15

Rhetoric, paideia, and psychology in Plutarch’s Lives

Friedrich Leo listed six categories often found in a Life’s opening chapters: family, appearance, character, way of life, education, and style of speech (γἐνος, ¹ It is with the relation of these last two categories, paideia and logos, that I am here concerned.

It goes without saying that both categories are extremely important to Plutarch, and not confined to opening chapters. As a child of Greek rhetorical culture, he could not fail to be sensitive to logos : he frequently stresses the important of rhetoric as a tool for politics (ὅργανον is the favourite word).² His interest in education, especially Greek education, is equally clear, as we have seen in the last two chapters: recent work, especially by Simon Swain, has brought out how central the notion of paideia is to many of the Lives, especially the Roman Lives, and in particular how the presence or absence of Greek paideia tends to condition the range of ethical questions which Plutarch asks about his subjects.³ It is clear, too, that paideia and logos belong closely together. Plutarch can show interest in the rhetorical teachers of prominent political figures (both Caesar and Cicero studied with Apollonius Molon⁴); and it is unsurprising that the two categories should so often be treated in close connection with one another.⁵

The precise way in which the two categories connect remains striking. We might have expected a man’s rhetorical style, or his degree of rhetorical skill and success, to be represented as a consequence of his particular teachers: for logos, in other words, to be explored as a product of paideia. And that is what we find – with the most extreme and famous cases, Demosthenes and Cicero. Demosthenes is mesmerized by the brilliance of his teacher Callistratus into dedicating himself to the pursuit of rhetorical glory (Dem. 5.4–7, with added speculation on what he learnt from Isaeus, Isocrates, and even Plato); and Cicero tours Asia and Rhodes to learn his rhetorical trade from the greatest masters before plunging back into Roman politics (Cic. 4). Here, then, paideia is what generates logos, both in fostering a particular rhetorical style and in lending an individual the rhetorical virtuosity which will enable him to become pre-eminent in politics.⁶

Yet these are, indeed, the most extreme cases. Elsewhere we find rhetorical style treated more as if it springs directly from a person’s nature.⁷ That, of course, is what makes it such a telling part of the biographer’s repertoire: style is a prism for viewing the man himself.

Fabius’ style fitted his life perfectly. There was no affectation in it, no empty, populist showiness; but there was intellect, showing a distinctive and extreme form and depth in its formulation of epigrams, very much (they say) in the style of Thucydides.

(Fab. 1.7–8)

Cato’s style did not strive for novelty or cleverness: it was correct, intense, and rough. Yet still this roughness of thought was overlaid with a certain charm which played on the listener’s ear, and the admixture of the man’s distinctive character added to the dignity a pleasure and humour which had its own human attractiveness.

(CatoMin. 5.3)

Antony spoke in the so-called Asianic style, which at that time was in vogue: there were many similarities between the style and the man himself, boastful, whinnying,full of empty prancing and uneven pretension.

(Ant. 2.8)

Of course, such a presentation need not preclude the importance of paideia as well: we could always say that an individual selected the teachers which suited his temperament, or drew from the tuition what he found congenial. But we would be the ones saying this: Plutarch does not say it himself, but leaves the impression that the relation between style and character is a simple and direct one.

There is, however, a further and subtler way in which paideia and logos interact. For Plutarch, one distinctive contribution of Greek paideia is the way it teaches control of the passions; a second, the way it builds a sympathetic interest in and understanding of other people, and a consequent ease and sensitivity in personal interaction. This is where Coriolanus and Marius fell down:

The same man (Coriolanus) bore witness to the truth of the view that a naturally generous and noble disposition, if it lacks education (paideia), will produce many evil fruits along with the good, in the same way as naturally good soil which is not tilled. Coriolanus’ energy and strength of mind constantly led him to attempt ambitious exploits, the results of which were good for Rome; but these qualities were combined with violent rages and uncompromising strokes of self-assertion, which made it difficult for him to combine with others... Of all the blessings which humans enjoy through the favour of the Muses, there is none so great as the process of taming and humanizing the natural instincts through education and study (ύπò λόγου καί παιδείας), so that by submitting to reason we acquire balance and avoid excess.

(Cor. 1.3–5).

Marius is said never to have studied Greek literature, or to have used the Greek language for anything serious, saying that it was absurd to learn a language whose teachers were other men’s slaves. Plato would often say to the philosopher Xenocrates, who had the reputation of being too surly and uncouth, ‘My dear Xenocrates, do please sacrifice to the Graces’; and in the same way, if Marius had been persuaded to sacrifice to the Greek Muses and Graces, he would not have brought his career, with its glorious commands and political achievements, to so ugly a conclusion, cast aground by rage and by untimely ambition on the shores of a most savage and brutal old age.

(Mar. 2.2–4)

Thus too Philopoemen spent more of his energy and ambition on military education than he needed, closing his mind to all philosophical and literary paideia other than military manuals; and this lack of education is subtly related to the distinctive ‘contentiousness’, philonikia, which so often compromised his political style.⁸ As we saw in ch. 14 (pp. 309, 312–13) Marcellus offers another case of a man whose education was affected by the Roman preoccupations of the day: in his case, the long sequence of wars which denied him the leisure to indulge his natural taste for Greek culture and literature (Marc. 1.3–5). In his case, too, it is arguable that cultural deficiency can be linked to behaviour later in the Life, in particular the man’s impetuosity and lack of self-control.⁹ Coriolanus, Marius, Philopoemen, Marcellus: it does indeed seem as if soldiers are, for Plutarch, particularly prone to such educational onesidedness.¹⁰ Such ‘contentiousness’, such infectious passion, such roughness in personal interactions are just the thing for the barracks or the battlefield, but they tend to leave a man out of his depth when it comes to the subtler relationships of personal and political life.

Rhetoric too requires a sensitive understanding of other people: in this case, understanding of an audience’s psychology. That point is formulated most powerfully by Aristotle in the Rhetoric, but it goes back much earlier: regretted by Plato, for it leaves the orator no better than a confectioner or beautician;¹¹ exploited by Thucydides, whose Nicias knows that his cautious rhetoric cannot compete against the enterprising vitality of the Athenian national character (‘my words may well be no match for your natural tendencies’, 6.9.3) whereas his Alcibiades knows so well how to tickle the Athenian tummy; and implicit already in Homer, whose Odysseus is so adept at finding the right thing to say for a particular listener.

In Plutarch too it is unsurprising that the personal insensitivities of the undereducated are mirrored in their rhetorical performance. They fail to find the right things to say because they fail to control their emotions and fail to understand their audience, whether we think of Coriolanus’ tactless harangues or Marius’ brash vauntings as he introduced his military reforms, those

speeches brimful of arrogant overconfidence and hybris which infuriated the leading citizens...it was not a matter of shallow, unthinking braggadocio; ...it was rather that the demos, in its pleasure at the senate’s humiliation and its perpetual habit of measuring a man’s spirit by his verbal boastfulness, was carrying him away and urging him on to be relentless in attacking the elite as he played to the mob.

(Mar. 9.3–4).

In warfare, Marius can be relied upon to say the right thing, and has a gift for establishing rapport with his listeners.¹² But this is not the last time in the Life when Marius’ peacetime logos – or once or twice his absence of logos, his aggressive and contumacious silences – mark a failure to check his passions, particularly his disastrous taste for popular goodwill;¹³ nor is it the last time when we see his logos misfiring in politics, generating the wrong response because he has failed to read his audience aright.¹⁴ Failure to control the passions, failure to react sensitively to others – these are the classic symptoms of a deficient paideia; and logos, even though (as we saw) it is not figured as springing directly from that paideia, proves a valuable touchstone for exploring a man’s educational strengths and frailties.

The ways in which rhetoric depends on audience rapport can have interesting variations, and the rest of this chapter will examine one of the most complex cases, the pair Coriolanus–Alcibiades. Both men have rhetorical skills, but in each case the rhetorical effectiveness is suggestively intermittent. Coriolanus, like Marius, can produce the right rhetoric on the battlefield: at Corioli he not only finds the right encouragement for his troops (8.5, 9.1–2), he also accepts their plaudits with dignity and aplomb (10). Such rhetoric does not need to be subtle. On the battlefield Coriolanus vented his indignation in loud ‘shouts’ (8.3, 8.5, 9.1),¹⁵ which certainly touch the spot with his men: Plutarch has just noted, rather intrusively, the demand of the elder Cato that the good soldier should ‘be fearful and irresistible to his foe not just with his hand and his blows, but also with the tone of his voice and the sight of his face’. Those men duly respond in kind, acclaiming their hero with ‘shouting and tumult’ (βοὴ καὶ θορυβος, 11.1, cf. 9.5, 10.6). But this shouting also offers a precursor of the political struggles which lie ahead. Cato’s language is echoed particularly closely in the trial-scene at 18.3, when Coriolanus refused to display any humility, but instead ‘showed in the tone of his voice and in the expression of his face a fearlessness which bordered upon contempt and arrogance’. The same tones are by then catastrophic. Even the register in which Coriolanus couched his martial encouragement at Corioli has hinted at the trouble which looms. When the danger was first approaching, he called on his aristocratic peers ‘not to fall short of the commons in fighting for the fatherland, but to show that they were their superiors in virtue rather than in power’ (7.4);¹⁶ Plutarch has developed this battlecry into an assertion – a potentially divisive assertion – of natural superiority.

It is not surprising that such rhetoric does not transpose well from the battlefield to the forum, when Coriolanus has to deal with a different sort of ‘shout’: this time, the shouts (13.1, 17.3) of the demagogues, whose manipulative and boisterous handling of the commons he is ill-equipped to handle.¹⁷ But this is not because he is simply rhetorically deficient. On the contrary, Plutarch underlines that he was ‘one of the most skilled and powerful speakers’ (ήν  39.6), and gives us an unusually extended example of that rhetoric in direct speech (16.5–7): this is particularly striking because Plutarch portrays a Rome which at this stage knew nothing of Greek education¹⁸ – itself an indication of how separately he tends to treat paideia and logos. That rhetorical skill may seem to leave it paradoxical that he is so much at a loss at his trial, so readily outmanoeuvred by the devious tribunes (20); but the paradox is only an apparent one.

For he had not expected this [the tribunes’ change of tack], nor did he have any ready fund of persuasive extempore argument to put to the demos: in fact, when hepraised those who had campaigned with him he was shouted down by the greaternumber who had not been part of those campaigns.

(20.6)

Coriolanus’ rhetoric is deficient precisely because it is only a matter of technique, the formal set speech: he cannot improvise because he has no natural understanding of the techniques his opponents are likely to employ, and the arguments his audience want to hear. Early in the Life Plutarch had elaborated the homely speech of Menenius Agrippa, whose comparison of the state to the human body was a palmary example of how to speak the language his audience could understand (6.3–5). When Shakespeare borrows the same foiling technique (Coriolanus I.i.50–161), he couches Menenius’ speech in conversational banter, question and answer with a responsive crowd – ‘extempore rhetoric’, indeed. As so often, Shakespeare is taking further a contrast which is already implicit in Plutarch’s own text, in this case the contrast between the rhetoric which understands its audience and responds to it and the rhetoric which does not.¹⁹

Alcibiades’ rhetorical manner is equally striking. Plutarch again emphasizes that he was a good speaker (δυνατός...εἰπει̑ν, 10.4), and can there quote the most unimpeachable authority, Demosthenes himself. But what Plutarch goes on to say about his rhetoric seems most surprising:

If we believe Theophrastus – a connoisseur of speech and unsurpassed among philosophers for his knowledge of history – Alcibiades was unmatched for his skill in identifying what needed to be said; but he was not fluent when it came to finding not merely what to say but the language in which to say it. He often stumbled in mid-speech, and fell silent, and left pauses when he could not find the words, thenpicked himself up again very carefully.

(Alc. 10.3–4)

That scarcely sounds like the model orator; and yet we are left with no doubt of his rhetorical impact on the Athenian demos, not least in persuading them into the Sicilian expedition. He gets away with it because of his natural rapport with the audience: he so perfectly mirrors their own nature, that vitality, that flair, that enterprise, that charisma.²⁰ During his first public speech he allowed a quail to escape from his cloak, and the Athenian public rushed around, helping him to find it (10.1–2). These are people who get on. They naturally find his stumbling style an engaging idiosyncrasy, not an irritating tic.

Yet his interaction with the demos is sufficiently complex that at other times Alcibiades seems to say exactly the right things, and they have no effect at all: his plea to the Athenians to try him before he leaves for Sicily, when he accurately detects the ‘malice’ (κακοήθεια) of his opponents (19.5–7); his letter advising them to beware of Phrynichus, which they wrongly assume is a case of a personal vendetta (25.13); his order to avoid engagement which Antiochus disastrously ignores (35.6–8), yet Alcibiades still takes the blame. Thrasybulus then accuses him of

...luxuriating away his office and entrusting command to his cronies, men who owed their influence to being his close drinking friends and his partners in sailor gossip, so that he could make money sailing around, debauching away, getting drunk, frolicking with the Abydan and Ionian courtesans, with the enemy anchoredjust a little way away.

(36.2)

The charge is false: Plutarch’s own narrative has made that clear. But the truth did not matter, Alcibiades’ reputation did. ‘The Athenians believed it’ (36.4).²¹ ‘If any man was ever destroyed by his own reputation, that man, it seems, was Alcibiades’ (35.2), and we can see how it happened. It was precisely the charismatic and outrageous aspects of his character which initially created the rapport with the Athenians: now it is the same aspects which ensure that his logos will not be believed, that the Athenians will think his words spring from personal antagonisms, ambitions, or vices. With Alcibiades as with Coriolanus, the rhetorical relations play a part in the wider picture of the men’s shifting relationships with their states: and Alcibiades, incomparably more sensitive and insightful and educated than Coriolanus, can ultimately manage his audience no more successfully.²²

Let us end by returning to Coriolanus. Is it fanciful to think that this contrast between prepared and extempore rhetoric has a Platonic ring? One thinks especially of the Phaedrus, with its suspicions of the fixed text and its preference for a dialectical exchange which can avoid predetermined positions, adapt to the shifting requirements of the discussion, and be sensitive to each new interlocutor. What makes the suggestion less fanciful is the fact that Plato is already in the air by that point of Coriolanus ²³ A few chapters earlier we have heard that:

Coriolanus had always given free rein to the spirited and contentious part of his soul  as if there were some inherent grandeur and greatness of will in those qualities, and he had never allowed the characteristics of gravity and tolerance (τò δ’ ἐμβριθὲς καὶ πρᾳ̑ον) – so central to political life – to be textured by discourse and education (ὑπò λόγου καὶ παιδείας). He never understood that a man who aspires to play a part in public life must avoid at all costs that stubbornness which, in Plato’s phrase, is the natural companion of solitude, but rather must mingle with other people, and even come to love the capacity to accept injury, so derided by some. Coriolanus on the other hand was always a simple fellow and obstinate, and he thought victory and domination over everyone and in every circumstance  was a mark of courage, not of the weakness and softness which generate rage (τòν θυμòν) like an abscess springing from the wounded and suffering part of the soul...

(15.4–5)

This brings us back to that stress on education: as we saw in the first chapter, it is logos and paideia which might have given the right texture of gravity and toleration. Instead Coriolanus gives free rein to ‘the spirited and contentious part of the soul’, again picking up that introductory statement at 1.4 when we heard of Coriolanus’ ‘violent rages and uncompromising strokes of self-assertion’ .

In this present passage both θυμοειδές (‘spirited’) and ϕιλόνικον (‘contentious’) are suggestive words. It is unclear whether Plutarch’s audience would have taken the etymology of ϕιλόνικον to be ‘love of quarrels’ (νείκη) or ‘love of victory’ (νίκη): probably they felt both associations,²⁴ and both associations are relevant here. The ‘love of victory’ is what one wants in a soldier, but once again we see how that can be disastrous in politics, as it topples over into that desire for ‘victory and domination over everyone and in every circumstance’; and this is precisely because of the ‘quarrels’, νείκη, which such contentiousness inspires. We noticed earlier that it was particularly the military men who found such quarrelsomeness a difficulty in politics: now we can better understand why.

It is the other term of the pairing, that ‘spirited’ (θυμοειδές) part of the soul, which is more distinctively Platonic, and raises the analysis to a new psychological level. The language recalls the ‘parts of the soul’ so important in the Republic; the explicit Platonic allusion to ‘stubbornness, the companion of solitude’ helps us to pin the hint down. In the Republic this ‘spiritedness’ (τò θυμοειδές) is a quality essential to the state (e.g. 376), but it is associated distinctively with courage and warfare: it is this which makes a person brave (ἀνδρει̑ος, 375a, 410d, 442b) – but it also makes a person hard to live with in everyday life, and one needs to have an injection of ‘gentleness’ (πραὀτης, 375b–c, cf. Laws 731b). This part of the soul is therefore particularly in need of careful education (401b–12a, 441e–2a). When the Republic fully develops its tripartite picture of the soul, we come to see that ‘spiritedness’ is associated particularly with the middle class, that of the ‘helpers’, whose function in the state is that of warfare (440d–1a, 441e–2c). Thus the Platonic vocabulary reinforces the suggestions of ‘contentiousness’, τò ϕιλόνικον, which is later closely linked with such ‘spiritedness’ (548c, 550b, 581a–b, 596c). These are indeed the characteristics that mark out the soldier, and they are exactly the qualities which rendered Coriolanus so great and so useful to the state – yet now also so menacing and so destructive.

So a complex picture has here been built of Coriolanus’ strengths and weaknesses, which – as so often in Plutarch – turn out to have a very close relationship to one another. Platonic psychological categories enable us to understand his failure to understand others. It does not follow that the man was psychologically beyond saving: a good education would have ensured that those hard, tough qualities were properly exercised and tempered. And Coriolanus’ rhetoric turns out to be closely integrated with the rest of the portrayal. For all his natural rhetorical skill, his failure to extemporize marks a falling short in another Platonic category, and further reflects the crucial lack of adaptability which the rest of the Platonic analysis has exposed. So logos, paideia, and psychology are indeed closely linked. The lack of rhetorical adaptability exposes Coriolanus’ educational failings, but not in the crude sense that education would have set him the right sort of extemporizing exercises. Education would have moulded his own psychology in such a way as to understand the psychology of others, a gift without which no speaker, then or now, can hope to succeed.

Notes

¹ Leo 1901, 180–2. On γένος see Pérez Jiménez, forthcoming.

² e.g. Advice on Public Life 801c–2e, A Philosopher should Particularly Converse with Princes 777b; Fab. 1.7, Cato Min. 4.3, Cic. 32.6, Crass. 3.3, Cato Mai. 1.5, Ant. 27.4.

³ Cf. esp. Swain 1990a, 1990b, 1992a, and 1996, 139–45; see also above, pp. 313, 321–2 and 333 n. 66, and Pelling 1989.

⁴ Caes. 3.1, Cic. 4.5. But it is true that rhetorical teachers are treated more rarely than their philosophical counterparts

⁵ e.g. Luc. 1.2–7, Crass. 3.3–8, Brut. 2.1–8, Cato Min. 4–5, Aem. 2.5–6, and Dem. 5.4–5.

⁶ A further case might be Caesar, if the argument of p. 93 is accepted about the reordering of material in Caes. 1–3.

⁷ Wardman 1974, 222–34, collects and discusses examples.

⁸ Cf. esp. Phil. 3–4; I also discussed this in Pelling 1989, 208–9, and more fully in Pelling 1997a, 125–35. See also Walsh 1992, 208–33.

⁹ I discussed this in Pelling 1989, 199–208; see also Swain 1990a, 131–2, 140–2 =Scardigli 1995, 239–40, 254–9.

¹⁰ More on this in Pelling 1996, xxvi–xxix. Compare the emphasis at Galba 1 on thedangerous and reckless irrationality of ordinary soldiers when they are out of control: inthat Life too he exploits Platonic allusion to make the point (Ash 1997, 191–6).

¹¹ Gorgias 464b–6a.

¹² Cf. esp. Mar. 16–17.1, 20.7–10, 24.1–2, 36.7–9: note that this paraded childhoodomen carried conviction among those who heard it: ‘they believed it’ (πιστεύσαντας,36.9).

¹³ Cf. esp. Mar. 28.3–6, 29.6–7, 30.2–5, 43.2–4, 44.8, 45.8–9, 45.12.

¹⁴ Cf. Mar. 30.6, 34.7, 43.3.

¹⁵ There is considerable improvement here on his source Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who has nothing of all this ‘shouting’ (AR 6.92–3): see also pp. 391–2.

¹⁶ Again there is nothing of this in Dionysius.

¹⁷ More on this at pp. 391–2.

¹⁸ Swain 1990a, esp. 136–7 = Scardigli 1995, 247–9, on Coriolanus and his rhetoric and education: cf. also his 132 n. 52 = Scardigli 1995, 240 n. 52 on other Romans whowere good speakers before the time when Plutarch thought Greek education reachedRome.

¹⁹ Below, pp. 388–91.

²⁰ Above, pp. 125–8.

²¹ οἱ δὲ ’Aθηναι̑οι πεισθέντες (36.4), in its brevity and bleakness as effective as Thucydides’ ‘they were persuaded’ (οί δὲ πεισθέντες) at 1.135.3. There, as here, a great man is overthrown in a moment of popular credulity. I say more about Plutarch’s picture of Alcibiades’ fall in Pelling 2000, 52–8; cf. also Duff 1999, 237–9, Gribble 1999, 281–2.

²² So this is a sort of answer to the question put by Frazier 1987, 74: ‘Quel point commun trouver.. .entre l’Athénien raffiné, disciple de Socrate, habile flatteur et redoutable opportuniste, et le rude Romain sans éducation, emporté et inflexible?’ Frazier too finds an explanation more in the actions of the two men and in the political circumstances they had to face than in their characters.

²³ We also go on to have a considerable use of Plato in the paired Life Alcibiades, particularly but not only when Alcibiades’ relations with Socrates are in point: Russell 1966, 40–1 = Scardigli 1995, 196–8, and 1973, 127; Pelling 1996, xlvii–xlix; Gribble 1999, 270–6; and now esp. Duff 1999, 206–14 on the use of Platonic categories in treating Coriolanus and his anger, and 216–18, 224–7 on the Platonic allusions in Alcibiades.

²⁴ At least, plays with both νει̑κος and νίκη are found before Plutarch’s day: cf. e.g.for -νικ-, Gorg. Helen 4, Plato Phileb. 14b6–7, Rpb. 9.581a10–b2, 582e4–6, 586c9–d1,Arist. Rhet. 1363b1, 1368b21 (ὁ δὲ ϕιλόνικος διὰ νίκην...), 1370b32–3, 1389a12–13;for -νεικ-, Dion. Hal. AR 2.75.3, LXX Prov. 10.12, Ezek. 3.7–8. The manuscripts of Plutarch, as of other authors, tend to spell the word indifferently ϕιλονίκ- and ϕιλονεικ-(Ziegler 1969, xix, claims that ϕιλονικία is the more usual form, but his apparatusentries sometimes suggest differently, e.g. on Alex. 52.9). Some of Plutarch’s own languagesuggests that the -νικ- connotations were more strongly felt, such as his references to τò ϕιλόνικον καί ϕιλόπρωτον in Alcibiades’ character (Alc. 2.1, cf. Tranquillity of Mind 471d, Advice on Public Life 811d, On Herodotus’ Malice 856a) and the link withπρωτεύειν at Ages. 2.2), or ϕιλονικει̑... νίκη...νίκη at Fab. 10.7 (cf. Marc. 31(1).11,Advice on Public Life 811d, Intelligence of Animals 971a) or the combination with ἀήττητοςat Alex. 26.14, Alc. 30.7. Equally, the word frequently clusters with words like ὀργή (as atCor. 21.6, Phil. 3.1, Flam. 22(1).4 and 7), θυμός or θυμοειδης (as in Cor. here at 15.4–5and at 1.4), and ἔρις or δύσερις (as at Phil.. 17.7): that almost as strongly suggests a link with νει̑κος. It is unlikely that we are dealing with two separate words here, for thetypical link with ϕιλότιμος occurs equally in cases where the -νικ- (e.g. Ages. 2.2–3) andwhere the -νεικ- (as in the Philopoemen cases) would be more appropriate. It is very likelythat both sets of association were simultaneously felt.