7

‘Making myth look like history’: Plutarch’s Theseus–Romulus

I. Introductory playfulness

In Chapter 6 I argued that Plutarch treated different periods in different ways: when it was appropriate – when the period admitted it, and when he was writing a particular sort of Life – he would apply a high degree of rigorous criticism to his material; but there were also periods and Lives where he would not. It is worth giving Theseus–Romulus a chapter of their own, and exploring how Plutarch adapts his technique to material which he acknowledges is rather different from the normal run of the Lives. This will also give an opportunity to develop two themes which have so far surfaced only spasmodically in this collection: first, the importance of intertextuality, in this case particularly intertextuality with Plato and Thucydides (tragedy is a further important presence, but I will turn to that in the next chapter); secondly, the sense in which the whole series of Lives is conceived, at least in some senses, as a coherent unity.

The proem to Theseus suggests some distancing from the material, and also a certain playfulness. This Life, and (perhaps to a lesser extent¹) Romulus too, are not to be quite like the others.

You know, Sosius Senecio, how geographers, when they come to deal with those parts of the earth which they know nothing about, crowd them into the margins of their maps with the explanation, ‘Beyond this lie sandy, waterless deserts full of wild beasts’, or ‘trackless swamps’, or ‘Scythian snows’, or ‘ice-locked sea’. Now that in writing my Parallel Lives I have reached the end of that period which can be reached by reasonable inference (είκότι λόγῳ) or where factual history (ἱστορία) can find a firm foothold, I might very well follow their example and say of those remoter ages, ‘All that lies beyond are fables and tragic stories, the province of poets and mythographers, where nothing is credible or clear.’

However, after I had published my account (λόγος) of Lycurgus the law-giver and Numa the king, there seemed to be nothing illogical (οὐκ...ἀλόγως) in going on to Romulus, since my history (ἱστορία) had brought me close to his times. Then, when I asked myself, as Aeschylus puts it,

With such a champion who will dare to engage? [Seven against Thebes 435]

Whom shall I match against him? Who can bear our trust? [Seven against Thebes 395–6]

it seemed clear that I could find no more fitting counterpart for the father of

unconquerable and glorious Rome than Theseus, the founder of the lovely city of Athens, famed in song. Let us hope, then, that the mythical  may submit (ὑπακο̑υσαι) to us, cleaned up through reason (λογος), and take on the appearance of history (ἱστορία). But when she obstinately defies credibility (τò πιθανόν) and refuses to admit any commingling with plausibility (τὴν πρòς τò εικòς μεί̑ ξιν), we shall ask our listeners (ἀκροατω̑ν) to be indulgent and to accept ancient history in a gentle mood.

(Thes. 1, tr. Scott-Kilvert, adapted)

Immediately, several contrasts are in the air. One is Athens and Rome, the one a ‘lovely city...famed in song’, the other ‘unconquerable and glorious’: carefully chosen adjectives, no doubt, and already this is a tale of two cities as well as two founders. Other contrasts already evoke those intertextual models. One is that between normal reality and that of the stage (the world of the quotations from Seven against Thebes): what lies beyond the boundary is, we notice, ‘tragic’. Another is that of historia² and the mythical, τὸ μυθω̑δες: here the inescapable figure is Thucydides, and his prominent disavowal of τὸ μυθω̑δες in his methodological introduction (1.22.4).³ A third is that of logos and muthos: a staple of much of classical Greek, but one which would probably particularly suggest to Plutarch’s audience, as it does to us, the name of Plato.⁴

Where you have logos, you also need listeners to that logos: here, Plutarch hopes, ones who are ‘indulgent’ and ‘gentle’.⁵ There is a triangle here of author, material, and audience. The author hopes that he may be able to tame the material into a sort of submissive ‘listening’ , accepting the appearance of history; if not, if the material behaves ‘stubbornly’ , then perhaps his real-life ‘listeners’ can be the ones who will accept things ‘gently’ (πρᾴως), tamed and receptive to this ‘ancient history’ (ǰρχαιολογίαν). Earlier in the chapter he has characterized the material of the other Lives as the period which is ‘reachable εἰκοτί λογῳ (by a logos which is both ‘reasoning’ and ‘reasonable’, ‘plausible’) and accessible to historia’. He will now apply logos to this material too, but the most he can hope for is, the ‘commingling’ with plausibility; and even this will not always be achieved, and in such cases his audience will have to accept this archaiologia as something different from the logos of those other Lives. He can hope for ‘credibility’ he can hope that the mythical material might λαβει̑ν ἰστορίας οψιν, ‘look like history’ – look, in fact, like those other Lives which were more ‘accessible to historia’. But it will be a matter of appearance; it will not, or at least not all the time, be the real thing.⁶

Already we can see a sort of playfulness about all this: he is teasing his audience, playing for a sort of indulgence and complicity as he plays the same games as he has with other Lives, but there will have to be a sort of suspension of disbelief. In this chapter I shall suggest that this playfulness goes further, but also that it is only provisional, that in one way or another seriousness comes in by the end; that an important part of that seriousness indeed concerns those two cities, ‘unconquerable and glorious Rome’ and ‘the lovely city of Athens, famed in song’ and that a key aspect of all this centres on intertextuality with those two authors, Thucydides and, particularly, Plato.

II. Truthfulness and uncertainty

After so disarming a proem, it may seem unbearably unsophisticated to raise the question of truth; perhaps ‘credibility’ (τὸ πιθανόν), a mingling with ‘what is plausible’ (τὸ εικός), is all that is in point. But then Plutarch keeps raising questions of truthfulness himself, and more pervasively in Theseus than in Romulus. We know too that he wrote a work ‘how we are to judge true history’ (placed next in the Lamprias catalogue, which tends to order works thematically, to a work ‘on the time of the Iliad’,which I take to be about the date of the Trojan War rather than the date of the poem’s composition).⁷ It is this sort of material which for Plutarch most, not least, insistently raises questions of truthfulness.⁸ And it was subject-matter that he liked, and thought about a good deal: he had already written a Life of Heracles, outside the series of Parallels, to which he cross-refers in Thes. 29.5; and this is about the same time as he was writing the Roman Questions as well, a work in which he is certainly concerned to distinguish true versions and true aetiologies from false.⁹

The Theseus proem makes it clear that the truth-value is not as straightforward in this pair as in other Lives: when he talks about truth and tries to establish it, what sort of truth is he dealing with? Does he provide any support for Paul Veyne (or at least one strand in Veyne’s thinking), suggesting that ‘truth’ or ‘belief’ are relative terms, and one can see myth as commanding a different sort of belief, reached, weighed, and received in different ways from literal everyday reality?¹⁰ Or would he share Dover’s impatience with ‘...a pretentious kind of falsehood’, which, he thinks, ‘the Greeks had more sense than to call...“ideal truth”¹¹ If so, could he really be defended from Momigliano’s criticism for ‘lacking consistency’ in his historical approach across different Lives, and writing confidently about figures like Romulus instead of confessing his inability to judge deficient evidence?¹²

In the last chapter I argued that the ‘consistency’ in truth-standards that Momigliano seeks is in any case not in Plutarch’s style. That is more on Veyne’s side than on Dover’s, but there are still different ways of putting it, and questions still open. A full-blooded Veynian approach would have, not merely different standards of rigour or styles of argument, but a different sort of truth applying in mythical material; Veyne tends to talk of ‘modalities’ of ‘belief’ rather than ‘truth’,¹³ but when he does talk of truth he makes it clear that truth and (ideologically driven) belief are for him the same thing.¹⁴ Thus, for Veyne, myths are true, or at least believed, in a different way. It is like children ‘knowing’ both that toys come from Santa Claus and that they are given to them by their parents (Veyne 1988, 135 n. 33). In Veyne’s view this approach to myth persisted in popular and general Greek thought despite the attempts of various ‘existence thinkers’ (18), or ‘rational minds, beginning with Thucydides’ (23), to strip away the incredible elements and reduce myth to something more like everyday reality; though for Veyne even these do it in a half-hearted way, doubting particular legends but never doubting the historical kernel of a real-life Theseus. That, for Veyne, is the sort of ‘purification of the truth’ that Plutarch is talking about in the Theseus proem; but behind it we can still detect the more popular, but for Veyne also more sophisticated, different type of belief which such ‘purification’ unsuccessfully tries to elide, and which some other authors reflect more sensitively.¹⁵

Veyne contrasts that popular view with that of the ‘rational mind’ of Thucydides; yet Thucydides is not so far removed in approach as Veyne implies.¹⁶ Thucydides, as we saw in the last chapter (p. 149), concludes his Archaeology with the claim that he has relayed the facts with sufficient accuracy given their antiquity (, 1.21.1). It would be unreasonable, he implies, to expect the same rigour or precision as with more recent and verifiable events. The Archaeology has therefore based inferences on more questionable evidence than he goes on to do later: extracting conclusions, including statistical conclusions, from Homer, for instance, in a way in which he would never use sources when it came to harder history. Admittedly, this is not extreme Veynism: truth would still be the same in distant periods and if one believed it one would be believing in the same way; if the Trojan war happened, it was true in the same way that fifth-century history was true. But one still cannot expect to establish such truth with the same standards of proof or by asking the same questions. This position is close to the one I argued for Plutarch in the last chapter and will argue again here, that in Aristotelian terms one can only seek the precision (ἀκρίβεια) appropriate to the material (ὓλη).

Plutarch himself, as we saw, proposes to try to ‘make myth look like history’: how does he set about it? His language leads us to expect ‘rationalization’, the reduction of mythical and especially supernatural material to look like more everyday reality, and profuse ‘rationalization’ of the Theseus myth was clearly there in the Atthidographic tradition long before Plutarch. When Jacoby talked of ‘a very far-reaching historization of the whole archaeology’, he was largely thinking of the Atthidographic passages cited by Plutarch himself (from Hellanicus, Cleidemus, Demon, and Philochorus).¹⁷ But ‘rationalization’ is a lazy word, and can mean different things. At least we should distinguish two. The first tries to make sense of legends by explaining how they came about. One example is Herodotus 2.56–7, where the ‘speaking black dove of Dodona’ is traced back to two Egyptian sisters who were sold into slavery: the one who came to Dodona was black because she was Egyptian and a speaking dove because she could not speak Greek, only twitter in barbarian. That is a ‘rational’ picture, but the essence of the story has gone: it is a story about how a story could develop, it explains away a legend. Then there is the style we can again call Thucydidean, or at least typical of the Thucydides of the Archaeology. Agamemnon gathered the Trojan expedition, Thucydides insists, because of his power, especially his sea-power, not because of any oaths (1.9). This time the essence of the story remains, but it comes to make literal sense by being plausibly contextualized: this is ‘contextual explaining’, rather than ‘explaining away’.

Plutarch does a little of both – or perhaps we should say ‘is attracted to both’, given that there were many examples of both types already in the tradition. First, the ‘explaining away’, the provision of a plausible explanation why a mythical version might have grown up. There are so many variants within the Cretan chapters that it is hard to follow any basic narrative line, but in the main we seem to have a general of nasty habits called Taurus, and the Minotaur is a legendary misunderstanding: this was the version of Philochorus and Demon (Thes. 16.1, 19.3–7, 23.5; cf. Jacoby on FGrH 327 fr. 5 and 328 frs. 17–18). This is a time when Plutarch comes close to ‘explaining away’ rather than ‘explaining’ he does not do so clodhoppingly (there is no ‘you see, readers, how the idea of a bull could come about.’), but he implies that explanation of how a misleading story could develop. Nor does Theseus go down to Hell and get trapped into sitting in stone (hence there is no room for that delightful Athenian aetiology using this to explain why Athenians have such neat small bottoms¹⁸). Instead he and Peirithous visit a Molossian king called Aidoneus with a wife called Persephone, a daughter called Kore, and a dog called Cerberus (Thes. 31.4–5, 35.1): Theseus is kept captive, and Peirithous ‘made to disappear’ by execution by dog. ‘Made to disappear’, ἀϕανίζειν (31.5): that is a choice word, used usually of more sinister and mysterious disappearances such as that of Romulus himself.¹⁹ It is borrowed here from the more miraculous version, and transfused into the naturalistic account which Plutarch prefers – an interesting way in which Plutarch nods to the alternative way of telling the story even without explicitly mentioning it. This is one of the cases (there are several) where his narrative would not make much sense except to someone who knew the alternative version; and that informed reader would also catch Plutarch’s implied explanation that this is how the more usual miraculous version arose. But, once again, it is precisely that, an implication. As in the Minotaur version, this assumes that the usual version has already been ‘explained away’, rationalized out of existence to make the world more like the way it is now. That informed reader would also appreciate what Plutarch has done with the myth to make it more everyday. This is ‘commingling with plausibility’, indeed.

Such cases would seem to conform with what Veyne called ‘the doctrine of present things’.²⁰ Minotaurs do not exist now, so would not have existed then. That is in keeping, too, with several passages when Plutarch simply prefers the less miraculous variant. Poseidon is not Theseus’ father, and that is simply a story put around for propaganda purposes by shewd old Pittheus (Thes. 6.1); nor is Mars the father of Amulius, though it may be that Amulius got up in Mars kit to impress and seduce Romulus’ mother (Rom. 4.3). That, again, is ‘the doctrine of present things’: gods do not regularly appear now, and so talk of their appearance then must be some sort of human fiction or misunderstanding.

Still, not everything is quite the way it is now, and the ‘doctrine of present things’ does not quite apply. Thus the Lapiths and Centaurs are simply there, without apology or explanation, at Thes. 30.3. Tales like those of Sinis and Sciron and Procrustes and the Crommyonian boar are again not easy to explain naturalistically (Thes. 6–11). True, here too the text tends to play down the miraculous elements: thus Sciron is just a brigand (with even a hint that he might have been quite a good fellow after all, ch. 10), and the foot-washing habits are hardly mentioned; there is certainly no man-eating tortoise waiting at the bottom of the cliff. But Plutarch still has to concede that travelling from Troezen to Athens was much more dangerous then, with vastly perilous Bad People along the way. That requires ‘contextual explaining’ much more than ‘explaining away’: it demands some naturalistic explanation which can give a context where such things could have happened. In the next section we will return to this, and examine more closely how Plutarch sets about clarifying how the world could have been so different.

This careful balancing – the assumption of a world which is largely similar, but also in important ways different – becomes clearer if we look at Plutarch’s use of εἰκὀς arguments, what it is ‘reasonable’ or ‘plausible’ to assume might have happened: and this is particularly interesting in the light of the proem, where ‘commingling with τò εἰκὀς’ was signalled as a feature of the Life. If such arguments are to work, it can only be on the assumption that life then was more or less as life is now.²¹ Thus it is not εἰκὀς that Theseus’ mother should have been captured if he were present to defend her, 31.7; and, nicely, Carmenta is more likely to owe her name to ‘lacking mind’, carere and mens, than to anything to do with carmina, presumably because there are more crazy women than singing women around, Rom. 21.2–3. But these εἰκὀς arguments also indicate what variations may be accepted as believable within that world, a world which is not necessarily quite the same as ours. It is not plausible that Antiope and her Amazons interrupted Theseus’ wedding with Phaedra and that Heracles killed them, but not it seems because it is an Amazon story (28.1); it is more that weddings are not rowdy like that, it sounds like ‘fiction and myth’.

This Life, indeed, is quite receptive to Amazons, excluded though they would naturally be by any ‘doctrine of present things’. In other Lives Plutarch is more sceptical, even if he does not exclude the possibility of Amazons completely. Pompey was said to have killed some Amazons, admittedly in a rather distant part: Plutarch leaves the possibility open, but notes that ‘no female corpse was seen’ (Pomp. 35.3). When he comes to the tale of Alexander and the Amazons, he marshalls a spectacular list of authorities on each side: the issue is worth debating – but it ends with the story of Lysimachus being read an account of the meeting with the Amazons by an eager historian, and commenting with a smile ‘And where was I when all that happened?’ (Alex. 46). In Theseus too Plutarch has some irony at the expense of Cleidemus ‘who wants to get everything exact’ and gives the precise dispositions of the Amazons’ battle-line in Athens (Thes. 27.3 = FGrH 323 fr. 18; cf. 19.8 = fr. 17): and yet he himself gets caught by the spirit of the thing, and much of his language only works on the assumption that the battle really happened, hard though it is to be sure about the details.²² ‘That they fought in the city itself is attested (μαρτυρέίταί) by the names of the places and the graves of those who fell’, for instance (27.2). μάρτύρέίτάί, ‘attested’: that is a word he uses frequently in the Life, much more frequently than  is mere ‘inference’ but μαρτύριον does suggest real ‘attestation’,²³ pointing to something which was really true – even though this ‘evidence’ would seem pretty unreliable by Plutarch’s critical standards elsewhere. We are some way from the scepticism of a Strabo, who elaborately applies ‘the doctrine of present things’ to his Amazons: the stories for Strabo are incredible because women would not have been able to get their political act together, nor to expand into neighbouring territory as men’s expense – why, it amounts to claiming that women of those times were men and men were women (11.5.1–5). For Strabo the world must obviously have been the same as today; Plutarch is prepared to toy with the idea that what was plausible then was different from what is plausible now.

So this world is more hospitable to Amazons than the world of Pompey and Alexander. But it is only a matter of degree, for even in those other worlds Amazons were not quite excluded, and even here there is an element of irony at Cleidemus’ expense. We are still concerned with truth, and disentangling what is ‘attested’ nor is there much here to suggest a different type of truth, one which cannot be investigated and would not be received in the same way; but still arguments and evidence may be credited here which would not pass critical muster in other Lives. This is the intermediate, ‘Thucydidean’ position: the world, truth, and belief are not totally different, but the precision and the type of argument need to vary according to the material.

Plutarch does not gloss over the uncertainty of it all. It may be the best he can do with the material, but he does not pretend that things are as reliable here as elsewhere. In the Alexander passage Plutarch provides that remarkable cluster of quotations on the Amazon question; its counterpart here is not too different, and Theseus as a whole is remarkably rich in learned citations, much richer than Romulus.²⁴ We might expect that to be a declaration of scholarly research, and of course it is partly that: there is a projection of authorial persona here.²⁵ But it is not a persona of certainty, I have done the reading so I know. It is the opposite, for time and again the flood of quotations underlines the perplexity, the difficulty of pinning the factual truth down (one reason, doubtless not the only one, why there is more citation in Theseus than in the historically more secure Romulus). Some points, such as the Ariadne chapters, are particularly rich in citation and puzzlement, but on the whole it would be wasted labour to try to work out which parts are presented as more certain and which as less. He may talk of particular facts being ‘attested’, but even there it does not mean that every inference is secure. That provisionality of the proem, with its acknowledgement that the reader may not be able to accept all the attempts to make myth look like history, is reinforced by the diffidence of the narrative.²⁶

And in this Life it matters. The Alexander account ended by saying ‘whether one believes in these things or not makes no difference to one’s estimate of Alexander’ but clearly the Amazon encounter, and the treatment both of women and of warfare, does make a big difference to one’s estimate of Theseus. The factual truth is hard to pin down; as we shall see, the moral truth is hard to pin down as well. We shall return to these uncertainties in the final section, and also revisit the implications for Veyne and for any differing ‘types of truth’.

III. Plato and Thucydides

Let us return to that ‘contextual explanation’: the sort of contextualization which provides some naturalistic explanation to clarify how such things could have happened. This, rather unexpectedly, is where we find Plato. At 6.4–6 Plutarch explains how such bad people could flourish:

This age, it seems, produced a race of men who, for sheer strength of arm and swiftness of foot, were indefatigable and surpassed the human scale, but who did not apply these gifts of nature to anything proper or helpful; rather they rejoiced in their overwhelming hubris and took advantage of their strength to behave with savage inhumanity and to seize, outrage, and murder all who fell into their hands. They thought that shame and justice (άίδω.. .κάί δίκάίοσύνήν) and equality and human spirit had nothing to do with anyone who could gain advantage (τοίς πλέον έχέίν δύνάμένοίς): no, it was just that most people praised such qualities because they did not dare to do wrong and were fearful of being wronged themselves (άτολμίά τού άδίκέίν κάί ϕοβω τού άδίκέίσθάί). Heracles went round displacing and destroying some of these, but others cowered out of sight as he went by, and withdrew and were disregarded as too abject for his notice. But then Heracles’ fortunes turned, and he killed Iphitus, went to Lydia, and spent a long time in slavery to Omphale there, imposing this punishment on himself for the killing. At that point affairs in Lydia had deep peace and security, but in Greece the former evils came into flower and burst out again, for there was no-one to repress or restrain them.

(tr. Scott-Kilvert, adapted)

This draws on several passages where Plato’s speakers explored the nature of society, especially society’s virtue, by affecting a style of historical reconstruction. The rejection of ‘shame and justice’ (άίδω...κάί δίκάίοσύνήν) summons up Protagoras’ great speech (Prot. 322c); the idea of a social contract not to do wrong and not be wronged, together with its restraint on those who want to ‘gain advantage’ (πλέον έχέίν), has a lot of the beginning of the Republic (343d6, 349b ff., then the social contract idea at the beginning of Book 2); the notion that it is only ‘lack of daring’ which would hold back people who want to do wrong has something of the Gorgias as well (483c–d, 488b5, 490a ff.).

Yet this is Plato with a difference: this is playful Plato, the sort of playfulness which the proem encouraged us to expect. In Plato’s own text it is natural to take these historical ‘reconstructions’ as heuristic or hermeneutic tools rather than literal ‘history’ (that is especially clear in Protagoras’ case), ways of presenting the nature of justice and society in mock-historical terms as a way of capturing their essence: Cynthia Farrar brought this out particularly clearly.²⁷ Is Plutarch not here being faux naïf in taking over such a picture in this wide-eyed, uncritical way? Consider in particular that notion that Greece was suffering because Heracles was away with Omphale, while Lydia was correspondingly peaceful: it is hard to take that as anything other than tongue-in-cheek. But if it is, we should not take that playfulness as a keynote of the whole pair. Many things, including Platonic intertextuality, become more earnest as the pair continues. As we shall see, Romulus ends with a purple passage on the potential immortality and divine nature of the soul (Rom. 28.7–10), which again re-evokes Plato and is much more intense.²⁸

In Theseus the suggestions of Plato continue, or at least of texts which Plutarch would have taken to be Platonic. Chapter 16 ends with an extended borrowing from the pseudo-Platonic Minos to which we will return, combined with a hint of another passage in the Laws;²⁹ chapter 23 has a verbal allusion to the opening of the Phaedo, as Plutarch refers to the ship from Delos whose arrival famously (though Plutarch does not mention it here) delayed Socrates’ execution.³⁰ Such passages help to introduce hints of a different, more modern world, a world of fifth- and fourth-century intellectual confrontation – and of violence and intolerance too, if the hints of Socrates’ execution are caught.

It is not just Plato who suggests that more modern world. Thucydides has already cropped up several times. As we saw, he is probably there in the proem, with το μύθωδες³¹ and I have suggested that Thucydides’ style of contextually ‘explaining’ legends, rather than ‘explaining them away’, is rather like Plutarch’s own. In 2.2 Plutarch links Theseus and Romulus as both (so the Teubner text prints) μετά τού δύνάτού το ξύνετόν εχοντες (‘combining intelligence with their power’): it is the Teubner editor Ziegler who prints ξύνετον with a ξ rather than with the manuscripts’ σ, and that may be overdoing it – but it does capture the way that this echoes the ξ-ridden Thucydides, for at 2.15.2 Theseus εβάσιλεύσε, γενομενος μετά τού ξύνετού κάί δύνάτος (‘became king, having combined power with his intelligence’).³² Then at 3.2 Plutarch picks up what Thucydides said about Pelops at 1.9.2, and here he corrects Thucydides.³³ Thucydides had made Pelops ‘acquire power because of his wealth’, πληθει χρημάτων...δύνάμιν περιποιησάμενον: once again, very much ‘the doctrine of present things’ – money always talks. Plutarch thinks differently: he insists that it was not only the surplus of money that brought him power, it was also the surplus of sons (ού χρημάτων πληθει μάλλον η πάίδων). That plays a delicious game of rationalization. Thucydides is being at his most ‘rationalist’ himself there, with his own brand of ‘commingling with plausibility’, but Plutarch trumps him by going back to the mythical matrix: in that sort of world, sons did matter, and sure enough the rest of the Life stresses the theme of Aegeus’ childlessness, the Pallantids’ contempt for it, and the simmering family loyalties and animosities.³⁴

The Plato and Thucydides intertextuality comes back just as the last big political movement of the Life begins, with the synoecism in 24. The synoecism itself borrows material and even language from Thuc. 2.15.³⁵ Notice too the strong, ‘modern’, tone with which the politics of the synoecism are presented (24.2).

So he now travelled around Attica and strove to convince them town by town and clan by clan. The common people and the poor responded at once to his appeal, while to the more influential classes he proposed a constitution without a king: there was to be a democracy, in which he would be no more than the commander of the army and the guardian of the laws, while in other respects everybody would be on an equal footing (ίσομοίρίάν). Some were convinced by his arguments without any difficulty; others, because they feared his power, which was already great, and his enterprising spirit (τολμάν), preferred to be persuaded rather than forced into agreement.

It is a very democratic sort of Theseus, the sort we grow to know on the tragic stage (most notably in Euripides’ Suppliant Women);³⁶but it is by now a very fifth-century sort of Athens too, with his opponents fearful of his δύνάμίς and, interestingly, his τολμά, that highly Athenian buzz-word. They are just biding their time, as we will see.

There may be some Plato too in the following chapter, with Theseus’ avoidance of ‘undisciplined and unmixed democracy’ (25.2). Some of his fears there sound very much like those of the Republic (e.g. 557c–8c). In that case it becomes interesting that Theseus introduces three classes, the Eupatridae, the Geomoroi, and the Demiourgoi (25.2), each doing their own thing: not quite the same things as the three classes of the Republic, it is true, but still a rather neighbouring idea.³⁷

That could affect an issue which has troubled constitutional historians, for most of this chapter looks as if it is borrowing from Athenaion politeia. Plutarch ‘borrows’ with some freedom, certainly, as his quotation of Aristotle’s view οτί δέ πρωτος άπέκλίνέ προς τον δήμον (‘that he was the first to incline to the people’, 25.3) is a strong overstatement³⁸ of Ath. Pol.’s μίκρον πάρέγκλίνούσά τής βάσίλίκής (‘inclining a little away from the regal’): so strong, indeed, that some have preferred to posit a different Aristotelian source, though this degree of source-manipulation is clearly within Plutarch’s range. Yet Ath. Pol. itself seems initially to have only two classes,³⁹ though by Ath. Pol. 13.2 we have three. Rhodes argues that in the lost early section of Ath. Pol. Ion introduced two classes, then Theseus expanded this by adding the Eupatridae as a third.⁴⁰ If that is right, then we have Plutarch simplifying by having Theseus introducing all three at once. That may be a routine instance of what Stuart called the ‘law of biographical relevance’, highlighting the contribution of the central figure,⁴¹ but again the Platonic texturing may be playing a part. If so, the intertext would not be casual, for the end of the Life will develop the dangers of the demos when empowered, the slipperiness and instability of monarchy, and the people’s manipulability by the ambitious demagogue, Menestheus. These are all hackneyed themes, especially in the fifth and fourth centuries, but ones to which Plato had given particularly strong and thought-provoking expression. And Theseus would here be recognizing the dangers, being a Plato before his time, and still not being able to do anything about it: a powerful, poignant, perhaps even tragic picture.⁴²

IV. Myth and fifth-century reality

That brings us to the final chapters of the Life, where the forces of the demos are turned against Theseus by Menestheus. The opportunity was offered because Theseus was away with Peirithous on his amorous adventures, and was therefore unable to protect the city when the Dioscuri, inflamed by Theseus’ abduction of Helen, attacked from the Peloponnese (Thes. 32–4). Menestheus was always an extremely malleable figure: he was known from the Iliad as the leader of the Athenian contingent at Troy,⁴³ but does not actually do very much in the Iliad (Page described him merrily as ‘a ninny and a nonentity’⁴⁴), and could therefore be more or less elaborated at will. Here it is those currents of ill-will and fear surviving from the synoecism, combined with the forces of the demos that Theseus had himself built up, which offer Menestheus his demagogic chance:

Meanwhile Menestheus, the son of Peteus, grandson of Orneus and great-grandson of Erechtheus, had taken a hand in affairs. He was the first man, they say, to cultivate the arts of the demagogue and to ingratiate himself with the people. He began by uniting the nobles and stirring up their resentment. They had long harboured a grudge against Theseus, because they felt that he had deprived each of the country magnates of his rule and authority and then herded them all into a single city, where he treated them as subjects and slaves. At the same time he also set the masses in a ferment with the accusations he brought against Theseus. He told them that while they might delude themselves with the dream of liberty, the truth was that they had been robbed of their native cities and their sacred rites, and all to make them look up to a single master who was an immigrant and a follower... (Thes. 32.1)

Thus Theseus is destroyed by the very forces which he himself had unleashed, and which were to make his Athens what it was.

The schema here is as early as Theophrastus’ ‘Oligarchic Man’:

He goes around saying, ‘when are we ever going to stop being ruined by the liturgies and trierarchies?’, and ‘how hateful are the tribe of demagogues! Theseus was to blame for introducing this bane to the city: he brought people together from twelve cities into one ⁴⁵ and the monarchy was dismantled; and he got what he deserved, because he was the first to be destroyed by them.’

(Theophrastus Characters 26.6–7)

So Plutarch may well not have invented the idea himself. But we can see why he welcomed and doubtless elaborated this. It maps closely on to two very familiar Plutarchan schemata. The first is the way in which a hero can so readily be destroyed by the very forces which make him great and which he himself has earlier fostered. The great man comes to be haunted by versions of his own past. Synoecism and democracy were, politically, what Theseus did for Athens; synoecism and demos now destroy him. Thus Caesar eventually falls when his friends misbehave, and alienate the troops and particularly the demos – those friends who had always been so devoted to him and to whom he owed so much; those troops and particularly that demos which he had so ruthlessly and effectively exploited. Thus Lysander too starts to totter when Agesilaus arrives in Asia Minor, and is courted in the same very unspartan way that Lysander himself had earlier developed. Thus Coriolanus lives out a version of his Roman experiences among the Volsci, the very people who gave him his chance of vengeance; but this time he is overthrown by the Volscian leader Tullus, someone who is a lesser version of his own strengths and weaknesses.⁴⁶ The same factors build a man, then destroy him. The insight is often a profound one, and it is central to Life after Life.

He also likes to make a Life evocative, not just of the great man, but also of his city. Marcellus’ strengths, and more especially his emotional weaknesses, show the way Rome was at the time, so absorbed with wars that it did not have time for proper Greek education (Marc. 1);⁴⁷ a similar point is made about Coriolanus (Cor. 1.6). The most elaborate example is Philopoemen–Flamininus, where both men are driven on by overwhelming ‘ambition’ (philotimia), but in ways which typify their two countries. Philopoemen’s philotimia easily topples over into destructive philonikia (‘contentiousness’), whereas Flamininus’ philotimia leads him to give Greece the freedom for which Philopoemen had so gloriously but ineffectively fought. At the Isthmia in 196 Flamininus proclaimed that freedom: the dumbstruck Greeks thought back to all the battles which Greeks had fought, but almost always against one another, so that every triumph had also been a disaster and a reproach for Greece. Their country, they reflected, had been destroyed by her own philonikia – that philonikia which is Philopoemen’s as well as Greece’s keynote.⁴⁸ That pair is not just about two men, it is about their countries; and we find something similar here with the comparison of ‘the founder of Athens, beautiful and celebrated in song, and the father of Rome, unconquered and great in glory’ (Thes. 1.5: above, pp. 171–2).

So far I have presented this flavour of Athens as a rather general one, suggesting demos and demagogues. Is there a more specific suggestion as well? The stress falls on the distaste of those packed together into a city against their will, with the countrymen feeling resentment against the great man who was behind it: Thucydides himself brought out the parallel between Theseus and Pericles at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War (2.15: above, p. 179), and Plutarch makes the parallel even closer, making Theseus’ synoecism not just a constitutional unification but a real physical uprooting of the countrymen into the city.⁴⁹ At the end of Theseus the fifth-century resonance recurs, though this time more of Alcibiades and the events of 415 and 411. Theseus and his private excesses alienate the city, so that he is driven into exile (Thes. 35.5): the Dioscuri invade from Sparta, and there is internal dissension within the walls; Menestheus prefers to open the gates to the Spartans, blaming his internal enemy Theseus for it all (33.1).

The normal way of approaching this has been in terms of source-criticism: when did this story take shape? Cantarelli 1974 argued that this demagogic characterization of Menestheus dated from the late fifth century. Gianfrancesco 1975 built on this, identifying what he thought to be ‘sophistic’ material in the last parts of the Life: he suggested that the origin of much of Plutarch’s material was in a (not very well attested) speech of Antiphon, ‘for the Pallantidae against Theseus’, possibly put by Antiphon in the mouth of Menestheus himself (the wording of the testimonium is rather obscure).⁵⁰ On this view, that speech would become a cross between a mythological exercise like Gorgias’ Helen or Palamedes, and a contribution to contemporary propagandist debate. Gianfrancesco suggests that the oligarch Antiphon used the speech to lambast his democratic opponents in disguise, and to preach the virtues of opening the gates to Sparta.

That last aspect brings out the weakness of the thesis. As oligarchic propaganda, in war-time, this is inept. Come on, men of Athens, our opponents are no better than Theseus – what a way to argue! One wins few adherents by associating one’s enemies with a great national hero. And it is no better for the speaker to reveal that the oligarchs were planning to be treacherous and invite the Spartans in. It would be a gullible audience who would believe that they would be just like the Dioscuri in the story, who exploited their victory only so far as to ask for permission to be initiated in the Mysteries (Thes. 33.1). After twenty years of war and hatred and atrocity, that would persuade no-one.

So oligarchic ‘propaganda’ does not work. The fifth-century resonance remains, though, and perhaps we should think less in terms of propaganda than in terms of commentary; perhaps we should look for an author who manipulates the distant past to make it play out in anticipation the themes of Athens’ later history – rather as the second half of Livy 1 foreshadows many of the themes of later Roman history, as ambitio arrives and violent discontent gathers until finally a Brutus overcomes a tyrant and inaugurates a new era of Roman history. In the present case, the ‘patterner’ could be a source, perhaps as Cantarelli and Gianfrancesco assumed a fifth-century one; but why should it not be Plutarch himself?⁵¹ He knew, and reminded his audience intertextually, that Thucydides had pointed the Theseus–Pericles parallel; and he had already introduced a lot of what we might crudely call ‘sophistic’ material, borrowing those Platonic motifs in a subtle and sometimes faux naïf way. He liked his Lives to tell tales about cities as well as about people; what could be neater than to make Athens’ inaugurator sow the seeds, not merely of his own downfall, but of his city’s downfall in the greatest crisis of her later history, the Peloponnesian War?

V. Theseus and Romulus

In that case, it becomes interesting that the end of Romulus plays a similar game. Romulus too sows some seeds that turn against him. For Theseus the danger was in moving from being a king to being a democrat, for Romulus it was the opposite move⁵² from being demotikos to becoming more of a king:

This was Romulus’ last war. Next came the experience which falls to most, indeed virtually all who are raised to power and majesty by great and paradoxical successes; Romulus did not escape this either. His career had given him (over?-) confidence (έκτεθαρρηκώς); he became haughtier in spirit and abandoned his popular manner (έξίστατο του̑ δήμοτίκου̑), shifting to a monarchy which gave offence and pain. This came about in the first place because of the way in which he presented himself...

(Rom. 26.1)

Then we move into a description of his purple robes,⁵³ his kingly throne, his bodyguard and so on. The similarity to 44 BC is not far to seek, with Caesar’s semi-regal outfit and golden throne, the humiliation of the senate, and the fears of his monarchy:⁵⁴ especially as the distant future has already so often been felt as a presence in this Life.⁵⁵ Then Romulus too dies, mysteriously. One version, aired by Plutarch though left uncertain, is that he is killed by the hostile senators (Rom. 27.6). The people are certainly suspicious, and threaten those aristocrats whom they see as the murderers. And the appearance of Proculus Iulius, announcing he has seen the dead Romulus in a dream (Rom. 28.1–3), pre-enacts the role of Cinna the poet (Caes. 68), though it does not turn out so murderously.

Naturally there is a similarity with the end of Theseus too, as both men’s political programmes turn sour. That is even pointed by a verbal echo, for Theseus is disappointed that the democracy has turned out so rebellious, ‘corrupted and wanting to be fawned on instead of silently carrying out their orders’, , Thes. 35.4; now Romulus’ patricians, much to their irritation, could do no more than ‘listen silently to their orders’, , 27.2. Romulus too has done something to establish the pattern that will ruin him, for ‘playing the demagogue’  he sets up dual annual magistrates in Alba, and it is this which encourages those in Rome to ‘seek a monarch-free and independent politeia’ with an alternation of ruling and being ruled, 27.1.

The differences between the two Lives are also important, and they too capture something important about each city. It is the people which excludes Theseus, but the aristocrats who are so hostile to Romulus; and Romulus’ last mysterious words strike a keynote of Roman history which is again rather different from the Greek, for the Romans ‘are to practise prudence with courage (σωϕροσύνήν μέτ’ άνδρέίάς)⁵⁶ and thus come to the greatest portion of human power’, 28.3.

Thus both men initiate their nations’ style as well as the nations themselves, and both reversals look forward to later crises and catastrophes.⁵⁷ Once again Plutarch is not drawing this from nothing, just as in Theseus he found the Theseus–Pericles parallel already suggested in Thucydides. The Romulus–Caesar parallel was in the air in 44 BC itself, and it is likely that the conspirators were consciously modelling themselves on Romulus’ eliminators. But that simply suggests that Plutarch’s knowledgeable audience might already be primed to notice the parallels, just as they were already primed by Thucydides’ suggestion of the Theseus–Pericles contact. We can still be sure that the elaboration of the pattern is Plutarch’s own, and that he is not simply copying out a source. The similarity between the two Lives, evidently from different sources, renders that secure.

VI. Playfulness turned serious

One thing is different between the ends of Romulus and of Caesar: the role of the gods.⁵⁸ The Ides of March had a religious dimension, but Caesar’s twenty-three wounds were very human indeed. The end of Romulus is much more mysterious. On the whole it leans towards making Romulus’ disappearance – άϕάνίζειν is again the recurrent word⁵⁹ – genuinely supernatural: the one naturalistic explanation, that he was cut up into little pieces and the senators divided him up and carried him out in their clothes, does not carry conviction (27.6). All the weight falls on the description of the omens, on Proculus Iulius who has surely seen something, and on the purple passage 28.7–10 defending the immortality of the spirit – though it is true that this leaves the fate of the body a little obscure.

The immortality of the soul: that returns us to Plato at the end of the pair, but with an earnestness far removed from that early, playful false naïveté. Platonic myth is a mode, employed in particular discourse for provisional and persuasive reasons, of conveying something more serious – the origin and nature of humanity, say, or of morality, or of the divine and its relationship to humankind. In Thes. 6 Plutarch had smilingly accepted in literal terms what for Plato was only the mythical vehicle to convey something more substantial; in Rom. 28 Plutarch is accepting not the vehicle but the cargo, not the myth but what the Platonic underworld myths convey – the immortality and intrinsic divinity of the human soul itself. That is no joke.

This, then, is the culmination of that process whereby elements of the divine come more and more to the surface. Romulus began in the same tones as Theseus, with Amulius in his Mars kit and Mars no more Romulus’ parent than Poseidon was Theseus’ but even here there is some supernatural element in the birth-story and the recognition-scene, enough for Plutarch to emphasize that

some may find the theatrical and fictional flavour of the story suspicious, but we should not be sceptical when we see what Fortune can devise, and reflect that Rome would never have advanced to such power if it had not some divine beginning, something which was grand and paradoxical

(Rom. 8.9)

– as we noticed in the last chapter (p. 149 and n. 41), not the sort of argument which one could imagine coming in a Life like Pompey or Caesar, but one which is more at home in this thought-world. But what is that divine element? Not the parentage, but the lucky chance whereby Numitor sensed what might be going on and asked the right question of the captive Remus (7.5); in other words, something explicable in a natural way as well in terms of human intelligence and/or pure chance – something which could sit perfectly well in a naturalistic world in a way in which Minotaurs and divine fathers could not. Then there is much respect for auguries and religious foundations and purifications. Romulus is made very ‘pious’ (θεοσεβης), more so than in Livy or Dionysius, where a lot of this has to be left for Numa.⁶⁰ But the point where that piety becomes most mechanically necessary to the narrative is when it explains why the Sabines continued respectful to Romulus after the death of their own leader Titus Tatius, and that is because some of them thought that he had the goodwill of the gods in everything (23.5), again a point about human mentality rather than the firmament.

Yet now the supernatural seems harder to avoid. Once again, this is the sort of pattern which Plutarch reproduces elsewhere. In Alexander–Caesar, in particular, there seems a similar rhythm whereby the supernatural dimension is played down through most of the pair, but at the end the great daimon of Caesar does appear, irreducibly.⁶¹ However much the narrative might try to play the divine down, however much in Thes.–Rom. the demythologizing programme requires the suppression of the more supernatural and marvellous elements, there will finally be some divine accompaniment for events as momentous as this.

VII. Terminal uncertainty

A final word on the synkritic epilogue, for there too Plato is in evidence. It begins with a Platonic quotation (indeed the only explicit quotation in the pair), once again from the Phaedo: unlike Theseus, Romulus became ‘brave through fear’, because of his determination to escape from slavery and imminent punishment (30(1).1, citing Phaedo 68d). In the Phaedo the contrast is with the true philosophical nature which needs no such impulse; by implication, that may here be the nature of Theseus rather than Romulus. So initially Theseus seems to be the winner in the comparison. But as in the Life of Theseus itself, there is a shift of sympathy here, and the epilogue like the narrative moves on to dwell on Theseus’ more disturbing aspects, especially those concerning his erotic life.⁶² After reflecting on various stories in which women suffered badly because of Theseus, Plutarch concludes:

...unless this story (that of Theseus’ mother’s captivity) is false – as it really ought to be false, along with most of the others (ως εδεί γε κάί τούτο ψεύδος είνάί κάί τά πλέίστά των άλλων). The mythical stories about the divine aspects, too, show a great difference. For safety came to Romulus with great goodwill of the gods; but the oracle given to Aegeus, to abstain from women while abroad, seems to show that the begetting of Theseus was contrary to the gods’ will.

(35(6).7)

That is an astounding thing to say about Theseus, the great national figure; just as it is astounding to have him come off worse, in erotic terms, than Romulus, the architect of the rape of the Sabine women.

Here too an extra twist is given by a Platonic original. In Republic 3 Socrates is attacking traditional stories of the gods:

Let us not believe such things, and let us not let the poets say that Theseus son of Poseidon and Peirithous son of Zeus hurled themselves in this way into dreadful rapes, nor that any other son of a god or any other hero would have dared to do such foul and impious deeds as the poets now falsely claim. For we have shown that it is impossible for bad deeds to come from the gods.

(Republic 3.391d–e).

So Plutarch’s ‘really ought to be false’ has good Platonic authority, one which centres particularly on those erotic stories of Theseus which Plutarch finds so disturbing. Perhaps then they were false after all; perhaps, to revert to the terms of the proem, the narrative has not achieved that ‘commingling with το έίκος’ which would have given credibility (το πίθάνον); perhaps we too have been taken in by all these sensational ‘tragic’ stories. If we remember another Platonic passage, that from the Minos in Thes. 16, we remember that ‘it is a dreadful thing to become hated by a city which has a voice and a Muse’, for the Athenian tragic poets have vengefully corrupted our view of Minos. Perhaps they have corrupted our view of Theseus too.

So, like the end of (paradoxically) many tragedies themselves, the close of the pair invites us to reassess radically what we have heard, and to wonder if it was not, after all, built on uncertain foundations, not the stuff of true historia after all. The ring has taken us back to the suggestions of the proem, and we are still not sure how playful the whole exercise has been.

VIII. Conclusion: continuity and change, truth and Veyne

Several points have, I hope, emerged about this fascinating pair, not least its subtlety and charm, and the important part played in it by intertextuality: this is indeed one of Plutarch’s most exploratory and enterprising productions. I will end by drawing out some further implications, and then returning to the original question of truthfulness. In particular, how far do the terminal uncertainties, both about historical accuracy and moral judgement, affect those initial questions about mythical truth and Veyne’s argument about a different type of belief?

We have seen that both Lives have a perspective rather wider than the two individual figures themselves; they make points about Athens and Rome, not just Theseus and Romulus. If the conventional relative chronology is right, the Lives of Pericles, Caesar, and Brutus themselves were not yet written. But they soon would be. Theseus–Romulus is normally put, along with Lycurgus-Numa and Themistocles-Camillus, into three of positions VI–IX in the series, most likely in position VIII or IX, and this is one of the most secure parts of the sequence.⁶³ Two of the only fixed points are then Pericles and Brutus. Pericles–Fabius was the tenth pair to be written (Per. 2.5), probably therefore the next after this little group; Dion–Brutus was the twelfth (Dion 2.7), and, if the argument of ch. 1 holds, Alexander–Caesar was written as part of the same project as Dion–Brutus. We can surely regard all these pairs as in some sense complementing Theseus–Romulus, and assume that this pair, like the others, is written with a function in the series as a whole, not just as a free-standing work of art.⁶⁴

If so, that is most interesting for our conception of Plutarch’s whole project. One great step of the last generation of scholarship has been to see the unit of Plutarch’s biographies as the pair as much as the Life.⁶⁵ We should now take the further step, and see individual Lives more in the context of the series as a whole.⁶⁶ His whole project may now seem to have something of the style of the history of Drumann–Groebe, splitting up Rome’s history (and in Plutarch’s case Greek history as well) under the leading figures⁶⁷ – doing in a sense, but in a more refined sense and in a more skilful way, a version of what Plutarch had already done for the principate in his Lives of the Caesars, though those seem to have been closer to ‘history’ in genre.⁶⁸

That is important in itself; it also matters for our inquiry into truthfulness. For, if the series of Lives shows coherence, that is because of an element of continuity; as Theseus and Romulus inaugurate their nations’ history, they also inaugurate the strengths of each people which will produce greatness and then generate crisis and disaster. That is a continuous story for each people; it is one which belies any neat distinction between different sorts or types of material, any categorization of a spatium historicum which is different from a spatium mythicum – even though it is Plutarch himself who introduces the ‘spatial’ metaphor into the proem, and suggests some sort of boundary between the two. It is clear from the range of sources quoted within Theseus itself that the most influential Atthidographers did not accept a firm boundary between mythical and historical material, and passed within their works from one to the other.⁶⁹ Plutarch shares that intellectual outlook. For this continuity of conception to work, closely related sorts of thing must – on the whole – have been going on in the ‘mythical’ past as in the fifth century and the first century BC: they must at least be parts of the same story. That does not sound as if the two sorts of material commanded ‘different sorts of belief’.⁷⁰

That ‘on the whole’, though, is important. We have also seen ways in which Plutarch implies that things were different; an essential continuity of history is compatible with an awareness of the possibility of substantial change (an insight we can also trace in Plutarch’s treatment of later history).⁷¹ Perhaps there were bad people who flourished, perhaps Amazons did appear – though even here we noticed that there was no firm break from the assumptions followed in later periods and other Lives, only a difference of emphasis and degree. If the element of the divine can finally not be resisted in Romulus, that too does not mark a total difference from later history; it cannot be resisted in Caesar either.⁷² Certainly, matters may have to be investigated with more provisionality; arguments may have to work in a different way, slighter forms of evidence may have to be accepted. That is not full-blooded Veynism, for Plutarch’s emphasis falls on the difficulty of knowing exactly what to believe. That is not the same as saying that, whatever one might eventually decide to believe or whatever might turn out to have been true, it would be belief or truth in a different sense. It does however suggest an awareness that historical inquiry must be relative – yet not ‘relative’ in the egocentric way beloved of the assertive modern reader, not ‘relative’ in the sense that its validity is relative to us; no, this is ‘relative’ to the texture of the material which is being treated.

Plutarch indeed implies readers who are compliant before they are assertive; readers who are prepared to enter into the spirit of this inquiry with a proper acquiescence, readers who will at least begin by playing the same games as Plutarch himself, and may end by sharing some of his uncertainties. In chapter 12 I shall say more about the complicitness of narrator and narratee which this encourages and implies.

Notes

¹The geographical analogy of Thes. 1.1–4 suggests that the shift to Romulus is less bold than that to Theseus. Notice how insistently the analogy is pursued. To move into such territory at all is to go beyond the area which he has so far ‘traversed’ (διελθóντι), that which can be ‘reached’ (ἐϕικτóν) by factual history and where it can ‘find a firm foothold’ (βάσιμον). Now he might do what the ‘geographers’ do and mark the area beyond as unknown. But Numa had brought him ‘close’ in time to Romulus, so he thought it reasonable to ‘go on to’ him (προσαναβῆναι); Theseus is then selected as the natural partner. The implication seems to be that Romulus is only the other side of the boundary; Theseus can be more distant. – Swain 1990b, 193, is technically incorrect to lump Numa with Romulus as a figure about whom Plutarch admits there is no ‘solid information’: Thes. 1 puts Numa just this side, Romulus just the other side of the boundary. But there is a wider sense in which there is more continuity between the Romulus material and all that followed, as I argue at the end of this chapter.

²On ίστορία and its meanings in Plutarch, cf. Duff 1999, 18–19 with n. 14 and bibliography cited there.

³Flory 1990, 193 and n. 2, argues that later occurrences of are generally confined to historiographical criticism and seem ultimately to be quotations of Thucydides’: perhaps an overstatement, but this is one of the more plausible ‘quotations’ – or at least allusions. Flory takes the phrase in Thuc. 1.22.4 to mean ‘patriotic stories in particular and sentimental chauvinism in general’. That seems to me wrong ( may often have been exploited by writers in that direction, but that is a different matter); Strabo’s gloss on  as ‘material which is old, false, and full of monstrosities’ , 11.5.3) would be a better starting-point, at least for those passages where ‘mythical’ serves historians rhetorically as a pejorative term (cf. Johansen 1999, 278–9). But, if Flory is right, it gives even more point to this pair’s interest in tales about Athens and Rome as well as about Theseus and Romulus. – σαϕηνείαν at Thes. 1.3 may also echo Thucydides’ σαψἐς σκοπεί̑ν at 1.22.4: so Ampolo and Manfredini 1988, xi.

⁴Most memorably perhaps Gorgias 523a (cf. Veyne 1988, 131 n. 3), Phaedo 61b, Timaeus 26c–e (alluded to at Sol. 31.6), and Prot. 320c and 324d. The Platonic material is explored helpfully by Murray 1999 and Rowe 1999: see also Calame (125–6) in the same volume, Buxton 1999. Strangely, none of the contributors to that excellent collection mentions the Theseus passage, which touches closely on many of their concerns. By contrast, Veyne 1988 mentions this passage on his first page, taking this process of ‘purification of myth by logos’ as typical of one strand in Greek thought: but he does not seem to have caught the playfulness, which suggests that Plutarch’s programme here may be ironically self-conscious and quizzically off-key rather than typical and routine.

⁵Cf. below, pp. 272, 276–7 on Plutarch’s construction of different sorts of narratee, sympathetic and cross-grained.

⁶We might even find an equivocation in the way Plutarch talks of ‘cleaning up’ the material by logos. If we look at his other uses of the word (ἐκκαθαίρεσθαί), is the process more like ‘cleaning out a ditch’ (Mar. 16.7), getting rid of the dirty material? Or like ‘polishing up steel’ (On the Decline of Oracles 433b), leaving the substance the same but making it look better? The nearest metaphorical use may be Table Talk 735a, ‘clarifying’ a murky sentiment of Democritus – in other words, clearing off the surface murk which makes a formulation or a story harder to understand; but that can still leave it open whether one believes it.

⁷, Lamprias catalogue 124 (Sandbach p. 6); 123 is .

⁸This qualifies Gabba’s statement that ‘Plutarch’s preface to the lives of Theseus and Romulus completely denies the historicity of Romulus and the value of the historical traditions relating to the king’ (Gabba 1991, 214, cf. 48). That is too strong. Even the preface puts Romulus only just the other side of whatever line there is (above, n. 1), and the approach to ‘historicity’ throughout the pair is much more complex.

⁹Life of Heracles : referred to at Thes. 29.5: we have three fragments, most accessible in Sandbach’s Teubner Moralia VII (1967, 15–16), of which the most elaborate is fr. 2 = Aul. Gell. 1.1. Roman Questions seems to date to c. 105 AD, about the time which the relative chronology of the Lives suggests for Thes.–Rom.: Jones 1966, 70, 72, 73 = Scardigli 1995, 114, 120, 122. Cf. also p. 33 nn. 50–1; Vera Mufioz 1990, 180–1.

¹⁰Veyne 1988: for his own proemial use of Plutarch, cf. above, n. 4. For a thoughtful critique of Veyne’s approach see Méheust 1990, bringing out (among other things) that the considerable number of North Americans who think they have been abducted by aliens believe this to be ‘true’ in the most literal sense. They may or may not be wrong, but if they were right it would have happened in exactly the same way as the rest of reality has happened. – I have benefited much from discussions of Veyne with Charles Smith.

¹¹Dover, HCT v. 396 n. 2: cf. pp. 156–7.

¹²Momigliano, 1985, 83–92 at 87–8, discussed in ch. 6.

¹³Thus he leaves myths as ‘neither true nor false’, 28, and ‘beyond matters of truth and falsehood, in an ageless past’, 46 (= ‘au-delà du vrai et du faux, en un passé sans âge’ in the original); but notice also 84, ‘the coexistence of contradictory truths (= ‘vérités contradictoires’) in the same mind is nonetheless a universal fact...’ but that is only because ‘truths and interests are two different terms for the same thing’, so that ‘contradictory truths do not reside in the same mind – only different programs, each of which encloses different truths and interests, even if these truths have the same name’, 85–6.

¹⁴‘We know (or believe – it is the same thing) only what we have the right to know’: Veyne 1988, 92. Cf. 127, ‘Truth is the name we give to the choices to which we cling’ (= ‘la vérité est le nom que nous donnons à nos options’), and that is why truth is ‘a work of the constitutive imagination’, 117. The book’s subtitle is ‘Essai sur l’imagination constituante’.

¹⁵Notably Diodorus 4.1 and 4.8 (Veyne 1988, 47–8, followed by Gabba 1991, 126–7), though Diodorus’ formulations look to be closer to the position I am here arguing for Plutarch: ‘... For some readers adopt an unfair standard and require in the ancient myths the same degree of exactness (τἀκριβές) as in the events of our own time...’ ‘in general, when the histories of myths are concerned, one should not always scrutinize the truth in so exacting a way...’ (4.8.3–4). Diodorus too finds an important continuity between these ‘histories of myth’ (an interesting formulation) and later events, including those of his own time: cf. my concluding remarks on Plutarch in this chapter, pp. 188–9.

¹⁶Cf. above pp. 149 and 165–6 nn. 42–4.

¹⁷Jacoby 1949, 136.

¹⁸For this aetiology cf. Σ Ar. Knights 1368 and Suda s.v. λίσποι, with Mills 1997, 12 n. 40.

¹⁹Cf. Rom. 27.4 bis, 27.6, 29.12, 32.7, 33.9–10, all of Romulus: cf. p. 185. Other eerie and mysterious/sinister destructions at e.g. Fab. 3.4, Dion 44.8, and Caesar’s ‘great daimon’ at Brut. 37.1; autocratic liquidations at Pomp. 80.6, Alex. 74.1. There is also a less charged sense of ‘disappearances’ at sea, i.e. drownings: Duff 1999, 170 n. 40.

²⁰‘Doctrine’or ‘principle of present things’ (= ‘la doctrine des choses actuelles’): Veyne 1988, 14, then e.g. 27, 47, 52–3, 68, 73–4. Cf. Stern 1999, 216–17 for Palaephatus’ application of this principle to mythical ‘rationalization’. Cf. also Jacoby 1949, 87, 133, cited by Hunter 1982, 112; Wiseman 1979, 49.

²¹The same goes for Plutarch’s long-distance psychological reconstructions, most noticeably that of Theseus’ fixation on Heracles at 6.8–9, which is explicitly compared with the later feelings of Themistocles about Miltiades: I discuss this in ch. 14, p. 311. Cf. Larmour 1988, esp. 362–4, 366–7 for the part this psychological ‘raring to go’ plays in the Life; Duff 1999, 51 and 84 for similar psychological pictures in other Lives. Figures of the right cast of mind in any period could think, feel, and be inspired in the same ways. Cf. also Pérez Jiménez 2000, 235 and 239–40, and particularly 1994, 227: there he interestingly suggests that the same type of psychological reconstruction underlies Plutarch’s recasting of Aegeus’ role in the Life, particularly his nervous fears.

²²This point complicates the use Wiseman 1979, 150–2, and 1993, 142, makes of Plutarch’s criticism of Cleidemus. He compares it with Polybius’ criticism (3.33.17) of the circumstantial ‘precision’ used by other historians to generate a false persuasiveness. But Plutarch is not immune to the charge himself (nor, perhaps, is Polybius); and Plutarch does not press his criticism of Cleidemus, nor present it as ultimately decisive.

²³Thes. 5.2, 17.7, 25.3, 27.2, 27.7, 29.5, 31.2, 32.7, 34.1, Rom. 3.1, 15.5 (in a way),20.2, 35(6).5. τεκμηριον only at Rom. 30(1).3, of inferring political background rather than identifying literal truth (contrast Thuc. 1.1.3, 1.3.3, 1.20.1, 1.21.1, 2.15.4 etc; μάρτύριον at Thuc. 1.8.1, cf. 1.73.2).

²⁴For Plutarch’s source-citations in Theseus cf. Frost 1984, with a useful list on p. 71; for discussion, see also Ampolo and Manfredini 1988, xlii–lv.

²⁵On such proemial self-characterization, especially the projection of learning but also of diffidence, see also pp. 271–2 and 367–8.

²⁶This reading thus makes Plutarch’s rationalization more self-conscious and self-critical than, for instance, Frost 1984, 70 suggested in his influential study of Plutarch’s sources: ‘In the Theseus [Plutarch] has made an honest attempt to treat the period as a historical one; therefore all fable, all marvels, all episodes that smacked too much of the supernatural must be avoided, or at least explained in a logical way. Given these goals, Plutarch found himself in over his depth, although he never seems to have realized it...’

²⁷Farrar 1988, esp. 87 ff.

²⁸See p. 185.

²⁹Thes. 16.3–4, exploiting Minos 319d, 320d–1b: see p. 187. That is the point of οντως at the beginning of 16.3, ‘it seems that it really is [as Plato said] a hard thing to become hated by a city with a voice and a Muse.’, though Plato in fact had stressed the dangers of being hated by an individual poet rather than a poetic city (320e). In their Teubner editions Lindskog and Ziegler scented a further quotation, probably from poetry (‘ϕώνην – μού̑σαν ex aliquo poeta petitum?’); Renehan 1979 saw that the elevated language is drawn not from a poet but from Laws 666d–7a.

³⁰Thes. 23.1: notice especially the rhythm τò πλοί̑ον.. .ἐν ᾧ ἔπλεύσε καὶ πάλιν ἐσώθη: the Phaedo refers to τò πλοί̑ον.. .ἐν ᾧ...ἔσωσέ τε καὶ αύτος ἐσώθη.

³¹p. 172 and n. 3 above.

³²The different ordering is a neat touch. Theseus and Romulus are linked first because of their physical ‘power’ (2.1), but they also for Plutarch ‘combined intelligence with that power’. For Thucydides, Theseus was not only intelligent, as Pericles was now, but also ‘combined power [when he became king] with the intelligence’, and hence was able to impose his will more readily and decisively than Pericles could now.

³³Cf. the cases in fifth-century Lives where Plutarch corrects Thucydides’ interpretation, pp. 126–8 and 134.

³⁴On this see Pérez Jiménez 1994, esp. 223–5, 227–8.

³⁵Thes. 24.1 and 3–ί echo Thuc. 2.15.1–2, esp. 24.3 καταλύσας ούν τὰ παρ’ ἑκαστοις πρυτανεί̑α καὶ βουλευτήρια καί ἀρχάς (~ Thuc.’s κατά πόλεις ᾠκείτο̑ πρύτάνείά τε ἐνταυ̑θα πρυτανείον κάί βουλευτήρια (~ Thuc.’s ἓν βουλευτήρια άποδείξάς κάί Cf. also pp. 182–3 and n. 49.

³⁶Cf. Larmour 1988, 368–9 for variant, less positive versions of this episode which Plutarch presumably knew and rejected. For the Theseus of tragedy cf. esp. Mills 1997; I say a little about the Suppliant Women myself in Pelling 1997c, 230–4, and 2000,180–4.

³⁷Jacoby 1949, 247–8 n. 49, noticed the Platonic texturing, but assumed it was owed to a source, in his view Theophrastus. Sarkady 1969, 5, does not accept that there is anything Platonic here because the classes are so different from Plato’s; but Plutarch needs to adapt the three classes if his political analysis is to have real bite, and combine Plato’s ‘three’ with Aristotle’s content for the classes (see the next paragraph in the text, pp. 180–1). Aristocrats (whose power Theseus reduces), farmers (who will be forced into the city), and members of the demos (who will turn against him) all have an important role to play. Were there less Plato elsewhere in the Life, Sarkady might still be right to be sceptical; but the Platonic profusion makes the allusion harder to escape.

³⁸‘Una semplificazione eccesiva’, Ampolo and Manfredini 1988, 238: so excessive that Jacoby (see last note) denied that Plutarch could be deriving from Ath. Pol. here. Contra, Sarkady 1969.

³⁹That is the picture in fr. 3 Kenyon, a division ‘before Cleisthenes’ into georgoi and demiourgoi : this was presumably introduced in the lost first part of the Ath. Pol.

⁴⁰Rhodes 1981, 67, following Wade-Gery 1958 on the Ion suggestion; cf. also Rhodes 1981, 74–6, and on 41.2.

⁴¹Stuart 1928, 78: cf. p. 53 above.

⁴²Contrast Jacoby 1949, 247–8 n. 49, finding Plutarch’s treatment incoherent: he thought that 25.1–2, stressing Theseus’ measures against unlimited democracy, inconsistent with this inclination at 25.3 towards the demos, and assumed that Plutarch was incompetently combining variants or abbreviating. Sarkady 1969 does not accept this, thinking that it all comes from Aristotle; but he does not deny the incoherence, simply arguing that one should not expect anything better of Plutarch (‘Jacoby scheint in dieser Hinsicht eine so weitgehend durchdachte, logische Kompositionsart von Plutarch zu erwarten, die für diesen Schriftsteller auch sonst gar nicht charakteristisch ist’, 4). But nothing precludes Theseus from moving towards democracy at the same time as sensing and trying to mitigate its dangers. Plutarch is here subtler than his critics.

⁴³Il. 2.552–6, 4.327, 12.331–63, 373, 13.195–6, 689–90, 15.331.

⁴⁴Page 1963, 145–7.

⁴⁵This translates Diels’ Oxford text, inserting   . Other emendations or supplements are possible, but the point will remain the same.

⁴⁶For these analyses see respectively chs. 11, 13, and 18.

⁴⁷I discuss this aspect of Marcellus more fully at Pelling 1989, 200–1; cf. Swain 1990a, 131–2, 140–2 = Scardigli 1995, 239–40, 254–9; Duff 1999, 305–7.

⁴⁸Flam. 11, a very different emphasis from Plb. 18.44–6 and Livy 33.33.5–7. On this see pp. 243–4, 350–1, and Pelling 1997a, esp. 148–53.

⁴⁹Ampolo and Manfredini 1988, 235.

⁵⁰Gianfrancesco 1975, building on Rhet.gr. 7.5.26 W.,Παλλαντίδων (‘Some say that the first forensic speech was delivered by Menestheus, the general of the Athenians who also went to Troy, others say that this first speaker was Antiphon, “For the Pallantidae against Theseus”...’).

⁵¹I am pleased to see that Pérez Jiménez 2000 accepts this suggestion of Plutarch’s originality here (238 and n. 28), in the course of a balanced argument which also acknowledges that fifth-century motifs had affected the Theseus legend long before Plutarch (230). For this latter process cf. esp. Sourvinou-Inwood 1979, Calame 1990, 397–465, and Mills 1997. Calame 1990, 417, accepts that there is fifth-century flavour- ing here, but implies that it affected the story well before Plutarch.

⁵²The chiastic rhythm is made explicit in the comparative epilogue, 31(2).1–3.

⁵³See n. 57.

⁵⁴Especially in the Lupercalia affair: see Caes. 61 and Ant. 12, with Pelling 1988, 144–7, esp. 145–6 on the Romulean elements. Fears of Caesar’s monarchy: esp. Caes. 60.1, ο της βασίλείας ἔρως (Caesar’s ‘lust for kingship’). Humiliation of the senate: esp. Caes. 60.3–8. This caused wider offence, ‘for the impression was given that the whole city was being trampled in the mud along with the senate’  προπηλάκιζομενης, Caes. 60.5): cf. Rom. 27.3, (Romulus) ‘seemed to be completely trampling the senate in the mud’ .

⁵⁵Rome’s future glory, esp. Thes. 1.5, Rom. 1.1, 8.9. The Life is full of aetiologies of customs and places which ‘still today’ survive: esp. 1.3, 4.5, 5.4–5, 8.7, 9.5, 13.6, 15, 18.1, 18.6, 18.9, 19.8, 20.2, 21.2, 24.2, 25.7, 27.4. Particular later crises: Celtic conflict, 22.1 and 29.5 (see n. 57); Hannibalic War: 22.5. Other big names of the future: Augustus, 17.3; ‘Gaius Caesar’ (i.e. Caligula), 20.8; Scipio Africanus, 27.5; ‘times of Varro’, 12.3–6. Hints of Caesar himself are more elusive, but notice that the calendar at 21.1 and the Lupercalia at 21.4–10 introduce themes which will occur in the same order at Caes. 59 and 61; and in the context of Romulus’ disappearance, 27.4 notes – apparently incidentally – the renaming of the fifth month as ‘July’. Caesar is not there named; he does not have to be.

⁵⁶An echo of the claim of Thucydides’ Pericles, ϕίλοσοϕούμεν άνεύ μάλάκίάς (‘we are lovers of wisdom, but without softness’, Thuc. 2.40.1), as Christina Kraus suggests to me? If so the Thucydidean intertext would again be thought-provoking, with the adaptation capturing national characteristics. (Roman) σωϕροσύνη is a more practical pursuit than (Greek) ϕίλοσοϕίά, and the litotes άνεύ μάλάκίάς gives way to the stronger positive μετ’ άνδρείάς.

⁵⁷Nor is it only Caesar’s crisis which Romulus anticipates: in particular, 22.2 and especially 29.4 look forward to Camillus and the great threat to the city presented by the Celts. It is characteristic of Plutarch to recall a hero’s greatest moments at his end (pp. 375–6, Pelling 1989, 207–8), just as he here allows Romulus’ ‘purple robe’ (26.2) to recall an earlier crucial moment (14.5). At the end, though, it is Camillus’ story which comes to recall Romulus: the role of the maids at 29.7 echoes 2.5–6, and Philotis’ signal at 29.7 evokes Tarpeia’s treachery at 17.3. Thus Camillus’ great exploit at the end goes back to Romulus’ beginnings, and the second founder re-evokes the first. That is further testimony to the degree to which this Life concerns Rome as a whole, not just Romulus. – My reading contrasts markedly with that of Scheithauer 2000, who denies (512) any relation between Romulus’ character and the development of the state, and contrasts here the Greek writers Plutarch and Dionysius with the more engaged Romans Cicero and Livy.

⁵⁸I discuss the role of the supernatural in Alexander–Caesar more fully at pp. 378–81 below.

⁵⁹Above, n. 19.

⁶⁰Scheithauer 2000, 509.

⁶¹See pp. 378–81.

⁶²I say more about this in the next chapter, pp. 198–200. For the shifting balance in this and other epilogues, cf. Duff 1999, 253 and n. 36, 257–8.

⁶³See above, pp. 7–10 and 33 n. 50. Thes,–Rom. group in positions VI–IX: Jones 1966, 66–7 = Scardigli 1995, 106–9; Piccirilli 1980; van der Valk 1982, 303–7.

⁶⁴For this suggestion cf. Marsoner 1995–6, suggesting (39, cf. 47) that the Theseus proem might serve as a proem for a (reordered) whole series. That is more doubtful: in that case Plutarch would probably not have drawn attention to the original sequence of publication (‘after I had published my account of Lycurgus the law-giver and Numa the king...’). But it can still play an important role in the whole.

⁶⁵On this see ch. 16, esp. pp. 359–61.

⁶⁶Thus Mossman 1992 cautiously but convincingly suggests that Demetrius, Eumenes, and Pyrrhus are to be read not merely with a general knowledge of Alexander, but specifically with the Life of Alexander in mind; Harrison 1995 argues that Demetrius–Antony and Agesilaus–Pompey are to be read with a knowledge of Alexander–Caesar.

⁶⁷Drumann–Groebe 1899–1929.

⁶⁸On the ‘generic’ closeness of those Lives to history cf. Duff 1999, 19–20; Pelling 1997a, 127–8; and especially Ash 1997, 190–1, for sensible caution about drawing conclusions about the whole series from Galba and Otho. I return to questions of the ‘genre’ of the Parallel Lives in Pelling (forthcoming) (a).

⁶⁹Humphreys 1997, 218 n. 46 is sceptical about any firm distinction in the historians between ‘myth’ and ‘history’ I agree (Pelling 1999, 333 and n. 30). See also von Leyden 1949/50 and Calame 1999, 135 n. 24, with further bibliography.

⁷⁰Though Veyne could retort that this is simply to make Plutarch one of those ‘rationalist thinkers’ who are insensitive to the rich multiplicity of popular belief. That still seems to me a subtlety too far, when Plutarch’s own text shows such alertness to the uncertainties and precariousness of any ‘rationalizing’ programme.

⁷¹I return to this theme in ch. 10, especially pp. 242–3.

⁷²Cf. also Swain 1989c on the other ways in which Plutarch recurrently associates divine involvement with the great events of Rome’s history.