomfortable judgement that Pericles’ behaviour was ‘contrary to his own nature, which was not at all democratic’ (7.3).⁶⁷ He does not seem to have faced the question whether this was really compatible with his admiration for Pericles’ integrity and greatness of spirit.⁶⁸ It is not that Plutarch did not have a perfectly good model to use, that of the youthful leader of the people who becomes more moderate as he grows older: there is a certain amount of that in Caesar, Pompey, and even Cleomenes. But it will not do here simply because Pericles was so thoroughly educated, and hence must have developed a character which was above genuine demagogy at an early stage. The analysis is not really very profound, and tends to regard education simply as something you have either had or not had, rather like a vaccination: if you have had it, then you ought to be immune from certain dangers for ever. Here, as so often, Plutarch’s preoccupation with education is disquietingly superficial. Pericles’ education created the problem for Plutarch’s characterization; but the analysis was too shallow to solve or even illuminate that problem at all satisfactorily.

Take Alcibiades, too. Plutarch makes a fair amount of his growing up in Pericles’ house, and of his relationship with Socrates. But the interesting thing about it is simply that, despite all his flair and excesses, he was still the sort of man to listen to Socrates; there is no attempt to explore what Socrates might have told him about the Athenian democracy, for instance, or the admirable aspects of Spartan military culture. How much more he could have made of the relationship with Pericles, too. He has an anecdote where Alcibiades hears that Pericles is thinking out a speech in which he would submit an account of his magistracy to the Athenian people; Alcibiades promptly reflects that it would be ‘better to think out how to avoid giving accounts to the Athenians’ (8.3). But that is all. Consider the following passage:

Alcibiades was inspired by Pericles’ power, which he saw around him every day; but he was deeply disillusioned by the ingratitude the Athenian demos showed him. He considered where Pericles had perhaps made mistakes: perhaps his haughtiness was out of keeping with a younger generation, perhaps more affability and charm was needed. He also saw what Pericles had achieved, and determined that he too, one day, would have a great achievement that would be his own, and he would make Athens indeed prince of Greece.

But Plutarch did not write that, I did. He had the wherewithal to make that sort of psychological deduction, but he had enough to say about Alcibiades if he simply described the peculiar flair and glamour of his political style. Trying to understand what made him the sort of politician he was could, in this Life, be discarded.⁶⁹ Understanding people was just one among several things which he was trying to do; it was not always the priority. That is a fundamental difference between Plutarch and modern biography.

III

This is largely because, for ancient biography, there was less in the adult personality to understand. Plutarch individuates his personalities; he has a rich and differentiated vocabulary for describing traits;⁷⁰ but it remains true that he, like most or all ancient writers, has an extremely integrated conception of character, and that his figures are consequently individual in a way which we find oddly limited.⁷¹ The differing elements of a character are regularly brought into some sort of relationship with one another, reconciled: not exactly unified, for a character cannot be described with a single word or category, and is not a stereotype; but one element at least goes closely with another, and each element predicts the next. Antony has his simplicity, his άπλóτης or ‘oneness’,⁷² which leaves him so vulnerable to flatterers or more powerful personalities (Curio, Fulvia, Cleopatra); that helps to explain why he is so passive. The simplicity goes well with his soldierliness too, and the rumbustious sense of fun he shares with his men – and then goes on to share with Cleopatra, so that the same qualities both build and destroy his greatness; the soldierliness and the leadership then go well with the nobility, which he shows for instance in honouring the fallen Brutus at Philippi (22.6–7); that nobility goes closely with his capacity to be inflamed by Roman values and duty, and therefore to feel his shame intensely at the end – the head-in-hands scene as he sails from Actium (67), the Roman suicide (76), the fine dying words, ‘a Roman, by a Roman valiantly vanquished’ (77.7). It all fits together very tightly: not as a stereotype, for these are all distinct traits; but they are closely neighbouring traits, and we are not surprised that Antony shows them all. In modern terms, his personality exemplifies a ‘syndrome’ of traits which are independent but which one naturally finds in combination, rather than a set of characteristics which are all deducible from a single original ‘source-trait’.⁷³

This is typical.⁷⁴ The younger Cato’s high principle and resolution go with his Stoicism,⁷⁵ and that in its turn goes with his determination to feel shame only at the truly shameful: that explains his scruffiness, his strange but (to him) logical treatment of his women, perhaps even his drunkenness (cf. 6.1–4); but this singleness of purpose also goes with a disabling lack of political insight and flexibility. In the last chapter I discussed how Plutarch turns Aratus into a much less peculiar mixture than he was in Polybius (4.8): there is now a particular ‘sort of cleverness and understanding’ which explains his apparent inconsistencies, and is represented as a regular feature of human nature (Arat. 10.4–5). We saw too how Lysander’s ruthlessness, deviousness, and unscrupulousness all combine readily with his personal ambition and pride: the combination may be unexpected, especially in a Spartan, and he is certainly individuated – yet those characteristics still bind together tightly.⁷⁶ Even Alcibiades’ ‘many-sidedness’ is not the sort of complexity we find in a modern counterpart, any more than, say, Homer’s Odysseus is ‘many-sided’ in quite our sense.⁷⁷ It still requires only a rather limited list of categories to capture an Alcibiades or an Odysseus: each trait still predicts the next, and the reader swiftly gets the idea. Such characters are arresting, not intriguing: this is a very different sort of complexity from what we shall see in, for instance, Strachey’s General Gordon. The same really applies to Sulla, even though Plutarch goes out of his way to stress his ‘inconsistency’ (Sulla 6.14–15). And Caesar’s ambition, determination, and ability are the traits which control that Life: we would bring out the man’s many-sidedness in a different way – one which in fact is closer to Suetonius, whose rapidly shifting categories lend themselves to such protean complexity.⁷⁸

Plutarch’s ‘integrated personalities’ are nothing unusual in the ancient world, though it is arguable that his integration is peculiarly thorough and complete, as those comparisons with Polybius and Suetonius suggest; but his characters are clearly very different from the more complex figures which modern writers like to develop.⁷⁹ He would indeed find it rather difficult to cope with some of the quirky combinations so familiar to our popular awareness: the Maharaja with four Rolls-Royces whose only ambition is to compete at Wimbledon, the England fast bowler whose delight is writing poetry, the distinguished philosopher with an obsessive preoccupation with the workings of the British telephone system.

The more developed portraits of formal biography tell the same story. Lytton Strachey’s ‘New Biography’ is in some ways a special case as his work was so consciously iconoclastic, but it makes the point particularly plain. Strachey is always straining for the unexpected. Here we are presented with personalities whose traits do not sit at all comfortably together, whose combination in a single individual is paradoxical: Gordon earnestly tracing the location of Old Testament sites around Jerusalem, Bible in hand; but also approaching military operations with vigour and dynamism; but also hiding himself from his troops and staff for bouts of brandy and soda; but also, when coolly sober, bombarding the Ambassador in Cairo with utterly contradictory telegrams about the military situation, sometimes thirty a day. Dr Arnold towers darkly in his gown and religion; but also he finds it humanly difficult to get out of bed in the morning; but also he cavorts with his children on the hearthrug; but also he suffers from a strange hypochondria. When Eminent Victorians was published, Virginia Woolf wrote to Strachey about his Gordon:⁸⁰

My only criticism, which I ought to hesitate to give until a second reading, is that I’m not sure whether the character of Gordon altogether ‘convinces’. I felt a little difficulty in bridging the gulfs, but 1 rather think this is inevitable from the method, which flashes light and dark this side and that…

These ‘gulfs’ capture something quite important. One may dispute whether Strachey does make Gordon convincing; but if he does, it is a great tribute to his art, and it is indeed a primary task of a biographer in this genre to bring together such almost random, sometimes conflicting, traits in a single individual personality. And the only thing that brings them together is that single individual. Gordon may have combined all those traits, but there is little in the traits themselves to predispose us to expect their combination.

This contrast naturally affects the characters’ exemplary quality. Even with Plutarch’s most individual figures, we can still naturally talk about what may happen to ‘a sort of person like Antony’ when he encounters a ‘a sort of person like Cleopatra’: such figures will certainly not recur often, but at least their traits combine so readily that a recurrence is conceivable. One would not talk of ‘a sort of person like General Gordon’, for so paradoxical a combination must be unique. It would of course be a mistake to think that this was Plutarch’s reason for the integration, to believe that he characterizes in this way to make the extraction of morals more straightforward.⁸¹ That is to start from the wrong end, as if our modern assumptions were unquestionably right or natural, and Plutarch’s different approach required explanation. In fact, this taste for the quirky is very much a modern fad. Plutarch’s characterizing technique rests on assumptions which he inherited and saw no reason to question, and indeed which few other cultures fundamentally questioned until the nineteenth century (though it is true that few cultures integrated quite so thoroughly as the Greeks).⁸² Similar points – and similar modern comparisons – can so easily be made with other Hellenic genres, epic, historiography, or drama: it makes much more sense to talk of ‘a sort of person like Odysseus’ or Hector or Pericles or Orestes than ‘a sort of person like Pierre’ or Anna or Churchill or Hamlet – or even less dominating figures such as Masha or Nina in The Seagull.⁸³ The integrating assumptions clearly went very deep, and it would be facile to derive them from a straightforward interest in the exemplary. The integration certainly goes well with the drawing of exemplary morals, and in some cases will have encouraged or facilitated that process; equally, the taste for morals reinforced the assumption of integration; but the causal relation of the two was surely delicate and tangled – and, of course, wholly, unconscious.

This fundamental difference between ancient and modern has its impact on the treatment of childhood. Plutarch can give that telling anecdote or generalization prefiguring the ‘sort of person’ that Alcibiades or Cato or Aratus is going to be. It is not going to be a paradoxical combination of divergent traits, any or all of which might be usefully prefigured. And Plutarch can develop his technique of gradual refinement: the traits he is going to develop will not wholly call into question those which we know from the beginning, they will just sharpen and complement them. Contrast Strachey on Florence Nightingale:

What was that secret voice in her ear, if it was not a call? Why had she felt, from her earliest years, those mysterious promptings towards…she hardly knew what, but something very different from anything around her? Why, as a child in the nursery, where her sister had shown a healthy pleasure in tearing her dolls to pieces, had she shown an almost morbid one in sewing them up again?

(Eminent Victorians 120)

One can tell how Plutarch would have used the story of the dolls: a straightforward, and not very imaginative, foretaste of her later concern for healing. Strachey is very different: now the elder sister takes ‘a healthy pleasure’ in tearing the dolls apart, while Florence’s behaviour is ‘almost morbid’: ‘it was very odd; what could be the matter with dear Flo?’ Strachey brings out how paradoxical and unexpected the behaviour is: it still prefigures the later person, who is demoniacal in her pressure for work, driving more passive assistants into early graves, but it prefigures those more individual traits in a distinctly more individual way. Still, elaboration need not guarantee success, and this is not good writing. The anecdote stretches credibility (‘it is difficult to think of dainty Parthe “tearing up dolls” ’, wrote an indignant family friend⁸⁴); the psychology is dark but forced. Plutarchan simplicity and restraint might after all have been better.

Childhood anecdotes also prefigure the clashing elements in a personality. It is distinctive of Strachey’s Cardinal Manning that his ability and ambition are more weighty than his piety, though the piety is real enough; and the clash of these elements leads to psychological strain, which Manning is powerful enough to cope with – again, we notice how singular a person this is, and how unplutarchan it is to have such conflicting tensions. So in his childhood we have the piety, in a very evangelical household. At the age of four he was told by a cousin of six that God wrote down everything we did wrong, and for some days his mother found him sitting under a kind of writing-table in great fear. ‘I never forgot this at any time in my life, and it has been a great grace to me’, wrote Manning later – and Strachey notes it, with a typical, slightly malicious hint of the self-righteousness as well as the piety. ‘Yet’, Strachey goes on, ‘on the whole he led the unspiritual life of an ordinary schoolboy’, and more noticeable was ‘a certain dexterity of conduct’. At Harrow

he went out of bounds, and a master, riding by and seeing him on the other side of a field, tied his horse to a gate, and ran after him. The astute youth outran the master, fetched a circle, reached the gate, jumped on to the horse’s back and rode off.

(Eminent Victorians 6)

It is a much less expected story for a future Cardinal, and yet it prefigures something more important than the piety. So childhood anecdotes are here used to focus two conflicting traits, and the paradoxical one carries the greater weight. The whole technique is more complex, and the characterization again incomparably more singular, than in Plutarch.

With so much more to understand in the adult figures, there is therefore more to prefigure; we might expect there to be more for the child to develop, too, and more that could be related to specific influences. Here we can trace a growing interest through Strachey’s oeuvre. A few points are traceable even in Eminent Victorians : Manning’s evangelical home, or Nightingale’s closeted childhood in the Derbyshire country house, carry some explanatory force; or there is the more delicious point about Arnold:

It is true that, as a schoolboy, a certain pompousness in the style of his letters home suggested to the more clear-sighted among his relatives the possibility that young Thomas might grow up into a prig; but, after all, what else could be expected from a child who, at the age of three, had been presented by his father, as a reward for proficiency in his studies, with the twenty-four volumes of Smollett’s History of England?

(Eminent Victorians 183–4)

But it is left at that, and there is no clear interest in tracing in detail how particular influences shaped a child’s development. Most of the ‘understanding’ is to be reached by considering the man himself or the woman herself, not their society; that is still in the Plutarchan tradition. And indeed, there is comparatively little development to trace: Manning is already showing the same tensions as later.

By Queen Victoria that has changed. We have a chapter on ‘Antecedents’ as well as one on ‘Childhood’, and Strachey is very concerned indeed to depict the importance of the uneasy atmosphere in the royal family. Her christening, for instance, provoked a marvellously embarrassing scene;⁸⁵ that does reveal something about the uncomfortable background against which she grew up – the background which finally erupted in a public tirade against Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, delivered by William IV before 100 embarrassed guests at a birthday dinner, again a story in which Strachey revels. He is concerned to point influences, too: of governesses, of her uncle the king of Belgium, of her father’s political sympathies and associations, and of the lack of robust masculine friends – ‘It was her misfortune that the mental atmosphere which surrounded her during these years of adolescence was almost entirely feminine’ – which may explain why she was so mesmerized when handsome male cousins visited, including the youthful Prince Albert. Then in Elizabeth and Essex Strachey points Elizabeth’s ‘seriously warped sexual organization’,⁸⁶ crucial for understanding the way she handled English noblemen and foreign kings. This is explained by ‘the profound psychological disturbances of her childhood’ – the early beheading of her mother, the bewildering sequence of stepmothers, finally the extraordinary sexual attention of Catherine Parr’s later husband Thomas Seymour, with his habit of bounding into her room, tickling her in bed, and slapping her bottom. The Freudian influence by now is clear, and this detailed tracing of influences takes us some distance from Plutarch.

This preoccupation with influences and understanding is of course what we now expect. It is particularly clear in Erikson, but for instance Emil Ludwig’s Bismarck is also similar – the bad relations with his distant, theatrical mother, always too busy to have him at home, which led to his neurosis, cynicism, and ‘refractory and unequable nature’;⁸⁷ no wonder he came to despise the liberal ideas his mother espoused, and no wonder his reaction was so ambivalent to the harsh, whipping, military school his mother sent him to. Tickling, bottom-slapping, and whipping tend to be less typical of the more regular genre of political biography, less highly wrought than Strachey, less self-conscious and artistically pretentious, distinctly more respectful, and in some ways closer to the grave, dignified genre of multi-volume Victorian biography which Strachey was striving to replace. But this preoccupation with influences and understanding remains dominant. Not quite at random, one could take Philip Williams’s fine book on Hugh Gaitskell.⁸⁸

There are in fact some surprising similarities with Plutarch. Williams too is concerned with education, though the points are made in greater detail. The Dragon School was ‘a highly unorthodox and notably unconventional preparatory school…masters were known by their nicknames’. Later, his public school Winchester was ‘much less philistine than most of its contemporaries. Intellect was not despised as at Rugby or Harrow.’ There is often the routine generalization, more pointed than in Plutarch but showing rather the same flavour: ‘at prep school, Winchester, and Oxford alike, he was unusually unpossessive and behaved as a “natural socialist”, treating everyone as equal and everything as held in common’. One wonders exactly what that means, and what really lies behind it: surely a measure of retrojection from later years? And there is the telling anecdote, too, which one suspects is not always subjected to rigorous historical criticism: ‘he once startled a strange lady in the street by chanting to her from the pram: “Soon shall you and I be lying | Each within our narrow tomb” ’. But what is different here is that perpetual quest for understanding, clearly the author’s first priority. The chapter is headed ‘Seeking Something to Fight For’ – the psychological register which Plutarch sometimes moves into, but generally eschews. There is the interest, again, in isolating influences: ‘to his mother he owed the gaiety and friendliness…the strong Burma connections had – surprisingly – no apparent influence on his life, outlook, or policy. Separation from his parents possibly did have such an influence’; ‘Winchester’s heavy emphasis on self-restraint helped Hugh to keep under firm control the strong emotions that seethed beneath a placid surface.’

What would Plutarch have made of all that? It is quite alien to his manner, even in the passages where he is trying to understand: we are moving into a quite different register when we seek to isolate such broad influences. Plutarch would have been perplexed; and he would also have felt the irony that he is now regarded as the man with the taste for fiction, while the moderns regard themselves as reconstructing truth. Williams’s reconstruction of these influences is much more moderate and cogent than those of Strachey, Erikson, or Ludwig, but all rest on a very slender foundation. Winchester was like that, and Gaitskell was like that too; Bismarck’s mother and Luther’s father were unsatisfactory, and Bismarck and Luther turned out the way they did; Thomas Seymour was sexually peculiar, and Elizabeth was arguably a bit peculiar too; hence there must have been a causal connection. Plutarch would have thought all this a new, peculiar brand of imaginative reconstruction; and I am not sure that he would have been too impressed.

Postscript (2001)

Constructing Personalities: a Tale of Two Gills

In this 1990 essay I exploited the distinction Christopher Gill had developed between ‘character’ and ‘personality’.⁸⁹ If we speak of ‘character’ we are more likely to be subsuming an individual to a category: one can usually put some sort of adjective in front of ‘character’ – ‘irascible’, ‘generous’, ‘surly’, ‘vain’, ‘sinister’, and so on. ‘Personality’ for Gill is more concerned with defining how an individual is different from others, identifying the areas in which that individuality is defined. ‘Personality’ further involves, to a greater degree than ‘character’, understanding a person: getting inside his or her skin, gauging what it is that makes her or him tick. ‘Personality’ also tends to be less judgmental than ‘character’, more concerned to define and render intelligible the person and less concerned to categorize as good or bad. In one of his papers (1983) Gill suggested that the fundamental contrast between Plutarch and modern biography can be put in those terms: Plutarch is typically more concerned with character, modern biography with personality.

I made some reservations clear at pp. 308–12. In Coriolanus, in particular, we seem to have a real concern to understand the factors which shaped the man’s nature: that seems to fit ‘personality’. At the same time Plutarch insists that, however peculiar the influences which moulded Coriolanus, he still fits an identifiable human type, that of the ‘more stable’ form of ambition (4.1: p. 310 above); and he certainly encourages moral evaluation of Coriolanus’ behaviour, for this is one of the most ethically charged of the Lives. Both of these features seem rather to fit Gill’s ‘character-viewpoint’. There may be other difficulties too in applying the distinction to Plutarch. Sometimes he individuates (Alcibiades or Timoleon), sometimes makes his heroes closer to a class (Crassus or Numa); sometimes he is both individuating and evaluating (Pompey or Nicias), sometimes not doing much of either (Alexander and Caesar). It puts matters too roughly, I think, to claim that Plutarch adopts a character-viewpoint rather than a personality-viewpoint: there is too much of both, even if the ‘character’ aspect weighs more heavily than we would expect in a modern biography.

Still, that character–personality distinction can still be illuminating, and some points that I made in this essay could helpfully be put in those terms. One way of capturing Plutarch’s interest in education is to say that Hellenic culture, when it is present, is more a question of character than of personality: it encourages us to ask more evaluating questions; it counts as a plus, but not always a decisive one, on the moral scale; it may make some (but only some) of the figures more akin to types (Brutus, perhaps, perhaps even Flamininus, but not really Cicero, nor Marcellus, nor the elder nor even the younger Cato). What it does not particularly do is help us to understand them, though in Cicero’s case it may help us to understand some of the tensions and temptations which he felt (p. 313). An absence of education by contrast does help us to understand people as ‘personalities’, as it offers an explanation why a Marius or a Coriolanus or a Marcellus found a certain passion more difficult to control: the lust for revenge, or for victory at all costs, or in Marcellus’ case to engage Hannibal in single combat.⁹⁰ It also encourages us to dwell on the ways in which certain critical flaws cohere closely with moral strengths, so that we develop a stronger, more integrated picture of a man’s nature. That does not preclude evaluation, but it certainly promotes understanding too.

One can see, too, why the different aspects which Gill associates with the two viewpoints should cohere, in particular why the ‘character-viewpoint’ has more categorization and evaluation but less understanding: this is not simply an English semantic accident.⁹¹ The more one comes to understand why someone should be the way she is, the less straightforward it is to blame her, or even to praise her. If society is to blame for making a boy delinquent, if the marital condition wrecks a woman or a man, if a costly education gives someone a surface smoothness or a cultural depth or a knack for getting high grades in examinations (or for that matter an irritating insouciance or arrogance) – in all these cases we may feel it more problematic to dispense punishment or rewards, or simply dismissiveness or esteem, than we might otherwise have done. Increasingly, this is a problem in the modern courts;⁹² it was a problem which was felt as early as Gorgias and Euripides and Antiphon and Thucydides and Aristotle.⁹³ It is not surprising that there should be a right-wing backlash encouraging us to ‘understand a little less and condemn a little more’,⁹⁴ and that in itself brings out how difficult it is simultaneously to understand and to condemn. If Plutarch nevertheless manages in a Life like Coriolanus to combine understanding and evaluation, that may be because his moralism usually deals in more complex concepts than simple ‘condemnation’, and because he is interested in probing and exploring ethical experience as well as in praising, blaming, inspiring, and deterring. We saw some of that in chapter 10.

In his 1996 book Gill addressed some of these problems in a different way. The character–personality distinction is now laid aside. Instead he develops a more ambitious duality, distinguishing a ‘subjective/individualist’ and an ‘objective/participant’ approach to personality. His treatment is richly nuanced, and I summarize it here only at the cost of considerable simplification.⁹⁵ First, the ‘subjective/individualist’ strand, which Gill takes to capture a main strain in post-Cartesian and post-Kantian modern philosophy. This strand seeks an important element of personhood in the unifying ‘I’, a single distinct personal entity which imparts selfhood. In the Cartesian strand, that is a psychological thesis: a unifying consciousness which makes me what I am, the ego who cogito. In the Kantian strand, that is more an ethical thesis: the essence of ethical thought consists in the autonomous will, where this important ‘I’ works things out, reaches my own decision and thereby defines my own self. This can dispense with any great interest in the part this ‘I’ is playing in society; or, if society comes into it at all, it may be that I am asserting my autonomous individuality against that society as a self-determining decision-maker.

Gill’s project is to develop against this subjective/individualist ‘unifying I’ a different perspective, which he finds much more characteristic of Greek thought, the ‘objective/participant’ strand. It will be helpful to distinguish the Cartesian (psychological) and Kantian (ethical) components here (and we will later see reasons to wonder if Gill brings them together too closely, though he has various subtle points to make about their relation). On the psychological side, Gill reasonably observes that the usual model for Greek decision-making is rather ‘the self in dialogue’ (the sub-title of his book). This builds on the model of the external discussion, several people in the room, discourse or logos as an interpersonal thing; then it figures our own internal decision-making in the same way, constructing several internal ‘voices’ in dialogue. He interestingly (1996, 14–15) relates this to dominant literary genres, emphasizing the importance of agonistic dialogue in the major Greek genres: that contrasts with the dominant single-voice expressive genres that have dominated in the modern, especially Romantic and post-Romantic period – the lyric poem, the song, the novel. That is part of the ‘objective’ element in this strand, the tendency to think of internal decision-making on the model of, or at least in ways similar to, something external and separate.

The Kantian, ethical strand is rather different. This is more concerned with treating ethical choices less as autonomous and self-standing phenomena but more as embedded in the code or codes of one’s society: that is the ‘participant’ element in his ‘objective/participant’. On this view to be a ‘person’ is essentially to be a participative member of a society and its (doubtless complex and non-univocal) ethical code. One contributes to the definition and redefinition of this code by making a series of responses and gestures, in the big instances exemplary gestures – and this is a notion which Gill develops most profitably in discussing the great cases in epic and tragedy, Achilles in Iliad 9, Sophocles’ Ajax, Euripides’ Medea. All are distinct characters making ethical choices, but they are hardly autonomous and society-independent. One can certainly see why the notion of the exemplary gesture is here a helpful one: in their cases, the ‘self’ is ‘in dialogue’ with the norms of a society, or at least responding to ill-conceived conduct by others (Agamemnon, Jason) which the society either encourages or empowers, either endorses or has no strategy to repress. And in those cases we can also see the ‘self in dialogue’ in that other, first sense, the self in dialogue with itself, as these great individuals weigh up the alternatives with rival internalized voices very much in the style of an external to-and-fro of two speakers, in the dramatic cases with a mode of soliloquy which moderns either find unrealistically schematic and yes-I-will-no-I-won’t (Medea) or simply misinterpret (as so often with Ajax and ‘deception’).

It is not my concern here to give any sort of ‘review’ of Gill’s book: that has been done very well by others,⁹⁶ and the issues it raises are most complex. My purpose here is more limited, and still confined to biography, which is not the focus of the 1996 book. Do Gill’s new categories illuminate biography, especially Plutarchan biography, in a way that the old ones did not?

Let us take first the ‘participant’, Kantian side of the analysis. Plutarch is indeed most interested in relating people to their societies and evaluating them in terms of their ‘participation’. In chapters 5, 7, 9, and 10 we saw Plutarch’s interest in defining the nature of those societies as well as of the individuals, and exploring the (often recurrent) political circumstances with which the figures had to deal as well as the characters of the figures themselves. In the present chapter we saw how those circumstances are regarded both as explaining the characters (Coriolanus and Marcellus are what they are partly because Rome was the way it was), and as conditioning our ethical valuation: ‘Lysander’s ambition and contentiousness were derived from his Spartan education, and we should not greatly blame his nature for this’ (Lys. 2.4: above, pp. 293, 312); Caesar may be less blameworthy, and Brutus more, because Rome’s political malaise needed doctoring (Brut. 55(2).2: pp. 258–9, 376). It is also fundamental to that valuation to consider what an individual contributed to that society.⁹⁷ Lysander may be praiseworthy for his personal restraint, but we also need to consider what damage he did to Sparta, introducing that concern for money to which he was himself immune (ch. 13, pp. 291–5, and Pelling, forthcoming (b) ). And a figure who cannot acclimatize at all to his society may get understanding, but not much sympathy, nor usually much approval: that is particularly true of Coriolanus, but also in different ways of Marius and Nicias and Crassus and even the younger Cato (Phoc. 3.1–2). This fits the one side of Gill’s analysis very well: Plutarch analyses, not just people, but people in their society. Whether one would extend this point to other biographies is a different question, for Suetonius does not do this so much, nor for instance does Diogenes Laertius. We may again here be grazing a theme touched in chapter 7 (p. 188), Plutarch’s concern to write a coherent series which told stories about Athens, Sparta, and Rome as well as about the individual politicians. In that case of course he is concerned to set those figures against their societal backgrounds.

What of the other side of Gill’s analysis, the post-Cartesian psychological side? Does Plutarch too typically conceive, and portray, a ‘self in dialogue’? There will be questions here both of conceptualization, how Plutarch figures his heroes, and of technique, whether he makes use of such internal dialogue to convey the way they are. My main concern will be with technique.

The main genres which Gill treats in his book are epic, tragedy, and philosophy, and his shift of analysis works particularly well for these. In epic and tragedy in particular, the grand characterizing scenes are so often concerned with moments of choice and decision, particularly when dilemmas are agonizing and balanced. Should Agamemnon kill his daughter, or Medea her sons, or Ajax himself? Should Achilles return to the fight? These are moments when the self is indeed in dialogue, and so this new analysis is particularly well suited for exploring these agonizing moments. Yet this mode of characterization is much more typical of dramatic literature than of everyday life. We tend to characterize friends, and for that matter public figures too, more in terms of behaviour patterns than of life-defining moments, and in everyday life we often characterize by concentrating on their unreflecting moments and responses – especially when we think those responses might have been more reflective than they were. We might still find the personality–character distinction better equipped to deal with these patterns, whether we are subsuming to a group and praising or condemning a ‘character’ – she is so sensitive, he is so hysterical, she is so devious, he is so embarrassing when drunk; or seeking to explain a ‘personality’ – she was given such a hard time by her parents that it is not surprising that she breaks out, he has been working so hard that one can understand that shortness of temper, they had such a bad experience in opposition that one can understand why they have turned into control-freaks now.

It is no surprise if biography here aligns more closely with ‘everyday’ life, presenting people in terms of their dispositions, what they usually do and how they usually react, rather than concentrating on the great moments of decision. What is striking, though, is the degree to which Plutarch tilts that way. For it is part of his technique too to highlight ‘great moments’, crafting what Françoise Frazier has called his ‘grandes scènes’.⁹⁸ Many of those do concentrate on agonizing decisions: should Coriolanus leave Rome? Should he desist before his mother? Should Antony forsake his men? How can he cope with himself when he has done it? Should Caesar cross the Rubicon? And it may well be that Plutarch would have figured those agonizings in the way Gill suggests, with a ‘self in dialogue’, and different internal voices being heard. The theoretical framework he builds in On Moral Virtue portrays ethical debate in a way close to, though not quite identical with, Gill’s picture;⁹⁹ and there are many passages in the Moralia where he scripts particular ‘internal dialogues’ for himself as he weighs moral problems.¹⁰⁰ But whatever may be true of his conceptualization of such moments, his technique is not to use those ‘conflicting voices’ as part of his characterizing repertoire. Consider again Pericles’ decision to give himself to the demos ‘contrary to his own nature, which was anything but populist’ (παρά τὴν έαυτού ϕύσιν ἥκιστα δημοτικἡν οΰσαν, Per. 7.3: above, p. 314). We are left in no doubt as to his motives; but there is no telling internal dialogue to characterize him, no agonizing. Nor is there when Alcibiades goes off to Sparta and treachery and regal seduction (Alc. 22.1); nor when Cato lends his wife to Hortensius for a year or so to let him produce an heir (Cato Min. 25.3). Even if we take Lives with more of an internal, psychological register, we find little agonizing. Pompey for instance makes a great deal of that uxoriousness which distracts him from politics and warfare (esp. Pomp. 53, 74–5: above, p. 100). Distraction, yes; passion, yes; even conflicting drives, yes; but not articulated like that, not with conflicting internal voices and strongly characterizing uncertainty or agonizing.

Let us take some of those Lives where we might particularly expect such characterizing indecision. Even there the search for agonizing gives meagre results. Cicero, we saw (p. 313 and n. 64), makes a good deal of the choice between the two Lives, scholarly or political; yet the moves to and from scholarship, both at the beginning and the end, are simply responses to the political situation.¹⁰¹ No self in dialogue there. When Cicero wonders whether to join Pompey, Plutarch seems to be exploiting a letter or letters where Cicero was genuinely agonizing; but in Plutarch himself the reflections are perfunctory, and notable mainly for their simplifying of what Cicero actually said.¹⁰² For Plutarch, Cicero’s choice is eventually made swiftly, and from simple vanity: he is so irritated that Caesar had used Trebatius as a go-between instead of writing himself.

What of Coriolanus? We may half-remember agonizing there: should he stand for the consulship? Should he show his wounds to the stinking commons? But if we do we are half-remembering Shakespeare, not Plutarch, who makes nothing of the choice at all (Cor. 14.1–2). The nearest we come to agonizing is two passages, first 21.5 after he has been exiled but before he has decided to go to Antium and Attius Tullus:

He stayed for a few days in a country estate by himself, and was torn by many considerations suggested to him by his wrath (θνμός) – that nothing is fair or useful except to pursue the Romans for revenge; so he decided to mount a fierce war for them against a neighbouring enemy.

That may be an ‘exemplary gesture’ but it is hardly agonizing, and hardly internal dialogue: all the ‘considerations’ seem to be pulling the same way. Then 34.3, when the women arrive as he is delivering judgements:

He wanted to stay in those unswerving and inexorable counsels, but was overcome by his emotion and shattered by the sight. He could not bear to allow them to approach him still sitting, so he came down from the tribunal at swifter than walking pace and met them, embracing first and longest his mother, then his wife and his children, no longer sparing either tears or greeting, allowing himself to be carried away by his emotion as by a flood.

This is closer. He is torn between passion and friendship (as Achilles is torn, often a close intertextual presence in Coriolanus);¹⁰³ but the psychologically telling touch is in the gesture, especially the stress on his mother’s arms more than on his wife’s. In the scene which follows, we certainly sense Coriolanus’ psychology, but not by having it described nor by hearing his internal voices. The voice we then hear is his mother’s, rather a loud and forceful voice, and she knows the right words to say: the appeal to what he owes her, the stress on the point that he will not be betraying the Volscians, and the simple bullying. From Coriolanus himself, we hear first silence (36.1), the most expressive thing of all from this highly vocal figure; then a simple acknowledgement of collapse.

No internal voices then, or rather only voices which are inferred from behaviour and from others’ voices, not from Coriolanus’ own thought-processes; but we do certainly have the other side of the ‘objective–participant’ analysis, the dialectic between the individual and his world, the attempt and the failure to find a way to keep a sense of ‘selfhood’ and integrity against the norms of his society, a world which includes family as well as city. That produces the exemplary gestures, the first of rejection as he goes into exile, the second of acquiescence as he returns; but they come without being articulated in internal debate. Once again, this may well be more a matter of technique, Plutarch’s reluctance to present internal dialogue directly, rather than conceptualization; he simply finds better ways to intimate an agonized self than to describe it. Drama inevitably, and epic at least naturally, presents such dilemmas in direct speech; Plutarch’s manner can be subtler, but it may still be that such dialogue existed. So I am not arguing that Gill’s 1996 analysis is in any way wrong-headed; it simply does not capture Plutarch’s technique.

Let us end this survey of agonizing moments with Caesar at the Rubicon (Caes. 32), a passage which Brenk has compared with Aeschylus’ Agamemnon at Aulis:¹⁰⁴ will Caesar cross, will Agamemnon strike, or will he desist? Yet, viewed from our present angle, the differences seem more striking than the similarities. At Aulis Agamemnon may well be trapped by ‘necessity’ (άνάγκα, Aesch. Agam. 218) and may well have a choice which is no real choice; yet the way he articulates the choices, the way perhaps he makes the decision his own, can still be felt as characterizing. That is certainly the way the chorus see it: ‘for dreadful, disgraceful-counselling frenzy, the source of troubles, gives false confidence to mortals’ (βροτούς θρασύνει γὰρ αίσχρóμητίς τάλαινα παρακοπὰ πρωτοπήμων, Agam. 222–3).¹⁰⁵ The Agamemnon passage is one which we constantly relate to other indications of what Agamemnon is like. It also responds very well to the categories of Gill 1996, both psychologically (the conflicting voices) and ethically (the response of the individual to the culture which imposes a decision on him).

But Caesar?

Caesar himself spent the day where people could see him, visiting some gladiators and watching them as they trained. Shortly before evening he bathed and prepared himself, then entered the dining-room. He spent a little time with the dinner-guests, then rose from his seat as darkness was beginning to fall. He spoke politely to the others, asking them to wait for him, for he would soon return; but he had already told some of his friends to follow him, not all together, but each by a different way. He himself took one of the hired carriages, and first drove off in a different direction, then turned and took the road for Ariminum. On his way he reached the river that marks the boundary between Cisalpine Gaul and the rest of Italy. The Rubicon is its name. Thoughts came upon him on this very brink of danger, and he was turned this way and that by the greatness of his enterprise. He reined in the horses, and ordered a halt. Silently, within his own mind, his thoughts veered first one way and then the other, and this was when his resolve was most shaken; and for some time he also spoke of the dilemma with his friends that were present, including Asinius Pollio – if he crossed, how great the ills which it would bring upon the world; how great the story of it they would leave among later generations. Then, finally, as if with a burst of passion, he abandoned his counsels and hurled himself forward into the path that lay before him. As he went he uttered those words which so often serve as the prelude for some incalculable risk or audacious enterprise: ‘let the die be cast’. Then he moved swiftly to cross the river. He galloped the rest of the journey, and burst into Ariminum before dawn and took the city.

It is said that, the night before he crossed, he dreamed a monstrous dream. It seemed to him that he was lying with his own mother – the unspeakable union.

(Plutarch, Caesar 32.4–9)

This is the closest we have yet seen to agonizing, and to internal voices. There is some parallel to the Agamemnon too in the feeling that this is a choice which is no real choice, that events have by now borne along so far that (perhaps) it is a question of enacting and marking the decision rather than really making it. But we might notice first how unrelated the considerations are to the Caesar we see elsewhere in the Life. Caesar is ambitious, certainly; he is sensitive to the fame of an Alexander (11.4–5);¹⁰⁶ but this notion of ‘fame for later generations’ is not something developed in this Life, though it obviously could have been (that theme is left for the metatheatre of Shakespeare, J.C. III.i.111–16).¹⁰⁷ Nor is the concern for the ills that his actions will bring on the world. That formulation dramatizes the moment, but it does not particularly characterize the man. Nor does the uncertainty itself characterize: it is out of character, in fact, for Plutarch’s Caesar is not a man to hesitate. The fact he does so now is a way once again of marking the magnitude of the decision, big enough even to give a Caesar some pause; it is not crucial to our understanding of what sort of person he is.¹⁰⁸

So we have found the ‘Kantian’ side of Gill’s 1996 analysis illuminating for biography; it is illuminating for Caesar too, for what makes this night so momentous is precisely the challenge which Caesar is putting to his society, his refusal to conform to its norms. That is why he feels he must act; that is why that action will bring so many ills to the world. This is an exemplary gesture par excellence (‘how great the story of it…’), even if it is more than that as well. The ‘Cartesian’ side, however, is more problematic. However dramatic Plutarch is as a writer, however much at times he borrows from tragedy,¹⁰⁹ he does not borrow or dramatize like this : any internal voices are left for us to infer. He prefers to capture his figures by other means, especially by tracing their dispositions to act in particular patterns. And for analysing those patterns the earlier distinction between personality and character, however rough it sometimes seems, continues to be heuristically valuable.

Perhaps there is a wider implication. One part of Gill’s project, one he achieves with some distinction, is to make a contribution to modern ethical philosophy. Like Bernard Williams in Shame and Necessity,¹¹⁰ he finds Greek literature especially fruitful for finding moral test-cases, and showing how they were analysed with assumptions which are thought-provokingly different from our own. Tragedy, dealing as it does in extreme situations and appalling dilemmas, is particularly rich in such test-cases, it is natural – and richly productive – for Gill, like Williams, to concentrate on those moments when tragic figures decide what to do, and to explore the way those figures are to be judged. Yet, if there is anything in the argument here, tragedy is also in important ways atypical; this is not the way we evaluate people in real life, where recurrent patterns and behavioural dispositions are more important. Nor is it simply a distinction between these single climactic moments and the more protracted ways in which we build up pictures of our friends. When Aristotle speaks about ‘character’, ἦθος, he means those qualities of a person which lend a particular quality to what he or she does;¹¹¹ to judge a person’s act at a climactic moment, we must also take into account what other things that person has done or tends to do. The same speech can be gauged differently depending on the moral character of the speaker. It is one thing for Achilles to criticize Agamemnon, quite another for Thersites,¹¹² and that is not just a question of status: Plutarch himself speaks with approval of the Spartans when they responded to a good proposal from a worthless person by asking a respected elder to make it instead (Advice on Public Life 801b–c). If one cannot finally separate assessment of an action from assessment of the person, it is worthwhile to think more closely about how we do assess the people; and even in tragedy that is rarely a matter of judging a single action, however crucial that one climactic decision may be. ¹¹³ It may be that here historiography and biography have something to teach us that tragedy cannot.

Notes

¹ ‘A great man’, I fear, is appropriate for a discussion of childhood in ancient biography. There was certainly interest in women as personalities: that is especially true at Rome (see esp. Hallett 1984 for the importance of daughters), but even at Athens there are Aspasia, Xanthippe, Phryne, and a few others. There was interest too in relating female personalities to certain influences, especially in terms of family characteristics: Porcia (Brut. 13, 53.5–7), Cornelia (Gracch. 1), and the eloquent Hortensia (Val. Max. 8.3.3, App. BC 4.32.136–34.146); it was especially interesting when women of fine lineage went wrong, at least as men would put it – Sempronia (Sall. BC 25), Clodia, Julia. But there is little biographical interest in women (Diogenes Laertius’ Hipparchia is an exception, 6.96–8, and so later is that other philosopher Hypatia, on whose legend see Dzielska 1995), and girlhood anecdotes prefiguring the adult woman are not found. Even Cicero’s invective did not develop any interest in the infant Clodia; even the lubricious interest in famous hetairai did not come up with anything on young Aspasia’s charms; even Cleopatra has to wait until she is twenty-one for Julius Caesar, a carpet, and her entry into fantasy and legend.

Since this essay was written, several works have interestingly explored the ways in which childhood was viewed in antiquity: see Golden 1990, esp. 1–12 on the similarities and (more usually) differences from the adult personality; more generally, Wiedemann 1989 and Evans 1991, 166–209.

² Cf. Lefkowitz 1981, 59, 155–6.

³ Homer: Lefkowitz 1981, 24. Plato: Riginos 1976, 17–21. Hesiod and Lucan: Suet. Life of Lucan pp. 178–9 Rostagni. Ambrose: Paulinus, Life of Ambrose 3.2–5 (a reference I owe to Thomas Wiedemann). Others: Riginos 1976, 19 and n. 39; Lefkowitz 1981, 59 n. 12.

⁴ Homer: Lefkowitz 1981, 3, 20–2, 140–1. Sophocles: Lefkowitz 1981, 77, 160; cf. 93–4.

⁵ Epicurus: Diog. Laert. 10.2, Sex. Emp. Against the Professors 10. Metrocles: Diog. Laert. 6.94 (cf. 6.96 on his sister Hipparchia). On stories of the young Plato, see Riginos 1976, 39–52.

⁶ Any distinction between ‘literary’ (or ‘cultural’ or ‘intellectual) and ‘political’ biographies must be understood roughly: cf. pp. 147 and 164–5 nn. 25 and 28. Leo’s distinction in terms of generic form has long been recognized as imperfect (cf. Momigliano 1993, 87–8; Geiger 1985, 11–19), and men such as Cicero and M. Aurelius are both cultural and political figures. ‘Cultural’ biographies themselves straddle a large range, from propagandist tract to curious gossip. But, as I argued in ch. 6 (esp. p. 147) and will argue again here, certain important distinctions of content can still be made: here I agree with Geiger 1985, 18–29.

⁷ Alex. 5.4; Cato Minor 2.1–5. If the argument of ch. 6 is accepted, Plutarch would not have made up these stories; they are thus evidence for the texture of the material which he found in his sources as well as for his own interests.

⁸ Plut. Alc. 2.2–3; other stories scattered through 2–9, discussed by Russell 1966a.

⁹ FGrH 107, esp. frs. 1, 4, 6. He was evidently interested in Pericles’ private life (frs. 10–11), and some of Plutarch’s material on Pericles’ youth may also derive from him: cf. Stadter 1989, lxii–lxiii. On the character of his work, cf. the contrasting views of Schachermeyr 1965 and Meister 1978, and now Engels 1993.

¹⁰ Invective: pp. 303–4. The youth of Cimon and Pericles was clearly the subject of contemporary exchanges: cf. Cim. 4.4, 4.6–9, with 15.3; and the attacks on Pericles’ ‘educators’ Damon and Anaxagoras (Per. 4.3–4, 32, etc.). For Themistocles, cf. Plut. Them. 2.6, 2.8, 3.2, with Frost 1980, 67–70, 72 ad locc. As Frost emphasizes, the controversy lasted into later generations: cf. Xen. Mem. 4.2.2; POxy. xiii.1608 (Aeschines Socraticus).

¹¹ Theopompus (FGrH 115) and Idomeneus (FGrH 338) wrote ‘on the Athenian demagogues’, perhaps consciously following Stesimbrotus. Schachermeyr 1965, 20–1, claims that they showed a considerable ethical interest in paideia, and suggests that Stesimbrotus was similar. Yet no particular concern with education is visible in Theopompus, FGrH 115 frs. 85–100; Idomeneus perhaps had more (FGrH 338 fr. 13 on Aeschines’ education; cf. fr. 2 on his mother, and fr. 15 on Phocion’s father), but this is a natural consequence of his use of material drawn from invective (cf. e.g. frs. 9, 12), and nothing suggests that he was really judging politicians ‘mit schulmeisterlichem Stirnrunzeln’ (‘with schoolmasterly frowns’, Schachermeyr).

¹² In such cases we can often offer specific explanations for the material’s availability. Phil., for instance, is informed by Polybius’ encomium, and Alex. both by encomium and by works such as that of Onesicritus (see pp. 303–4); Demosthenes perhaps by literary biography; Cato Minor by the martyrological tradition (pp. 10, 13, 47).

¹³ Cf. also pp. 284 and 294–5, where I fantasize about some other childhood material – there psychological reconstructions rather than anecdotes – which Plutarch might have made up, had he been that sort of writer.

¹⁴ SHA M. Aurel. 2–3; cf. 4.9–10.

¹⁵ SHA Comm. 1; Gord. I 3; Gord. II 18; cf. Anton. Geta 3–4.

¹⁶ Cf. esp. Momigliano 1993, 65–100.

¹⁷ Not of course that cultural figures were immune: the attacks on Epicurus and Aristotle have much in common with the exchanges of Aeschines and Demosthenes. Epicurus too was attacked for assisting his father in his school for a paltry fee, and he apparently retorted that Aristotle took to soldiering and selling drugs after squandering his patrimony: Diog. Laert. 10.4, 8.

¹⁸ Cf. Nisbet 1961, 194; Dover 1974, 32–3.

¹⁹ Cf. Halliwell 1990, 56–7.

²⁰ Isoc. Evag. 21–2.

²¹ Polybius’ own description of the work, 10.21.5–6. Cf. esp. Plut. Phil. 3–4, and for Plutarch’s use of it and the complicated relation of Polybius, Plutarch, and Paus. 8.49–52, Pelling 1997a, 95–107 and 154–66.

²² See p. 165 n. 30.

²³ FGrH 134 T 1 = Diog. Laert. 6.84.

²⁴ FGrH 135–6, 170: cf. Momigliano 1993, 82–3.

²⁵ FGrH 134 fr. 38 = Plut. Alex. 8.2; fr. 17 = Strabo 15.1.63–5, Plut. Alex. 65. On Plutarch’s use of Onesicritus, cf. esp. Hamilton 1969, xxxi, liii, lvi–lvii.

²⁶ Cf. esp. Hamilton 1969, liii, lvi–lvii, and on Plutarch’s (cautious) use of Onesicritus in the Life, above, p. 147. Not all of this youthful material will come from Onesicritus: Eratosthenes is cited at 3.3, Hegesias of Magnesia at 3.6, Aristoxenus at 4.4. But some may well be specifically Onesicritus, esp. on Alexander’s education in 5.7–8.5 (cf. Hamilton on 5.7); possibly 6 (cf. fr. 20 = Alex. 61; Brown 1949, 20); 8.2 = fr. 38. The important point is the more general one, the traces in Plutarch’s material of this encomiastic and novelistic tradition.

²⁷ See Geiger 1985, 30–65, and above, pp. 147 and 164–5 n. 28.

²⁸ Timoleon is an especially interesting case: despite his glorification by the historian Timaeus, there was apparently no serious attempt to embellish his childhood in the manner of encomium or the novel, and nothing suggests that he was the subject of any political biography. Cf. Geiger 1985, 55 n. 89.

²⁹ Per. 4–6; Them. 2; Alc. 6; Cic. 2; Lucull. 1.4–8, 44(1).4; cf. below, pp. 313–14.

³⁰ I owe this point to Tim Cornell.

³¹ Churchill 1930, 24–6.

³² Ancient self-portrayal is treated magisterially by Misch 1950: see also Weintraub 1978, chs. 1–2; Gentili and Cerri 1988, 73–9; Most 1989.

³³ Pritchard 1969, 1.244–5; Luckenbill 1927, 2.378–80. In general, Eastern texts developed a greater interest in politicians’ childhood, as Momigliano 1985 and 1993 stresses (though, elaborating a thesis of Helene Homeyer, he builds too much on the very special case of Cyrus the Great): this can be traced in the Persian material collected, with particular reference to Cyrus, in Gera 1993, 13–22. Such an interest may well have influenced Xenophon’s portrayal directly, and through him the later Greek tradition of biographical novels. Its influence on biography itself was probably less than Momigliano suggests.

³⁴ Rutilius Rufus’ Latin autobiography was possibly an exception: certainly, Cicero was suspiciously well informed about his education (cf. R-E ia. 1270; Peter, HRR i², cclvii). But even here Cicero probably did not know enough to infer his age correctly (Lael. 101; cf. Vell. 2.9.6; R-E ia. 1269); and it anyway seems likely that Rutilius presented himself as a philosopher as well as a politician (cf. e.g. Sen. Ep. 24.4).

³⁵ Frs. 3, 4, 7 M; Suet. Div. Aug. 8.1 suggests that little was known of his life before his late teens. In his Life of Caesar Nicolaus of Damascus was perhaps writing ‘on Augustus’ paideia’ in the manner of the Cyropaedia and Onesicritus (cf. Jacoby on FGrH 90 frs. 125–30, introductory n.); but, although he clearly knew the Autobiography, he could still find little more than a page to write about Augustus’ youth (4–11).

³⁶ Riginos 1976, 39, comments on Plato’s reticence about his youth throughout the dialogues.

³⁷ Attack: above, pp. 302–4; defence: Aesch. 2.146, 167; Dem. 18.257. On autobiography as self-defence, cf. esp. Most 1989.

³⁸ Nic. Dam. Vit. Aug. esp. 4–6 (cf. above, n. 35); Jos. Autobiography 7–9.

³⁹ Lucian, Dream 1–3. On the sophistication of the self-portrayal there see now Gera 1995.

⁴⁰ Galen, On the Order of his Own Books 88; On his Own Books 116.

⁴¹ As Misch 1950, 479–80, rightly stresses. Nic. Dam. and Jos.: n. 38 above.

⁴² Conf. 1.8–9, 13, 2.4–8, 3.3–4. Augustine’s interest in childhood was not confined to his own: cf. his fine portrait of his mother Monica, with her youthful weakness for winebibbing (9.8).

⁴³ His interest in education is clear, as we saw in the last chapter and shall also see in the next: the most relevant essays are Progress in Virtue, Can Virtue be Taught?, On Listening to the Poets and On Moral Virtue : the last is especially full on the psychological processes involved (cf. pp. 283–8). For education as a civilizing and restraining force in the Lives, see esp. Cor. 1.4–5; Mar. 2.2–4; Them. 2.7; Numa 26(4).10–12; Bucher-Isler 1972, 21, 24, 49, 67–8.

⁴⁴ See pp. 293, 295.

⁴⁵ See p. 297 n. 3.

⁴⁶ Gill 1983, 1986, and 1990: see my discussion above, pp. 321–9.

⁴⁷ On this passage and its role in Romulus see now Tatum 1996, 144–6.

⁴⁸ For this distinction, see Pelling 1988, 33–6 and ch. 6, esp. pp. 153–6, where I say a little more about such childhood reconstructions.

⁴⁹ I discuss Marcellus more fully in Pelling 1989, 199–208; cf. also Swain 1990a, 131–2, 140–2 = Scardigli 1995, 239–40, 254–9. On the deficiencies of the military man cf. esp. chs. 15 and 18 on Coriolanus.

⁵⁰ More on Spartan wealth, and the (morally complex) way it is associated with women, in Pelling, forthcoming (b); and on Plutarch’s interest in these grand Spartan women see Powell 1999.

⁵¹ So Russell 1963, 23 = Scardigli 1995, 362.

⁵² Russell 1963. I discuss this instance more briefly at pp. 155–6 and more fully at pp. 394–8, where I link it with other reinterpretations of Dionysius’ material.

⁵³ Erikson 1958, 37, 47, 50 (cited at p. 167 n. 68), 65.

⁵⁴ Though ‘individual’ in a way which requires further definition, and which shows some differences from modern approaches and assumptions. Cf. ch. 13, esp. pp. 286–8. On Gill’s character–personality distinction see also pp. 321–2.

⁵⁵ Russell 1966a, 38 = Scardigli 1995, 193–4: cf. above, p. 293.

⁵⁶ I discuss the characterization of Lysander in ch. 13, pp. 292–7. On this technique of progressive redefinition of character see pp. 293–4 and n. 36; also n. 60 below.

⁵⁷ On the importance in the Life of this ‘raring to go’ (Larmour) cf. p. 191 n. 21.

⁵⁸ Isoc. Helen 23; cf. Diodorus 4.59.1, and other passages listed at R-E Spb. xiii. 1204. The absence of anecdote is here especially striking; contrast the pleasing Hellenistic story of Paus. 1.27 7 (= FGrH 607 fr. 4; cf. R-E Spb. 1058), which Plutarch may well have known. The seven-year-old Theseus met Heracles over dinner; Heracles took off his lion-skin, and everyone else thought it was a real lion and fled. Theseus stayed.

⁵⁹ On the moral complexity which this adds to the Life see also pp. 186–7 and esp. 198–200.

⁶⁰ This is a refinement of the basic narrative technique discussed briefly by Fraenkel 1950, iii. 805. In Pelling 2000, 69, 89–93 I try to extend the analysis to other authors, especially Thucydides (on whom see also Rood 1998, index s.v. ‘delay, narrative’). For a related technique in Aristophanes cf. Russo 1994, 34–7.

⁶¹ Cf. Pelling 1989, 214–15.

⁶² ‘The hero is there, all in one piece’: Cilento 1961, 109; quoted with approval by Russell 1966b, 145 = Scardigli 1995, 83 in the course of an interesting discussion (144–7 = 81–6). Cf. also Misch 1950, 291; Buchler-Isler 1972, 61; Frazier 1992, 4535 and 1996, 78–9. The more precise formulation of Gill 1983, 476, is very fair: ‘even when the author regards the theme of character-formation as relevant to his narrative (as Plutarch clearly sometimes does), the actual process of personal development is very lightly sketched’.

⁶³ See above, p. 293.

⁶⁴ On this ‘clash of lives’ cf. esp. Moles 1988, 11–12, 151, 185, 193; on the way this dominates the early chapters, also Swain 1990b, 194–5 and Pelling 1989, 216–17. See also p. 326 and n. 102.

⁶⁵ Pelling 1989, 222–8, especially 223–4; Swain 1990b, 201–3.

⁶⁶ Simon Swain has argued in a most interesting series of articles (esp. Swain 1990a, 1990b, and 1992a, summarized in Swain 1996, 140–4) that paideia tends to be explored more thoroughly in Roman Lives than in Greek: so often the nature, and particularly the deficiencies, of a Roman’s education explain where he went wrong in later life, especially when control of the passions is in point. I argued something similar myself, but more crudely and without the same emphasis on a Greek–Roman distinction, in Pelling 1989.

⁶⁷ Cf. pp. 129–30. Aem. 30.1 provides a particularly interesting parallel. Aemilius authorized the enslavement of 150,000 men and the devastation of 70 cities. That presented Plutarch with similar problems, for Aemilius too has been presented as a distinctively cultured figure: so ‘this in particular ran counter to his nature, which was reasonable and noble’. So also with the well-brought-up Gracchi, eventually led astray ‘contrary to their nature’ (Gracch. 45(5).5). It is figures like this whose lapses are felt as particularly problematic. Cf. Gill 1983, 478–81: ‘his analysis [of apparent character-change in Sulla and Sertorius] depends on his view of good character (fully developed, reasoned excellence of character), and his conviction that it guarantees emotional continuity regardless of circumstanccs’ (481). As Gill stresses, it is precisely paideia that imparts this ‘fully developed, reasoned excellence of character’.

⁶⁸ Stadter 1987 and 1989, xxxviii–xliv, acutely illustrates the rhetorical problems which this stage of Pericles’ career presented, and the importance of this ‘out of character’ analysis to Plutarch’s narrative strategy; but the criticisms levelled by Gomme, HCT i. 65–6, and Connor 1968, 114, still have some force. This particular narrative strategy was an uncomfortable one, but Pericles’ education forced Plutarch to adopt it. Cf. also pp. 129–30, where I discuss how this passage fits into Plutarch’s conception of fifth-century Athenian politics.

⁶⁹ Cf. Frazier 1996, 76–8, who similarly brings out Plutarch’s failure to trace any development in the young Alcibiades; she puts particular stress on the lack of any clear chronology (cf. also her p. 93; Russell 1966a and 1973, 118–19), with the narrative sometimes seeming to deal with a very young person, sometimes with a near-adult.

⁷⁰ See esp. Bucher-Isler 1972.

⁷¹ I also exploit this idea of an ‘integrated character’ in ch. 13, esp. pp. 288–91. For similar remarks, see Rutherford 1986, 149–50 and n. 31. Rudd 1976, 160–2, has a stimulating and cultured discussion to which I am indebted, though perhaps he underestimates the distance between ancient and modern assumptions. Cf. also Dihle 1956, 76–81; n. 77 below.

⁷² Ant. 24.9–12; cf. Pelling 1988, 181–3 ad loc.

⁷³ For terms and discussion, see e.g. Cattell 1965, chs. 3–4. ‘Source-traits’ do not work for Plutarch’s characters (pace e.g. Garzetti 1954, xliii–xlix): so, rightly, Bucher-Isler 1972, 60, though at 82 she oddly thinks that this detracts from their cogency as individual personalities; Frazier 1996, 85–6.

⁷⁴ Much useful material can be gleaned from Bucher-Isler 1972, 25–46, though her approach is austerely lexical. Her pp. 39–45, exemplifying ‘Gleichzeitiges Vorkommen gegensätzlicher Tugenden’ might be expected to provide counter-examples: but in fact many of the ‘virtues’ are not particularly ‘contrary’ (e.g. άνδρεία (‘manly courage’) does not combine at all uncomfortably with αίδώς, άπάθεια, γνώμη, δεινότης, δικαιoσύνη, or έγκράτεια (‘shame’, ‘unsusceptibility’, ‘intelligence’, ‘cleverness’ or ‘extraordinariness’, ‘justice’, or ‘self-control’), to take only her first six cases); and in some cases where the combination is more surprising Plutarch himself explains why the grouping is an easy one (e.g. it was natural that someone of Marcellus’ period, education, and tastes should become πoλεμικός, σώϕρων, and ϕιλάνθρωπος (‘warlike’, ‘restrained’, and ‘kind to his fellow-men’, Marc. 1.2) ).

⁷⁵ This formulation may help to explain why Cato’s Stoicism is allowed more explanatory force than most heroes’ education or philosophy: that point was noted in Pelling 1989, 229–30, and explained in Swain 1990b, 197–201. Stoicism more distinctively explains Cato’s lack of concern for conventional opinion, and that is important in relating the scruffiness, for instance, to the high principle.

⁷⁶ See pp. 288–91 (Aratus) and 292–7 (Lysander).

⁷⁷ Cf. esp. Rutherford 1986. The same goes for Tacitus’ Licinius Mucianus (Hist. 1.10) and Horace’s Tigellius (Sat. 1.3.1–19), pace Rudd 1976, 161–2. Such ancient figures are, in Aristotelian terms, ‘consistently inconsistent’ (Poet. 1454a27–8) – and much more predictably inconsistent than modern counterparts. Mucianus’ inconsistency, influenced as it is by Sallust’s Sulla and Catiline (BJ 95, BC 5), is indeed stereotyped rather than singular (cf. Griffin 1977, 21–2 = 1985, 39–40). Plutarch’s Sulla too has something in common with this type; so does Livy’s Antiochus Epiphanes (41.20). Cf. now Frazier 1996, 86–9, Gribble 1999, 265–70, 274–5, and Duff 1999, 227–31: Duff accepts that Plutarch’s Alcibiades is ‘integrated’ around this trait of inconsistency (227 n. 67 and 240, cf. Gribble 265, 268).

⁷⁸ Notice for instance how Plutarch treats Caesar’s physical appearance and sickness, including his epilepsy, in Caes. 17.1–3: ‘…he never made his physical weakness an excuse for slacking, preferring to use campaigning as a way to strengthen his physique: his way of fighting against his illness and keeping his body fit was a prescription of long marches, simple diet, nights in the open air, and constant hard work…’ So even a feature which does not seem to fit, his physical weakness, is made to play a part in the picture of his formidable generalship: the frailty illustrates the drive with which he fought against it. Contrast Suet. Div. Iul. 45.1, who treats the physical appearance and the epilepsy as self-standing points, without the same concern to ‘integrate’ them tightly with his other traits. For other examples in Suetonius’ Claudius (33.2, 35, and 39) cf. Pelling 1997d, 125 and n. 34, where I illustrate the point by a contrast with Cassius Dio.

⁷⁹ For most interesting treatments of ancient and modern assumptions, cf. Dihle 1956, 76–81, which I discuss at pp. 283–8, and Halliwell 1986, 149–52.

⁸⁰ Letter of 28 Dec. 1917: Woolf and Strachey 1956, 68.

⁸¹ The integration does not even invariably aid the moralism. One of his ethical interests is the demonstration that human nature is very varied, and can produce people like this (cf. esp. Cim. 2.5; Ag.–Cl. 37(16).8), an insight which should encourage rather than impede an interest in idiosyncrasy.

⁸² Shakespeare’s characters strike us as more individualized than their ancient counterparts (e.g. Gould 1978, 46–8); but Dr Johnson praised them differently: ‘In the writings of other poets a character is too often an individual: in Shakespeare it is commonly a species’ (Preface to his 1765 edn. = Wimsatt 1960, 59). Johnson’s tastes were those of his day. Cf. Bradbrook 1935, 50–4.

⁸³ Cf. ch. 13, esp. p. 287. The nearest ancient parallel to a modern ‘complex personality’ is perhaps afforded by divine ‘personalities’. Gods do often combine a multiplicity of traits or associations which do not group naturally, most clearly Apollo and Hermes, and arguably Artemis: that, doubtless, partly springs from the amalgamation of the associations of discrete local cults (see e.g. Sourvinou-Inwood 1978). The treatment of childhood is consequently more varied: the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, for instance, does introduce that range of different qualities, all pointed by anecdotes about the god’s first days – not merely the inventiveness (making the lyre), the mischief-making (the stealing of Apollo’s cattle, both on his first day alive), and the charm he exercises on both Zeus and Apollo himself, all qualities which could be held to be neighbouring, but also the flair for beguiling song, which seems less naturally related. This contrast of divine and human raises interesting points: for instance, an unusually singular combination of human traits is presented by Achilles in the Iliad, and one wonders about the relevance of his divine parentage. But that cannot be pursued here.

⁸⁴ Mrs Rosalind Nash, in a most entertaining article (Nash 1928; cf. Sanders 1957, 203). For other criticisms of the passage, see Holroyd 1968, 287–8.

⁸⁵ Strachey 1924, 16–17.

⁸⁶ Strachey 1928, 20.

⁸⁷ Ludwig 1927, 29.

⁸⁸ Williams 1979. I also exploit this passage in ch. 6, p. 157.

⁸⁹ Especially Gill 1983, 1986, and 1990. I discussed the issues raised by the distinction briefly in Pelling 1989, 230–2, and borrow some material from that discussion here.

⁹⁰ Esp. Marc. 28, cf. Pel. 2 and Marc. 33(3).6–8: more on this in Pelling 1989, 199–208, esp. 205–7.

⁹¹ As I grumpily suggested in Pelling 1989, 231.

⁹² This emerges from many of the papers in Brooks and Gewirtz 1996, e.g. Minow 1996, 31–2, on ‘one-downmanship’ (the I’m-a-worse-victim-than-you-are syndrome), Ferguson 1996, 86–8, on the ‘ethos of victimization’, and Gewirtz 1996, 142. See also Sykes 1992.

⁹³ That is, in Gorgias’ Helen, in the debate of Helen and Hecuba in Euripides’ Trojan Women 860–1059, in Antiphon’s Tetralogies, in Thucydides’ Plataean debate (and arguably in the presentation of the origins of the war in Book 1), and in Aristotle, Nic. Eth. 3. 1110b9 ff., 1111a21 ff. and elsewhere. I explore this further in Pelling 2000, 71–2, 94–5, and 100–1.

⁹⁴ Rather unexpectedly, the phrase originates with the not specially illiberal John Major, commenting in 1993 on juvenile crime after the atrocious murder of a toddler.

⁹⁵ Gill sets out and explains his categories in his introduction, 1996, 1–18. Among the crucial examples he then explores are those of Achilles in Iliad 9 (pp. 124–54, 190–204), Jason in Euripides’ Medea (pp 154–74, 216–26) and Ajax in Sophocles’ Ajax (pp. 204–16).

⁹⁶ In particular, Waterfield 1997, Blundell 1998, and Cairns 1998. One point which Cairns especially probes is the analogies Gill sees between his epic and dramatic examples, which are taken as ‘second-order’ reflections on shared ethical norms in extreme situations, and philosophical discussions which build on and also challenge and revise those norms. That clearly has application to my discussion of Plutarch’s moralism in ch. 10, and is a recurrent interest in the more elaborate treatment of Duff 1999: does Plutarch challenge accepted norms as well as exploring their application to crucial issues? The question is a good one, but less relevant to the concerns of this present chapter, and I do not address it here.

⁹⁷ This is a major theme of Frazier 1996, esp. her Part II (95–170), stressing that Plutarch presents and evaluates his heroes against ‘le devoir absolu d’agir au service de la cité’ (169). She goes on to trace the impact of this on Plutarch’s scheme of virtues, e.g the interpretation of dikaiosune (‘justice’) and sophrosune (‘prudence’ or ‘practical sense’) as ‘social virtues’, 189–5, or the retexturing of andreia (‘bravery’ or ‘manliness’) as courage deployed in the city’s interest rather than blind heroism, 180–9. In an earlier article (Frazier 1987) she brought out how frequently comparison centres on parallels in the political circumstances that the two men had to face: so also van der Valk 1982.

⁹⁸ Frazier 1992.

⁹⁹ Close to, because On Moral Virtue too has a picture of internal contestation, as reason interacts with emotion. In a well-ordered soul the passionate, emotional side will itself be habituated in Aristotelian fashion (pp. 284–5) into reasonable responses: this is analogous to ‘the unforced cohesion of the parts’ rather than ‘the conscious control of one part (or set of parts) by another’ which Gill argues for Plato (1996, ch. 4, esp. 245–60: quotation from 245), and his argument that Euripides’ Medea faces a clash of rationalities rather than a conflict of passion and reason (216–26). Not identical, because Plutarch argues elaborately against a single unified psyche and an assimilation of emotion to logos (446f–9a): among his targets there is Chrysippus, whose analysis of Euripides’ Medea along these lines is championed by Gill (1996, 226–39). At 441e–2c Plutarch also seems to take Plato as arguing for a more straightforward control of emotion by reason than Gill would think, and differentiates him more sharply from Aristotle.

¹⁰⁰ e.g. Advice on Public Life 813d, Tranquillity of Mind 471c, How to Listen to the Poets 16e, Talkativeness 514e–f, Keeping One’s Health 122e, Control of Anger 463d–f, Progress in Virtue 77f–78a (Diogenes) and 85a–b, Against Colotes 1119a–b, and even The Intelligence of Animals 969a–b (dogs too ponder like that). Plutarch need not have envisaged real decisions as consciously reached in so stylized a way; this can be seen as a mannered counterpart of the deliberative process – but, if it is an equivalent, it is still a telling equivalent. Cf. Gill on Plato and others, 1996, 252–3.

¹⁰¹ Cf. Cic. 3.3, 3.6–7, 4.3, 4.4, 32.5–7, 36.7–9, 40–1.

¹⁰² Cic. 37.3, exploiting at least Cic. Att. 8.7(155).2 and perhaps some other letters as well, e.g. Fam. 7.3(183).1–3, Att. 7.3(126).5, 7.12(135).3, 7.13(136).1–2: for this issue and for Plutarch’s simplifications, cf. Pelling 1989, 219 and n. 28 and Moles 1988, 186 ad loc. (‘eloquent simplification’). There is no need to doubt that Plutarch knew the letter(s) at first hand: cf. pp. 16, 21 and 42 n. 140.

¹⁰³ Below, pp. 388 and 407 n. 5.

¹⁰⁴ Brenk 1987b, 324–7: ‘Caesar’s role is primarily the psychological conquest of his own restraints and fears, set in the gloomy framework of irrationality overcoming cautious prudence and respect for law’ … ‘Plutarch’s Aeschylean Caesar’. Frederick Brenk kindly confirms to me that he was thinking especially of a parallel with Agamemnon at Aulis, a theme he had developed in an earlier unpublished paper.

¹⁰⁵ No passage in Greek literature is more disputed, and this is hardly the place to enter the fray. But the parallel with Eteocles in Seven Against Thebes seems to me the telling one, where the chorus similarly find disquieting Eteocles’ acquiescent reaction at 686–719: other factors may be making the course of action inevitable, but Eteocles still makes the choice his own. Gill 1990, 22–9, here has some very good remarks.

¹⁰⁶ I discuss that passage at p. 257.

¹⁰⁷ That is particularly remarkable because we do find something of ‘fame for the future’ in the paired Life Alexander, especially at 14.9 (above, p. 257).

¹⁰⁸ There may well be another sort of uncertainty here, the uncertainty of reader or narratee as to how to interpret ‘the unspeakable dream’. Is that a dream which is causing Caesar’s hesitation, one sent supernaturally from outside to mark the monstrosity of his action? Or is it caused by the hesitation, internally generated by his own uneasy conscience? We cannot know, any more than Caesar himself could know. I discuss this at Pelling 1997b, 200–1.

It takes us some way from Gill, but it is interesting to compare Marshall 2000, 78–80, who contrasts Plutarch’s Rubicon scene with Shakespeare’s modes of depicting internal conflict. She acknowledges a degree of internal debate in Plutarch’s scene, but adds that ‘[v]irtually no emphasis is given to Caesar’s own realization of the moment’s importance. What matters are his words, how the moment was publicly communicated. Lucan [at 1.183 ff.] comes closer to granting Caesar an interior consciousness…’ That seems to me an overstatement, but it does bring out how the internal debate could have been deeper. In treating Plutarch’s dream she then enters into a world which is eloquently different: ‘The dream offers a trace of female presence, located with Caesar’s consciousness and experienced as internal otherness. Thus the drama produces the sense of interior space while simultaneously attesting to the potency of the largely repressed female portion of Caesar’s identity. Figuring the representative of his mother within the consciousness of Caesar creates the impression of psychological complexity: “Rome” within is simultaneously “room” within (pronounced the same in early modern England). The episode illustrates how Plutarch, in the translated version Shakespeare consulted, used gender difference to create the sense of an other within the self.’ I express no view on whether Shakespeare might have read Plutarch like this; but if he did, it was not a reading which is true to Plutarch’s text – certainly not to the Life as a whole, nor really to this scene. Plutarch had the resources to create something like this picture, though scarcely with all the Lacanian refinements: it is not crass to read Coriolanus in a similar way. But Caesar does not develop either the notion of psychic conflict or an interest in gender in a sufficiently sustained way to make such a reading plausible. The absence of the feminine from Caesar (p. 260) is not an absent presence, it is just an absence.

¹⁰⁹ See p. 111 n. 27.

¹¹⁰ B. Williams 1993.

¹¹¹ For this notion of ‘characterful action’ cf. Halliwell 1986, ch. 5. esp. 151.

¹¹² Cairns 1982, esp. 204. Cairns explains Cleon’s echoes of Pericles (Thucydides 3.37.2, 40.4) in terms of allusion to Thersites and Achilles. I am uncertain about that, but the ethical assumptions we are here discussing are anyway relevant.

¹¹³ Pelling 1990, 256–7.