It is remarkable that of an author so familiar as Plutarch, not only
to scholars, but to all reading men, and whose history is so easily
gathered from his works, no accurate memoir of his life, not even the
dates of his birth and death, should have come down to us. Strange that
the writer of so many illustrious biographies should wait so long for
his own. It is agreed that he was born about the year 50 A. D. He has
been represented as having been the tutor of the Emperor Trajan, as
dedicating one of his books to him, as living long in Rome in great
esteem, as having received from Trajan the consular dignity, and as
having been appointed by him the governor of Greece. He was a man whose
real superiority had no need of these flatteries. Meantime, the simple
truth is, that he was not the tutor of Trajan, that he dedicated no
book to him, was not consul in Rome, nor governor of Greece; appears
never to have been in Rome but on two occasions, and then on business
of the people of his native city, Chæronæa; and though he found or made
friends at Rome, and read lectures to some friends or scholars, he did
not know or learn the Latin language there; with one or two doubtful
exceptions, never quotes a Latin book; and though the contemporary in
his youth, or in his old age, of Persius, Juvenal, Lucan, and Seneca,
of Quintilian, Martial, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Elder, and
the Younger, he does not cite them, and in return his name is never
mentioned by any Roman writer. It would seem that the community of
letters and of personal news was even more rare at that day than the
want of printing, of railroads and telegraphs, would suggest to us.
But this neglect by his contemporaries has been compensated by an
immense popularity in modern nations. Whilst his books were never
known to the world in their own Greek tongue, it is curious that the
“Lives” were translated and printed in Latin, thence into Italian,
French, and English, more than a century before the original “Works”
were yet printed. For whilst the “Lives” were translated in Rome in
1471, and the “Morals,” part by part, soon after, the first printed
edition of the Greek “Works” did not appear until 1572. Hardly current
in his own Greek, these found learned interpreters in the scholars
of Germany, Spain, and Italy. In France, in the middle of the most
turbulent civil wars, Amyot’s translation awakened general attention.
His genial version of the “Lives” in 1559, of the “Morals” in 1572, had
signal success. King Henry IV. wrote to his wife, Marie de Medicis:
“_Vive Dieu._ As God liveth, you could not have sent me any thing which
could be more agreeable than the news of the pleasure you have taken
in this reading. Plutarch always delights me with a fresh novelty.
To love him is to love me; for he has been long time the instructor
of my youth. My good mother, to whom I owe all, and who would not
wish, she said, to see her son an illustrious dunce, put this book
into my hands almost when I was a child at the breast. It has been
like my conscience, and has whispered in my ear many good suggestions
and maxims for my conduct, and the government of my affairs.” Still
earlier, Rabelais cites him with due respect. Montaigne, in 1589, says:
“We dunces had been lost, had not this book raised us out of the dirt.
By this favor of his we dare now speak and write. The ladies are able
to read to schoolmasters. ’Tis our breviary.” Montesquieu drew from him
his definition of law, and, in his _Pensées_, declares, “I am always
charmed with Plutarch; in his writings are circumstances attached to
persons, which give great pleasure;” and adds examples. Saint Evremond
read Plutarch to the great Condé under a tent. Rollin, so long the
historian of antiquity for France, drew unhesitatingly his history
from him. Voltaire honored him, and Rousseau acknowledged him as his
master. In England, Sir Thomas North translated the “Lives” in 1579,
and Holland the “Morals” in 1603, in time to be used by Shakspeare in
his plays, and read by Bacon, Dryden, and Cudworth.
Then, recently, there has been a remarkable revival, in France, in
the taste for Plutarch and his contemporaries, led, we may say, by
the eminent critic Saint-Beuve. M. Octave Gréard, in a critical work
on the “Morals,” has carefully corrected the popular legends, and
constructed from the works of Plutarch himself his true biography. M.
Levéque has given an exposition of his moral philosophy, under the
title of “A Physician of the Soul,” in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_; and
M. C. Martha, chapters on the genius of Marcus Aurelius, of Persius,
and Lucretius, in the same journal; whilst M. Fustel de Coulanges has
explored from its roots in the Aryan race, then in their Greek and
Roman descendants, the primeval religion of the household.
Plutarch occupies a unique place in literature as an encyclopædia of
Greek and Roman antiquity. Whatever is eminent in fact or in fiction,
in opinion, in character, in institutions, in science—natural,
moral, or metaphysical, or in memorable sayings, drew his attention
and came to his pen with more or less fulness of record. He is, among
prose-writers, what Chaucer is among English poets, a repertory for
those who want the story without searching for it at first hand,—a
compend of all accepted traditions. And all this without any supreme
intellectual gifts. He is not a profound mind; not a master in any
science; not a lawgiver, like Lycurgus or Solon; not a metaphysician,
like Parmenides, Plato, or Aristotle; not the founder of any sect
or community, like Pythagoras or Zeno; not a naturalist, like Pliny
or Linnæus; not a leader of the mind of a generation, like Plato or
Goethe. But if he had not the highest powers, he was yet a man of rare
gifts. He had that universal sympathy with genius which makes all its
victories his own; though he never used verse, he had many qualities
of the poet in the power of his imagination, the speed of his mental
associations, and his sharp, objective eyes. But what specially marks
him, he is a chief example of the illumination of the intellect by
the force of morals. Though the most amiable of boon-companions, this
generous religion gives him _aperçus_ like Goethe’s.
Plutarch was well-born, well-taught, well-conditioned; a
self-respecting, amiable man, who knew how to better a good education
by travels, by devotion to affairs private and public; a master of
ancient culture, he read books with a just criticism; eminently social,
he was a king in his own house, surrounded himself with select friends,
and knew the high value of good conversation; and declares in a letter
written to his wife that “he finds scarcely an erasure, as in a book
well-written, in the happiness of his life.”
The range of mind makes the glad writer. The reason of Plutarch’s vast
popularity is his humanity. A man of society, of affairs; upright,
practical; a good son, husband, father, and friend,—he has a taste
for common life, and knows the court, the camp, and the judgment-hall,
but also the forge, farm, kitchen, and cellar, and every utensil and
use, and with a wise man’s or a poet’s eye. Thought defends him from
any degradation. He does not lose his way, for the attractions are from
within, not from without. A poet in verse or prose must have a sensuous
eye, but an intellectual co-perception. Plutarch’s memory is full, and
his horizon wide. Nothing touches man but he feels to be his; he is
tolerant even of vice, if he finds it genial; enough a man of the world
to give even the devil his due, and would have hugged Robert Burns,
when he cried.
“O wad ye tak’ a thought and mend!”
He is a philosopher with philosophers, a naturalist with naturalists,
and sufficiently a mathematician to leave some of his readers, now and
then, at a long distance behind him, or respectfully skipping to the
next chapter. But this scholastic omniscience of our author engages a
new respect, since they hope he understands his own diagram.
He perpetually suggests Montaigne, who was the best reader he has ever
found, though Montaigne excelled his master in the point and surprise
of his sentences. Plutarch had a religion which Montaigne wanted,
and which defends him from wantonness; and though Plutarch is as
plain-spoken, his moral sentiment is always pure. What better praise
has any writer received than he whom Montaigne finds “frank in giving
things, not words,” dryly adding, “it vexes me that he is so exposed
to the spoil of those that are conversant with him.” It is one of the
felicities of literary history, the tie which inseparably couples
these two names across fourteen centuries. Montaigne, whilst he grasps
Étienne de la Boèce with one hand, reaches back the other to Plutarch.
These distant friendships charm us, and honor all the parties, and make
the best example of the universal citizenship and fraternity of the
human mind.
I do not know where to find a book—to borrow a phrase of Ben
Jonson’s—“so rammed with life,” and this in chapters chiefly ethical,
which are so prone to be heavy and sentimental. No poet could
illustrate his thought with more novel or striking similes or happier
anecdotes. His style is realistic, picturesque, and varied; his sharp
objective eyes seeing every thing that moves, shines, or threatens in
nature or art, or thought or dreams. Indeed, twilights, shadows, omens,
and spectres have a charm for him. He believes in witchcraft and the
evil eye, in demons and ghosts,—but prefers, if you please, to talk
of these in the morning. His vivacity and abundance never leave him to
loiter or pound on an incident. I admire his rapid and crowded style,
as if he had such store of anecdotes of his heroes that he is forced to
suppress more than he recounts, in order to keep up with the hasting
history.
His surprising merit is the genial facility with which he deals with
his manifold topics. There is no trace of labor or pain. He gossips of
heroes, philosophers, and poets; of virtues and genius; of love and
fate and empires. It is for his pleasure that he recites all that is
best in his reading: he prattles history. But he is no courtier, and
no Boswell: he is ever manly, far from fawning, and would be welcome
to the sages and warriors he reports, as one having a native right
to admire and recount these stirring deeds and speeches. I find him
a better teacher of rhetoric than any modern. His superstitions are
poetic, aspiring, affirmative. A poet might rhyme all day with hints
drawn from Plutarch, page on page. No doubt, this superior suggestion
for the modern reader owes much to the foreign air, the Greek wine,
the religion and history of antique heroes. Thebes, Sparta, Athens,
and Rome charm us away from the disgust of the passing hour. But his
own cheerfulness and rude health are also magnetic. In his immense
quotation and allusion, we quickly cease to discriminate between what
he quotes and what he invents. We sail on his memory into the ports of
every nation, enter into every private property, and do not stop to
discriminate owners, but give him the praise of all. ’Tis all Plutarch,
by right of eminent domain, and all property vests in this emperor.
This facility and abundance make the joy of his narrative, and he is
read to the neglect of more careful historians. Yet he inspires a
curiosity, sometimes makes a necessity, to read them. He disowns any
attempt to rival Thucydides; but I suppose he has a hundred readers
where Thucydides finds one, and Thucydides must often thank Plutarch
for that one. He has preserved for us a multitude
of precious sentences, in prose or verse, of authors whose books are
lost; and these embalmed fragments, through his loving selection alone,
have come to be proverbs of later mankind. I hope it is only my immense
ignorance that makes me believe that they do not survive out of his
pages,—not only Thespis, Polemos, Euphorion, Ariston, Evenus, &c., but
fragments of Menander and Pindar. At all events, it is in reading the
fragments he has saved from lost authors that I have hailed another
example of the sacred care which has unrolled in our times, and still
searches and unrolls _papyri_ from ruined libraries and buried cities,
and has drawn attention to what an ancient might call the politeness of
Fate,—we will say, more advisedly, the benign Providence which uses
the violence of war, of earthquakes, and changed watercourses, to save
underground through barbarous ages the relics of ancient art, and thus
allows us to witness the upturning of the alphabets of old races, and
the deciphering of forgotten languages, so to complete the annals of
the forefathers of Asia, Africa, and Europe.
His delight in poetry makes him cite with joy the speech of Gorgias,
“that the tragic poet who deceived was juster than he who deceived not,
and he that was deceived was wiser than he who was not deceived.”
It is a consequence of this poetic trait in his mind, that I confess
that, in reading him, I embrace the particulars, and carry a faint
memory of the argument or general design of the chapter; but he is not
less welcome, and he leaves the reader with a relish and a necessity
for completing his studies. Many examples might be cited of nervous
expression and happy allusion, that indicate a poet and an orator,
though he is not ambitious of these titles, and cleaves to the security
of prose narrative, and only shows his intellectual sympathy with
these; yet I cannot forbear to cite one or two sentences which none who
reads them will forget. In treating of the style of the Pythian Oracle,
he says,—
“Do you not observe, some one will say, what a grace there is in
Sappho’s measures, and how they delight and tickle the ears and
fancies of the hearers? Whereas the Sibyl, with her frantic grimaces,
uttering sentences altogether thoughtful and serious, neither fucused
nor perfumed, continues her voice a thousand years through the favor
of the Divinity that speaks within her.”