SIR THOMAS NORTH entitled his great translation of Plutarch The Lives of The Noble Grecians and Romans. Noble was his own importation, but it was a peculiarly well-chosen epithet, for it serves to emphasize the qualities which distinguish Plutarch from the Greek historians of the golden age. It reminds us of the distance which separates him from his subjects and of the heroic aura which had grown up around them in the meanwhile. Plutarch is, as it were, a backward-looking writer standing on the last range which divided the pagan civilization from the Christian. He lacks the startlingly original and impersonal quality of Periclean literature, just as that literature lacks his intimacy on the one hand and the breadth of his tolerance and philanthropy on the other. He was no Thucydides, applying a ruthlessly objective analysis to uncover the historical process. He was a lover of tradition, and his prime object was at once to cherish and understand the greatness of the past and to re-assert it as a living ideal.
Plutarch’s life-time of some seventy-five years stretches from the middle forties A.D. to the beginning of Hadrian’s reign. It is the period at which the blend of Greek and Roman culture reached its highest point of development: almost all the major writers had done their work and Plutarch’s writings are in many ways a summing up of that culture. He came of an ancient Theban family and he never strayed for long from his home-town of Chaeronea, a small city lying in the midst of the great Boeotian plain which the Greeks called ‘the dancing-floor of Ares’ and which had witnessed the decisive battles of Haliartus, Leuctra, Chaeronea itself, and many more. Not that his own outlook was provincial in any narrowing sense. He studied philosophy in Athens as a young man, travelled in Greece and Egypt, earned a high reputation both as a scholar and a diplomat in Rome, making many influential friends in the process, and may even have been granted honorary consular rank.
Plutarch himself assiduously practised the ideal of the city-state, that the educated man should play his part in public life; and he held a succession of magistracies at Chaeronea and a priesthood at Delphi. In any political sense, of course, Greece had lost the last vestiges of her independence at the sack of Corinth two centuries before. Meanwhile not only had her population shrunk, but the riches and other material rewards of Italy and Asia had attracted many of her ablest soldiers, administrators, and scholars to emigrate, so that in his own time, according to Plutarch’s estimate, Greece could scarcely have put three thousand armed men into the field. In the directly practical sphere no Greek could do anything to alter these realities, and yet it was no mere antiquarian sentiment which influenced Plutarch to keep his Hellenism as intact as possible rather than embark, say, on the career of an imperial civil servant. For the governing class of his day Roman and Greek education had become inseparably intermingled, and in the Roman Empire, which was now beginning to enjoy the benefits of stable government and yet possessed neither a moral nor an intellectual centre, a teacher of Plutarch’s stature could still hope to benefit his fellow-men by inspiration and example.
The form of Plutarch’s writings suggests that his gifts were for the essay rather than the full-length history. Apart from the biographies his other major work, the Moralia, is a collection of comparatively short treatises and dialogues which cover an immense range of subjects, literary, ethical, political, and scientific. There is a distinct correspondence between the two, the Moralia celebrating the thought of the past as the Lives celebrate its action, and each throws a great deal of light on the other. Plutarch never attempted any single work on a large scale and his themes are not developed organically, but rather as a series of factual statements followed by comments. Both in the Moralia and the Lives his main object is didactic. When he turned to history, he set out not only to convince the Greeks that the annals of Rome deserved their attention, but also to remind the Romans that Greece had possessed soldiers and statesmen who could challenge comparison with their own. He wrote only of men of action and he explains at the beginning of the Life of Pericles why he chose these rather than artists or philosophers. It was perhaps because of his firm belief that the two races should draw mutual profit from their traditions that he named the series Parallel Lives and grouped his Greeks and Romans in pairs. He liked to regard Greek and Roman history as complementary in a sense, and this arrangement of his material allowed him to sum up his heroes’ moral qualities and measure their achievements in the formal essay of comparison with which he concludes most of the pairs ofLives. But these resemblances were often more coincidental than real, and Plutarch does not in fact pursue them very far; indeed he could not have done so without seriously distorting his material.
The order of composition of the Lives is still much disputed, but there are signs that they were written in four distinct groups. One series contained the lives of Sertorius and Eumenes, Cimon and Lucullus, Lysander and Sulla, Demosthenes and Cicero, Agis and Cleomenes and Tiberius and Caius Gracchus, Pelopidas and Marcellus, Phocion and Cato the Younger, and Aristides and Cato the Elder. This series Plutarch undertook, he tells us, at the request of his friends, and it may also have included the lost Epaminondas, Plutarch’s favourite hero, paired here with Scipio Africanus. A second group was composed for his own satisfaction, and it consists of great men chosen as object-lessons in a particular virtue: Pericles and Fabius Maximus, Nicias and Crassus, Dion and Brutus, Timoleon and Aemilius Paulus, Philopoemen and Titus Flaminius, Themistocles and Camillus, Alexander and Julius Caesar, Agis and Pompey, Pyrrhus and Marius and Solon and Publicola. A third group was chosen to comprise those whose career may serve as a warning. It contains Demetrius and Mark Antony and Alcibiades and Coriolanus, and here, paradoxically, Plutarch achieved from the literary point of view three of his most brilliant portraits. Lastly he turned to the semi-mythical and wrote of the founding fathers and legislators of Greece and Rome, Theseus and Romulus, and Lycurgus and Numa.
The present selection has been drawn up on the same principle as Mr Rex Warner’s volume of Roman Lives.1 Instead of reproducing Plutarch’s arrangement of Greeks and Romans in pairs, I have grouped nine of the Lives in chronological order so as to trace one of the crucial periods of Greek history, in this case the story of Athens from the legendary times of Theseus down to the end of the Peloponnesian War. To read the Lives in sequence has the advantage, among others, of bringing to the fore Plutarch’s gifts as a social historian. His delight in anecdote and personal idiosyncrasy, his sympathy for the common man, and his readiness to introduce minor characters as foils to his heroes, create as it were a brilliant human tapestry before which the great events of the Persian Wars and the age of Pericles are unfolded.
By Plutarch’s time a conventional form of biography already existed. It began with an account of the subject’s birth, family, and education, went on to delineate his character and recount the most important and typical events of his career, and concluded with an account of his posterity and influence. Plutarch followed this organization of his material fairly closely, but he employed it with far greater skill and variety than his predecessors. He freed his Lives from the rhetorical and argumentative nature of Greek biography and from the ponderous eulogy of the Roman laudatio; above all he impressed on them the charm of his personality and the depth of his insight into human nature. He was a conscientious collector of material and he draws, especially in the GreekLives, upon a very wide range of authorities, although these are of distinctly unequal value, for he was better at amassing evidence than at sifting it. But the task as he saw it, working over material which was already familiar in outline to his readers, was not so much to evaluate facts as to create an inspiring portrait. And so, like a portrait-painter, we find him choosing a characteristic yet possibly idealized pose for his subjects. He is a great master of the ben trovato, and his comment on the story of Solon and Croesus explains the procedure which he follows again and again:
When a story is so celebrated and is vouched for by so many authorities and, more important still, when it is so much in keeping with Solon’s character and bears the stamp of his wisdom and greatness of mind, I cannot agree that it should be rejected because of the so-called rules of chronology…
The conclusion of the Life of Themistocles is another case in point. Seldom does Plutarch lay on the colours to such effect and seldom with less historical support. He feels that the hero’s stature demands an elaborate account of his reception by the king of Persia; and finally in describing his suicide by poison so as to avoid tarnishing the glory of his past triumphs, he deliberately rejects Thucydides’ version to the effect that Themistocles died a natural death. On the other hand, but for Plutarch we should know almost nothing of the character of Cimon, who, judged by results alone, must be ranked among the greatest of all Athenian soldiers and statesmen.
The story of Athens over this period is a blend of glory and tragedy that needs no introduction, and the career of Theseus, the young giant-killer who fails to mature after he has reached the heights of power, provides a curtain-raiser which is only too prophetic of what was to follow. Plutarch passes judgement on these events, and the consequent collapse of Greek liberties, in a memorable passage from his Life of Flamininus:
For if we except the victory at Marathon, the sea-fight at Salamis, the battles of Plataea and Thermopylae and Cimon’s exploits at Eurymedon… Greece fought all her battles against and to enslave herself. She erected all her trophies to her own shame and misery and was brought to ruin and desolation almost wholly by the guilt and ambition of her great men.
Still, it is not the cycle of history which really engages Plutarch’s attention, and his habit of seeing all events in personal terms is at once his weakness and his strength. His purpose is to bring out the moral pattern in a hero’s career, the movement from virtue to vice (Theseus) or the contrary (Cimon), for he believed that a man cannot stand still in virtue and that if he does not advance he will be driven back. He brought to history a Platonist’s conviction that knowledge is virtue and that cause and effect are really only operative in the sphere of Ideas: hence he tends to describe his statesmen’s policies simply in terms of their personalities and to judge public conduct by the ethical standards of private life. He forgets that a statesman is far more often faced with a conflict of opposing interests than with a straight choice between right and wrong, and he seems to regard the past as a completely separate world, rather than as a continuum, which merges imperceptibly into present and future.
On the other hand it is just this boundless interest in the individual character which has given the Lives their enduring popularity from age to age. Plutarch has an unerring sense of the drama of men in great situations. His eye ranges over a wider field of human action than any of the classical historians. He surveys men’s conduct in war, in council, in love, in the use of money – always a vital test in Greek eyes of a man’s capacities – in religion, in the family, and he judges as a man of wide tolerance and ripe experience. Believing implicitly in the stature of his heroes, he has a genius for making greatness stand out in small actions. We think of Alexander handing to his physician the paper denouncing him as an assassin, and in the same gesture drinking off the physic the man had prepared him, or of Aristides writing down his name to enable an illiterate fellow-Athenian to ostracize him: these and countless other scenes Plutarch has engraved on the memory of posterity for all time. It was surely this power of his to epitomize the moral grandeur of the ancient world which appealed most strongly to Shakespeare and Montaigne and inspired the gigantic outlines of such typically Renaissance heroes as Coriolanus and Mark Antony, and later prompted Mme Roland’s remark that the Livesare the pasturage of great souls.
Plutarch is not an author whom students of Greek are encouraged to take as a model of style. He can tell a story with great effect – witness his descriptions of the battles of Salamis and Plataea, and of the building of Periclean Athens. He is at his most original, both in thought and vocabulary, when he sets out to analyse characters, motives or states of mind. But in general the structure of his sentences is too loose and unwieldy for a close rendering into English, and the translator is constantly obliged to shorten and re-shape them if the narrative is to flow with any freedom or smoothness. A new translation was certainly overdue and my main concern here has been to bring the resources of the modern idiom to express Plutarch’s thought as faithfully as possible. There is, however, a deliberate sententiousness about his choice of words which often restrains the translator from going to the extremes of informality. Where a phrase has seemed to me exactly right, I have not hesitated to borrow from Langhorne, Clough, or other translators. In conclusion I should like to express my warm thanks to Dr G. T. Griffith of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, who has provided much salutary criticism of the translation and notes and made valuable constructive suggestions.
I.S.-K.