The age in which Plutarch was educated and in which he wrote his
_Ethica_ is, from the literary point of view, closely similar to the
so-called ‘Augustan’ age of English writing. Of all the periods of
English style and thought, he would probably have found himself most at
home in that of Pope, Addison, and Steele, or in its continuation with
Goldsmith and Johnson. He flourished at a time when intellectual
interests were remarkably keen, if not very profound; when literature,
if for the most part it ventured on no high imaginative flights, did at
least aim at some practical bearing upon the conduct of life; when men
found entertainment, and probably some measure of moral or social help,
in the readable essay or the friendly epistle; when facts, merely as
such, were accepted as interesting if interestingly set forth; and when
Philosophy, if she deigned to keep her feet upon the ground and to speak
as one of the mortals, met with a due welcome from either sex. An
eighteenth-century Plutarch might conceivably have written the moral
papers of Johnson without Johnson’s ponderousness, or have contributed
to the _Spectator_ papers more full than Addison’s of those ‘ideas’ in
which Matthew Arnold found that writer so deficient. He might have
written, though in a prose form, the _Essay on Man_, being meanwhile as
willing as Pope to owe the bulk of his matter to other minds, but not so
willing as Pope to play the expositor without first playing the earnest
and critical student. Plutarch did not, so far as we are aware, try his
hand at verse. To judge by his comments upon poetic duty and by his
quotations—which are regularly taken from the best writers of a
classical age already far remote—his conception of the poetic office was
too exalted to permit of his dabbling in that domain. Had he done so,
and had he followed the fashion of his times, he would perhaps have come
nearer to our ‘Augustans’ even than in his prose. In poetry it was the
age of description, reflection, satire, and moralizing, in the highest
degree sensible, studiously informed with ‘wit’—in the broader Queen
Anne sense of that word—and characterized by extreme deftness of pointed
and quotable phrase, but in no sense creative, imaginative, or inspired.
Its ideal contents consisted of ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well
expressed’. The attitudes of both prose-writer and poet belonged to the
intellectual and aesthetic spirit of the period, and so far as that
spirit finds an individual embodiment in the Greek half of the Roman
Empire, it finds him in Plutarch of Chaeronea.
It would be difficult to suggest with any precision the place which
Plutarch might have filled in Victorian literature. A distinguished and
popular ‘man of letters’ and an educator of public opinion he assuredly
would have been. Given a width of reading, a persistent self-culture,
and a careful but unpedantic style, corresponding to those which he
practised in his own generation, he might have made—as he did then—an
admirable biographer and essayist. He might have been a contributor of
substantial papers to the quarterlies and other higher reviews. He
might, and probably would, have been an eminent lecturer; possibly, with
a broad practical Christianity substituted for his broad practical
Platonism, a preacher not only eminent but also in the best sense
popular. He would certainly have made a brilliant expositor of whatever
he undertook to expound. He was no Plato or Aristotle; he would have
been no Carlyle or Herbert Spencer; but he might have been much that
Macaulay was outside of politics.
As to the date of Plutarch’s birth there can be no certainty.
Approximately it may be put down as A. D. 48. It is accepted that his
death did not occur before the year 120; it may have taken place
somewhat, though not much, later. Born in the days of Claudius, he lived
through the reigns of Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus,
Domitian, Nerva, and Trajan, and saw at least the first three years of
the rule of Hadrian. He must have been nearly fifty before the last
tyrant of the early Empire fell, but the remainder of his life was spent
under the most beneficent régime, and amid the greatest peace and
prosperity, ever experienced in the ancient world. The _pax Romana_ was
at its profoundest, the sense of security at its fullest; the fact of
general well-being was everywhere most palpable. There was at the same
time, or in consequence, a vigorous revival of intellectual life. At no
period of antiquity would it have been possible for a man of studious
habits and of mild and genial disposition to enjoy a leisure so
undisturbed or a society so free from those forms of preoccupation which
preclude an engrossing interest in things purely of the mind. For the
orator who is fired by the natural heat of democratic politics, for the
patriotic poet from whom thrilling verse must be wrung by the wrongs,
the decline, or the yet unrealized aspirations of his country, there was
indeed no stimulation or scope. But for the cultivation of the
humanities, for the indulgence of a taste for art and _belles-lettres_,
for the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity, for the search after
interesting knowledge—physical, mathematical, antiquarian, historical,
philological—and for the thoughtful observation of men and manners, the
time was almost ideal. In the absence of anxious and absorbing problems
of the present there was leisure for a contemplative and critical survey
of the past, and for making acquaintance with ‘the best that had been
thought and said’ by it. Since the immediate human environment was no
longer distracted and distracting with the clamorous urgencies of
external or internal strife and danger, it was possible to look abroad
over a wider field, to contemplate the more spacious world of man and
his work, of Nature and her facts, beauties, and marvels. It was
therefore the age of the encyclopaedist, the traveller, the commentator,
the describer, the collector—collector of curiosities, of objects of
art, of books, of stories from history, of apophthegms, of pointed and
interesting quotations. The prevailing aim was mental and social
culture. This was the one object of education, however much its
professors might dissent from each other according to the degrees of
philistinism in their respective temperaments.
The aim of contemporary education—generally realized with more
definiteness than educational aims are wont to be in modern times—was to
turn the pupil into a gentleman, to equip him for the art of living and
conducting himself as such. There could, of course, hardly fail to be
those who regarded this _kalokagathia_ too much from the exterior point
of view, while others fixed their attention more decidedly, and often
perhaps too exclusively, upon the inward and spiritual grace. There were
also considerable differences between the Greek and Roman conceptions of
a gentleman. But in the main this end was universally avowed—to turn the
raw material of the boy into a man both capable and clubbable, whether
from a public or a private standpoint. The things to be sought were the
right accomplishments, the right morals, and the right manners. The
accomplishments included, beyond all else, literary information and
culture, argumentative dexterity, and a capacity for speech. The right
morals were based mainly upon reasoned self-command. The right manners
were chiefly those of urbanity, dignity, and that care of the person,
the voice, the dress, and the deportment upon which all ages have
insisted according to their several lights or tastes. It might be that
the teaching ‘philosopher’, whose concern was with the soundness of the
morals, had his quarrel with the teaching ‘sophist’, whose business was
with the rhetoric and its excellence for exhibition purposes or for the
gaining of various forms of influence. The philosopher might think the
sophist superficial, showy, and often actually pernicious, while the
sophist might look upon the philosopher as visionary, pedantic, and
often a positive clog upon practical efficiency. Nevertheless no
typically cultured person of the day would have questioned that, in
order to be complete—or, as Coleridge calls it, ‘orbicular’—education
must include its due measure of both forms of teaching.
After his years of infancy the boy, under the supervision of his
_paedagogus_—ideally a slave of superior character, but too often a
person who was merely useless for harder work—passed into a school,
where he was first taught his letters and then proceeded to the reading,
learning, and recital of classical poetry, to the study of music, and to
some acquaintance with elementary arithmetic and geometry. Next, taken
in hand by the rhetorical teacher in a higher school, he was made to
write and deliver descriptions and essays, mostly on trite and unreal
themes of a historical or pseudo-historical nature, to develop his
powers of invention on either side of a chosen topic, and to cultivate a
fastidious diction, pointed phrase, and the elocutionary arts and
graces. From artificial harangues and the ‘speaking of a piece’ he
advanced to the imaginary pleading of forensic cases, in which the law
was often as fictitious as the facts. When, upon reaching the age for
assuming the _toga virilis_, he was emancipated from the custody of the
_paedagogus_ and the discipline of the school, his formal education
commonly ceased. If he proceeded further, as many did, to what may be
considered as the equivalent of a university course, he might elect to
study philosophy, to study ‘sophistic’, or to dally with both in such
measure as seemed likely to set off the abilities or consolidate the
culture of a gentleman. Even in the more mature years of life the
intellectually-disposed grandee had a habit of maintaining near his
person a salaried philosopher as a kind of domestic monitor, and
audiences of wealth and fashion readily gathered in Rome and elsewhere
to listen to lectures on philosophy by professors who properly
understood the art of clear and pleasant exposition. For the most part
the typical Roman, less genuinely impassioned than the Greek for thought
pure and simple, looked upon any ‘specializing’ in philosophy as likely
to lead either to too cloistered a virtue or to the acquisition of
eccentric, if not dangerous, views. A certain modicum of philosophical
knowledge might be an adornment to life, and a certain modicum of
philosophical training might impart a steadiness to character, but the
study must not be pursued to the point at which the student himself
stood in danger of becoming a ‘philosopher’. With the Greeks
philosophical specializing was commonly subject to no such reprehension,
partly because of the inborn Hellenic ardour for study and esteem of
learning, partly because in this domain, even more than in the
rhetorical, the Greeks were the accepted teachers throughout the Roman
sphere.
This, or nearly this, was the attitude of the educational world in the
first decades of the second century, and it was in this world that
Plutarch of Chaeronea became a figure of special eminence and
distinction. For in whatever light the modern reader may regard Plutarch
as a man of letters, to his own times he was first and foremost an
educator. It is from this point of view that we must consider both his
_Parallel Lives_ and his _Moral Essays_, if we are to perceive in them
that unity of character and purpose which he intended all his work to
possess.
Plutarch, then, was born about A. D. 48 in the very heart of Greece, at
the comparatively small town of Chaeronea, famous as the scene of the
decisive victory of the Macedonians over the southern Greeks, and also
of that in which the forces of Mithridates were routed by Sulla. His
family must have been of high local standing, and the fact that his
father—a man of cultivated tastes and refined manners—was the owner of
the ‘finest kind of horses’ is enough to show, to those who appreciate
the significance of the word _hippotrophia_, that he must have been
possessed of considerable means. The same conclusion may be drawn both
from what Plutarch himself incidentally reveals concerning his brothers,
Lamprias and Timon, as well as other members of the family circle, and
also from what is known of his own life and upbringing. That as a boy he
passed through the orthodox curriculum, is obvious from his wide
acquaintance with literature and his intelligent, if not particularly
profound, references to both music and mathematics. When of an age to
receive an education in philosophy, he was placed, or placed himself,
chiefly under the distinguished Ammonius, an Alexandrian philosopher of
a broad semi-Platonist, semi-Peripatetic school, who had become
established in a prominent intellectual and public position at Athens.
It was the accepted rule for the student to attend, but not necessarily
to confine himself to, the lectures of a selected teacher. Often he
lived in that teacher’s house, or at least, in intimate connexion
therewith. If the philosopher was strictly conscientious he felt it his
duty to watch over the developing character of his pupil, to visit him
with any deserved reproof,[1] to serve as his father confessor, to
answer his questions, and to meet his moral and intellectual
difficulties. The familiar phrase ‘guide, philosopher, and friend’
perhaps describes the relations with unusual exactness. We find both
Plutarch and his brother in the company of Ammonius at Delphi when Nero,
in the year 66, graced that city with his imperial and artistic
presence.
His formal education completed, we discover little of the younger
manhood of Plutarch, except that he must have been in high local
estimation, partly, perhaps, from the position of his family, but
doubtless no less on account of his own conspicuous gifts. Had this not
been the case, he would hardly have been appointed as one of a
delegation of two sent on a mission to the Roman proconsul of the
province. At what age he was first entrusted with civic functions as
aedile, or with a Delphic priesthood (then merely a ceremonial office
open to any layman), or with other public positions, we cannot say. We
can only be sure that to his learning he added a recognizable capacity
for public business. However many hours he may have devoted to study and
to the compilation of those ample commonplace-books which evidently
served him in such good stead, he prided himself on carrying his
philosophic attainments into the local Chamber or on to the local
platform. In his judgement this procedure was not only a vindication of
philosophy and a method of keeping the faculties energetic; it was also
a patriotic duty.
As has been already said, this was an age of travel. Facilities of
transport were plentiful; the seas and main roads were secure from
pirate or enemy; journeys were at least as expeditious as at any modern
time until the employment of steam. We know of visits made by Plutarch
to Alexandria, various parts of Greece, Rome, and the north of Italy.
Rome he must have visited at least twice, and in this metropolis and
‘epitome of the world’ he made acquaintance with a large circle of men
of distinction, transacted public business (presumably on behalf of his
native town, of which he may have been sent as representative),
delivered lectures,[2] and apparently acted as a sort of consulting
physician to morally perturbed members of Roman society. He must have
spoken always in Greek, for he confesses that—like most other Greek
writers—he had given almost no attention to Latin; nor is any such
avowal needed from a person who, even after looking into the language,
believed _sine patris_ to be the Latin for ‘without a father’. Greek,
however, was then as much the universal language of the cultured as,
until recently, French was the universal accomplishment of fashion,
diplomacy, and the traveller.
The Rome with which Plutarch was immediately acquainted was the Rome of
Vespasian and of the earlier half of Domitian’s reign. Had his sojourn
in the capital taken place some fifteen or twenty years later, it is in
the highest degree probable that he would have been further known to us
through an acquaintance with Pliny or some other Roman writer of that
date. That a Greek, and especially one who had a difficulty in reading
Latin, should make no mention of contemporary Latin authors—that in his
heart he should rather despise them—is only characteristic of the
Hellenic attitude of the time. But that the amiable Pliny, who has an
appreciative word to say of almost every one within his social horizon,
including comparatively obscure philosophers like Euphrates, should say
nothing of so eminent a figure as Plutarch, amounts to evidence that the
two had never met. A man who could make close friends of consulars like
Sosius Senecio and Mestrius Florus, and who enjoyed an intimacy with
Paccius and Fundanus, could not have failed to win the notice of the
Horace Walpole of his day. Quintilian, Silius, Statius, Martial, Pliny,
Suetonius, and Juvenal were all writing when Plutarch was already the
coryphaeus of Greek culture, and if not one of them mentions his name,
it is because he was living in remote Chaeronea and forgathering only
with his chosen circle of philosophers, men of letters, artists, or
musicians in that town or in Athens, Corinth, and other Greek centres
near at hand.
To Chaeronea Plutarch must have retired by middle life. There he married
Timoxena, a lady of position, but of quiet tastes, had issue four sons
and a daughter, identified himself with the civic and religious concerns
of his town, delivered lectures, imparted instruction on the lines of a
modified or latitudinarian Platonic philosophy, industriously read the
books in his moderate but useful library, made copious extracts
therefrom, wrote his _Lives_ and those occasional papers known as his
_Ethica_ or _Moral Essays_, and enjoyed the discussion of many a knotty
question—often perhaps of little or no importance beyond the fact of its
forming a problem—in the agreeable society of his relatives or his
cultivated friends and guests. At such gatherings he was the leader,
doubtless dominating the conversation—though in his more courteous
way—somewhat as Johnson dominated the coterie described by Boswell.
Often, we gather, he varied this quiet course of life by means of
excursions to other Greek cities—Athens, Sparta, Aedepsus—where he most
probably delivered an occasional lecture, and where, as we are certain,
he thoroughly enjoyed himself in table-talk.[3]
That he gave philosophical education, though apparently not of a
systematic and pedagogic kind, to persons of both sexes is known from
his own references to the practice. Whether he did so for money or not,
we cannot tell. The later Platonists by no means felt bound to adopt the
attitude of Socrates and Plato towards the taking of fees. The world had
changed, and the _res angusta_ was often more powerful than a principle
which had ceased to appear entirely rational. But there is every reason
to suppose that Plutarch was a man of independent means; we know further
that a genial frugality was the rule of his household, and that he
entertained a becoming contempt for the obsequious or the advertiser.
The day of the endowed professor, whether of philosophy or sophistic,
was still to dawn for Greece under Marcus Aurelius, and it never dawned
at all for so small a town as Chaeronea. We may take it therefore that,
whether with or without fee or present, Plutarch was able to choose his
own pupils—in all likelihood the sons and daughters of his friends—and
that, in dealing with them or with a wider audience, he maintained the
fullest dignity and independence, and practised all the amiable candour
which he explicitly recommends.
For any lack of originality, of speculative audacity, of profundity (or
the obscurity which is so often mistaken for that virtue), Plutarch
fully compensates. To his generation he served as a milch-cow of
practical philosophy on its ethical side. He browsed on literature and
thought, secreted the most valuable constituents, and yielded the cream
to his hearers or readers. So far as he belonged to a philosophic
school, it was that of the Old Academy. In other words, he would have
labelled himself a Platonist. It is probable that he was as much
attracted by the superb literary style of Plato, the nature of the man,
and the nobility of his conceptions, as by anything capable of
crystallization into a philosophy. These qualities attracted even the
dilettante, while in the more specially philosophic world time had done
much to refract the real Plato, to extract dogma from him, and to create
a large _Aberglaube_ about his writings. Be that as it may, there is
much in Plato that Plutarch does not accept, and there is much outside
of Plato to which he gives a welcome. Towards Stoics and
Epicureans—whose doctrines, like those of the Christians, would
logically withhold men from public activity—he is distinctly, though
never virulently, hostile, and when his pen ranges itself against
particular schools, it is against these.[4] It is easier, in fact, to
say to what sect Plutarch did not belong than to associate him
definitively with any other. Nevertheless it is as a Platonist that he
would have classed himself, and it is especially by the later
Neo-Platonists that he was quoted as a divinely gifted writer who lent
literary charm and potency to wisdom. So broad, however, was his
teaching, and in many respects so adaptable even to Christianity, that
early writers of the Church had no scruple in borrowing liberally from
him.[5]
Into whatever shape he may have systematized his views, and however
popular his treatment of them, Plutarch ranked with the philosophers. If
he was opposed to Stoicism and Epicureanism, he was, like other
philosophers, no less opposed to sophistic. To him the representatives
of that art were apt to seem shallow and showy.[6]
He held, with the Socratics in general, that the basis of right action
is knowledge, and he had no belief in empiricism. Not that he rejected
either established moral views or established religion. He was no
sceptic, still less an atheist. As Friedländer has well argued, there
was no ancient cult of atheism. Plutarch, indeed, is remarkably
receptive in the matter of deities. The Egyptian worship of Isis and
Osiris, which had made great progress throughout the Roman Empire,
appeared to him equally tenable with the worship practised by his own
ancestors. In the polytheism in which he acquiesced, such divinities
were only other forms of those known in Hellas, and he found no
difficulty in reconciling and combining the two sets of notions and
cults. He was deeply tinged with Orientalism, though his culture and his
natural good taste made him despise corybantic demonstrations and what
Friedländer has called ‘dirty mortifications’. He held the Eranian
belief in daemonic agencies, which acted upon mankind from the one side
as the gods did from the other. If he appears to rise to the conception
of ‘God’ in the singular, the word is rather to be taken as denoting the
sum of divine wisdom and beneficent dispensation. Like all the best
minds of his own and many a previous generation, he found moral
difficulties in accepting the characters ascribed to the deities in the
best literature of earlier Greece, and therefore, while approving of the
established education in poetry, he necessarily felt some qualms as to
the possible effects. Poetry served in the schools ‘as introduction to
philosophy, history, geography, and astronomy’, and it had much to do
with the formation of religious and ethical notions. Homer, Pindar,
Sophocles, and Menander were ‘learned and wise’, and boys were brought
to regard them as inspired. Hence Plutarch’s treatise on _Poets as Moral
Teachers of the Young_. The point of view in that essay is not, indeed,
entirely rational. It was not so easy for Plutarch as it is for us to
realize that moral and religious ideas in Greek literature had passed
through an evolution corresponding to the development of intellect and
society. Instead of frankly recognizing the limitations of Homer or the
inconsistencies of the dramatists in this respect, he puts a highly
ingenious constraint upon the connexion between any dubious sentiment
and its context. It is only when he fails in such a _tour de force_ that
he consents to censure the poet. In this procedure he was by no means
the first. The battle of the ‘takers of objection’ (προβληματικοί) and
the ‘solvers of difficulties’ (λυτικοί) was centuries old. That Plutarch
should range himself as far as possible with the solvers is a
circumstance which would naturally follow both from his love of
literature and from his constitutionally reverential temperament.
As has been often observed, the purpose running through the _Parallel
Lives_ and the _Moral Essays_ is one and the same. The philosophy of
Plutarch was ethical. For logic and dialectic he shows no liking. His
object was to relate philosophy to life, to bring home a philosophy
which could be lived. By philosophy he meant the best conduct of life,
based on an understanding of the nature of virtue—τὸ καλόν, the right,
the honourable, the becoming. From philosophy we are to learn not only
what is due to ourselves, but what is due to the gods, to the laws, to
parents, children, friends, enemies, fellow-citizens, and strangers. The
_Essays_, like those of Seneca or Bacon, deal with separable components
or manifestations of right and wrong character, with duties and
circumstances: the _Lives_ meanwhile afford us concrete examples or
object lessons from history.[7] Yet life, even that of a philosopher, is
not made up entirely of preaching and exhortation, least of all when the
philosopher is at the same time a man of the world and a man of letters.
Plutarch felt a lively interest in all such posers as were mooted in the
talk of the table or of the loungers’ club. He therefore includes among
his occasional papers—whether written by request or under the
fashionable fiction of a request—a number of treatises on physical,
antiquarian, literary, and artistic topics which can hardly be said to
bear with any immediateness upon the ethical perfection of the reader.
As a change, therefore, from the treatment of _Superstition_ or
_Inquisitiveness_ or _The Restraint of Anger_, of _Rules for Married
Couples_ and _Rules of Health_ and rules for _The Student at Lecture_,
he may in a spare moment discuss such matters as _The Face in the Moon_
or questions in Roman custom.
The majority of the pieces in the present selection speak for
themselves. With the one exception to be mentioned immediately, they all
bear the impress of the man. There is the same moral broadmindedness and
sobriety, the same shrewd sense of _le bonhomme Plutarque_, the same
faculty for popularizing[8] without descending to vapidity, the same
knack of relieving the sermon by means of anecdote, quotation, or
interesting item of information at the point where the discourse
threatens to become tedious. It is true that the German critic, in his
indefatigable search for the _unecht_, has impugned the authorship of
the _Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages_[9] on grounds unintelligible to
those who do not expect a dinner-table conversation to be a systematic
treatise, and who are satisfied to believe that a mixture of serious
talk, banter, and narrative, and a frequent transition of subject, are
precisely the things for which one would look on such an occasion. Every
feature of the style is Plutarchan, and, if Plutarch did not write the
piece, we can only feel unmixed regret that he did not, and unmixed
surprise that its real author should sacrifice the credit of his
performance. With the article on _The Bringing-up of a Boy_ the case is
different. Wyttenbach has sufficiently pointed out its frequent
feebleness of argument, its turbid arrangement, the exceeding triteness
of its ideas, and its unaccountable omissions. To us moderns it is of
great interest for the light which it throws on the education of the
period, and for its incidental revelations of the conditions of domestic
life and the domestic affections. Otherwise it is a puerile performance
and savours of nothing but the student essay. If it be argued that it is
one of Plutarch’s juvenile works, the answer is that it is unlike him to
be disingenuous; and disingenuous he must be, if in his early youth he
pretends to have ‘often impressed upon parents’ this or that. Antiquity
produced far too many amateur essays in imitation of great
authors—imitations actually ascribed to those authors by a recognized
fiction of the schools—for us to do an injustice to Plutarch when an
easier solution lies so close to our hands. Perhaps, again, the piece on
_Fawner and Friend_[10] suffers from an occasional _longueur_, but there
are few writers who do not at some less felicitous moment perpetrate
paragraphs less vivacious than their average.
As a stylist Plutarch is apt to be underrated. He is, it is true, no
laborious atticist, and makes no point of writing like a purist in the
classic manner of a Plato or a Lysias. But this does not mean that he is
in the least negligent in either word or sentence. On the contrary, his
words are selected with extreme care, and his sentences—where the text
is sound, as for the most part it is—are rounded off and interlinked as
watchfully as any natural writing need require. It is true that his
vocabulary is large and his expression full, but, when his words are
properly weighed and their metaphorical and other differentiations duly
perceived, no understanding reader will call him verbose.[11] He
displays an immense command of language, but no word plays an idle part,
and if (like Cicero, whom in many respects he resembles) he is fond of
joining what are erroneously called synonyms, it needs but little
appreciation of verbal values to realize that the added words invariably
carry some amplification, some more precise definition, or some emphasis
helpful to a full grasp upon the sense. It is true also that his
sentences are apt to appear—like the sentences of Ruskin’s earlier
days—somewhat lengthy; nevertheless they commonly atone by lucidity of
construction for any demand they may make upon sustained attention.[12]
In a modern English dress they must necessarily be broken up, but a
practised reader of Plutarch finds no more difficulty with them in the
original than he would find with a passage of Demosthenes or Plato. To
one who becomes familiar with them they are at least as agreeable as the
staccato brevities of Seneca. What chiefly exacts some effort from the
reader of Plutarchan Greek is the fact that its words are
extraordinarily charged with metaphor and allusion.[13] His choice of
one word rather than another is always nicely calculated. This truth
once recognized, a reader cannot fail to admire both the consistency
with which the writer maintains his similitude while he is upon it, and
also the copious resources of vocabulary upon which he draws for the
purpose. Meanwhile, despite any length of sentence and fullness of
praise, Plutarch neither irritates with tricks and mannerisms nor
wearies with pedantry and ponderousness. A pedant he could not be. He is
no writer of Johnsonese. To him the best words are those which best suit
their context, and he has no objection whatever to a dash of the
colloquial or a touch of the homely or naïve. It is one of his
characteristic merits that he knows when to take the higher and when the
lower road of diction. He also knows when he is in danger of stylistic
monotony. Plutarch was a teacher, but, like all truly intelligent
members of that profession, he recognized that the most uninspiring
attitude to adopt is the severely and unremittingly pedagogic. ‘The
knack of style,’ it has been said, ‘is to write like a human being,’ and
Plutarch, a professor of humanity without a chair, is always and
entirely human. That his pen must have moved with extraordinary facility
is evident from the number of his publications. Apart from his _Lives_
(of which not all are extant), his _Moralia_ include over eighty pieces,
long or short, and it is certain that many others had disappeared[14]
before the present collection became available in its eleventh-century
MS.
It is not here implied that he is never culpable, never over-loaded.
There are times, though rare ones, at which we feel that his memory or
his notebook has been unduly exploited. We feel that he might have
spared us an illustration which does not illustrate or a similitude
which is deficient in similarity. To a certain extent he is a Euphuist,
and though Guevara perhaps owed nothing directly to him (as he did to
Seneca[15]), it is manifest that Plutarch sometimes strains a point in
order to achieve an over-ingenious comparison. The contagion of the
thing, like that of Euphuism in the Elizabethan age, was in the air, and
Plutarch assuredly does not err more often or more heinously with one
generation than Shakespeare did with another. Wide reading and natural
fecundity easily slip into sins which narrow resources and slow
invention are impotent to commit.
* * * * *
There are numerous signs that the pendulum of classical interest is
swinging in the direction of the literature of the early Empire. The
exclusive _toujours perdrix_ of the Attic and Ciceronian periods has
apparently begun to jade the palate, and writers like Seneca and
Plutarch are coming into their own once more. There was a time when
these authors were perhaps better known than any others. That they were
worthy of prime consideration is manifest from the immense influence
which they exercised upon the ardent and inquiring spirits of the
sixteenth and following centuries, in England no less than on the
Continent. Authors who could make such an appeal to Montaigne, to the
Elizabethan dramatists, to Bacon, or to Jeremy Taylor,[16] are surely
not to be despised because they belong stylistically to a ‘silver’ age,
or because their strength lies mostly in the fact that they are a mine
of ideas, wise saws, and pointed moral instances. Seneca, as being a
writer of Latin, was naturally the earlier and more widely read,[17] but
from the publication of the _editio princeps_ of Plutarch by Aldus in
1509 our author sprang into peculiar estimation among the recovered
spirits of antiquity. It was, however, due to Amyot that both his
_Lives_ and his _Essays_ became accessible to those who had little or no
Greek. The _Essays_ were rendered into idiomatic French by that
admirable translator in the year 1572,[18] and Montaigne was by no means
the only reader among _nous autres ignorans_ who made the Plutarch of
Amyot his breviary, and who ‘drew his water incessantly’ from him. It
was not the literary etiquette of the Elizabethan age to acknowledge all
the obligations one might owe even to a contemporary, much less to the
ancients, and the stores of Plutarch might be rifled without much fear
of detection, and certainly with no fear of reproach. When Lyly, in
_Euphues and his Ephoebus_,[19] takes it in hand to bring up a child in
the way he should go, he is in a large measure simply translating,
expanding, and emphasizing the pseudo-Plutarch on the _Bringing-up of a
Boy_ and interspersing the discourse with pickings from other essays,
particularly that on _Garrulousness_.[20] Montaigne, of course, with his
bland unreserve, credits Plutarch via Amyot with a multitude of
observations, while Bacon, when following the new vogue of the essay,
sometimes refers us to ‘Plutarke’, and at least on one occasion informs
us that ‘Mountaigny saith’ a thing which on reference to the said
‘Mountaigny’ we find to be Plutarchan.
Though it is no part of the present Introduction to examine in detail
the influence of the philosopher of Chaeronea upon modern writers, or to
make an inventory of his contributions to English literature, it is at
least worth asking whether an author whom genius once delighted to
exploit, and from whom so many good things have filtered down to us
through various channels, may not be well worth reading at first hand.
To Professor Mahaffy[21] Plutarch ‘is a pure and elevating writer, full
of precious information, and breathing a lofty moral tone’, and to
Professor Gilbert Murray[22] he is ‘one of the most tactful and charming
of writers, and one of the most lovable characters in antiquity’. Said
Emerson[23]: ‘Plutarch will be perpetually rediscovered from time to
time as long as books last.’
Footnote 1:
The reproof might ostensibly be general, but its particular
application was readily felt. Musonius, we are told by Epictetus, made
all his hearers feel ‘as if some one had been talking to him about
them’.
Footnote 2:
See _Concerning Busybodies_, 522 E.
Footnote 3:
Over and above his resemblances to Macaulay as a writer of essays and
biographical history, there is a distinct similarity between their
conversational tastes. We can imagine a Plutarch fully at home with
Macaulay at one of those astonishing early Victorian breakfast-parties
where a man might be asked if he ‘knew his Popes’, and where he might
be endured while he recited them. Plutarch’s _Table-Talk_, like his
_Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages_, reveals for contemporary Greek
society the same deliberate cult of intellectual conversation
sharpened by challenge and debate. In such conversation he must
himself have played a conspicuous part. Nevertheless, it may fairly be
gathered that the Greek or Graeco-Roman interlocutors in the reign of
Trajan were the more ingenuously athirst for reciprocal enlightenment,
however dubiously we may regard the value of the information or
misinformation actually gained. Nor is it easy to believe that
Plutarch would have thought it etiquette to indulge in the protracted
monologues to which the more modern society submitted with such grace
as it best could.
Footnote 4:
e.g. in his _De repugnantiis Stoicorum_ and his _Non posse suaviter
vivi secundum Epicurum_. Yet, as Mahaffy says, ‘it would be hard to
say whether the number of Stoic dogmas which he rejects exceeds that
which he quotes with approval’ (_The Greek World under Roman Sway_,
pp. 300 sqq.).
Footnote 5:
Volkmann names in particular Clement of Alexandria and Basil.
Footnote 6:
This does not mean that he had no friends among the rhetorical
teachers (the contrary is shown by his reference to ‘our Niger’ in
_praec. san._, § 16), but only that he distrusted the type. He refused
to approve of a fluent and polished style as an end in itself. Pliny
describes how the amazingly voluble Isaeus would offer his audience a
choice of subject and allow it to dictate the side which he should
take. He would then rise and demonstrate his extemporizing powers with
much show of rhetorical ornament.
Footnote 7:
Volkmann says of the _Lives_, ‘Das Werthvolle an ihnen sind nicht die
historischen Details, die er giebt, sondern die eingestreuten
Reflexionen, die ethischen Betrachtungen, das Eingehen auf
individuelle Stimmungen und Leidenschaften der grossen Männer.’
Footnote 8:
_Aulicis tantum scripsit, non doctis_, says Scaliger.
Footnote 9:
Volkmann guesses that it is _ein Produkt der späteren Sophistik_. If
so, we may congratulate the Sophist on his perfect reproduction of
Plutarch’s style and of his non-sophistic tone.
Footnote 10:
Bacon’s Essay _Of Followers and Friends_ owes almost nothing to
Plutarch beyond the title. We do, however, find him borrowing the
words ‘for there is no such Flatterer as a Man’s selfe’.
Footnote 11:
As Volkmann happily puts it, he writes ‘with comfortable breadth’.
Footnote 12:
The sentences would doubtless have been easier still if Plutarch had
not felt bound to follow the fashion of the time and elaborately avoid
hiatus.
Footnote 13:
Perhaps this is why Plutarch, as seen through Amyot, appeared to
Montaigne ‘close and thorny,’ while his sense was nevertheless
‘closely-jointed and pithily-continued’.
Footnote 14:
Stobaeus (sixth century) had access to much of Plutarch that is now
lost.
Footnote 15:
See an observation of Professor Summers, _Seneca Select Letters_,
Introduction, p. lxxiv.
Footnote 16:
Plutarch ‘is the theme of more than 230 allusions or direct references
on the part of Jeremy Taylor’ (Sandys, _A History of Classical
Scholarship_, i. 300).
Footnote 17:
He was familiar reading of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and
appears in the _Gesta Romanorum_. Later the _Adagia_ of Erasmus draw
freely upon him.
Footnote 18:
‘Il a en quelque sorte créé Plutarque,’ says Demogeot.
Footnote 19:
_Euphues_ appeared in 1579. Jusserand (_The English Novel in the Time
of Shakespeare_, p. 127) remarks that Euphues ‘addresses moral
epistles to his fellow men to guide them through life’, but he appears
to be unaware that Lyly borrowed this object, as well as so large a
quantity of his matter, from Plutarch.
Footnote 20:
We meet, for example, with the story of Zeno, ‘the olde man in Athens
that amiddest the pottes could hold his peace.’
Footnote 21:
_History of Greek Classical Literature_, ii. 427.
Footnote 22:
_The Literature of Ancient Greece_, p. 396.
Footnote 23:
Quoted by Sandys (_A History of Classical Scholarship_, i. 300).