“Early this morning, asking Epaminondas about the manner of
Lysis’s burial, I found that Lysis had taught him as far as the
incommunicable mysteries of our sect, and that the same Dæmon that
waited on Lysis, presided over him, if I can guess at the pilot from
the sailing of the ship. The paths of life are large, but in few are
men directed by the Dæmons. When Theanor had said this, he looked
attentively on Epaminondas, as if he designed a fresh search into his
nature and inclinations.”
And here is his sentiment on superstition, somewhat condensed in Lord
Bacon’s citation of it: “I had rather a great deal that men should say,
There was no such man at all as Plutarch, than that they should say,
that there was one Plutarch that would eat up his children as soon as
they were born, as the poets speak of Saturn.”
The chapter “On Fortune” should be read by poets, and other wise men;
and the vigor of his pen appears in the chapter “Whether the Athenians
were more Warlike or Learned,” and in his attack upon Usurers.
There is, of course, a wide difference of time in the writing of these
discourses, and so in their merit. Many of them are mere sketches
or notes for chapters in preparation, which were never digested or
finished. Many are notes for disputations in the lecture-room. His poor
indignation against Herodotus was perhaps a youthful prize essay: it
appeared to me captious and labored; or perhaps, at a rhetorician’s
school, the subject of Herodotus being the lesson of the day, Plutarch
was appointed by lot to take the adverse side.
The plain-speaking of Plutarch, as of the ancient writers generally,
coming from the habit of writing for one sex only, has a great gain
for brevity, and, in our new tendencies of civilization, may tend to
correct a false delicacy.
* * * * *
We are always interested in the man who treats the intellect well.
We expect it from the philosopher,—from Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza,
and Kant; but we know that metaphysical studies in any but minds of
large horizon and incessant inspiration have their dangers. One asks
sometimes whether a metaphysician can treat the intellect well. The
central fact is the superhuman intelligence pouring into us from its
unknown fountain, to be received with religious awe, and defended
from any mixture of our will. But this high Muse comes and goes; and
the danger is that, when the Muse is wanting, the student is prone to
supply its place with microscopic subtleties and logomachy. It is fatal
to spiritual health to lose your admiration. “Let others wrangle,” said
St. Augustine: “I will wonder.” Plato and Plotinus are enthusiasts,
who honor the race; but the logic of the sophists and materialists,
whether Greek or French, fills us with disgust. Whilst we expect this
awe and reverence of the spiritual power from the philosopher in his
closet, we praise it in the man of the world,—the man who lives on
quiet terms with existing institutions, yet indicates his perception of
these high oracles, as do Plutarch, Montaigne, Hume, and Goethe. These
men lift themselves at once from the vulgar, and are not the parasites
of wealth. Perhaps they sometimes compromise, go out to dine, make and
take compliments; but they keep open the source of wisdom and health.
Plutarch is uniformly true to this centre. He had not lost his wonder.
He is a pronounced idealist, who does not hesitate to say, like another
Berkeley, “Matter is itself privation;” and again, “The Sun is the
cause that all men are ignorant of Apollo, by sense withdrawing the
rational intellect from that which is to that which appears.” He thinks
that “souls are naturally endowed with the faculty of prediction;” he
delights in memory, with its miraculous power of resisting time. He
thinks that “Alexander invaded Persia with greater assistance from
Aristotle than from his father Philip.” He thinks that “he who has
ideas of his own is a bad judge of another man’s, it being true that
the Eleans would be the most proper judges of the Olympic games, were
no Eleans gamesters.” He says of Socrates, that he endeavored to bring
reason and things together, and make truth consist with sober sense. He
wonders with Plato at that nail of pain and pleasure which fastens the
body to the mind. The mathematics give him unspeakable pleasure, but he
chiefly liked that proportion which teaches us to account that which is
just, equal; and not that which is equal, just.
Of philosophy he is more interested in the results than in the method.
He has a just instinct of the presence of a master, and prefers to
sit as a scholar with Plato, than as a disputant; and, true to his
practical character, he wishes the philosopher not to hide in a corner,
but to commend himself to men of public regards and ruling genius:
“for, if he once possess such a man with principles of honor and
religion, he takes a compendious method, by doing good to one, to
oblige a great part of mankind.” ’Tis a temperance, not an eclecticism,
which makes him adverse to the severe Stoic, or the Gymnosophist, or
Diogenes, or any other extremist. That vice of theirs shall not hinder
him from citing any good word they chance to drop. He is an eclectic
in such sense as Montaigne was,—willing to be an expectant, not a
dogmatist.
In many of these chapters it is easy to infer the relation between
the Greek philosophers and those who came to them for instruction.
This teaching was no play nor routine, but strict, sincere, and
affectionate. The part of each of the class is as important as that of
the master. They are like the base-ball players, to whom the pitcher,
the bat, the catcher, and the scout are equally important. And Plutarch
thought, with Ariston, “that neither a bath nor a lecture served any
purpose, unless they were purgative.” Plutarch has such a keen pleasure
in realities that he has none in verbal disputes; he is impatient of
sophistry, and despises the Epicharmian disputations: as, that he who
ran in debt yesterday owes nothing to-day, as being another man; so, he
that was yesterday invited to supper, the next night comes an unbidden
guest, for that he is quite another person.
* * * * *
Except as historical curiosities, little can be said in behalf of
the scientific value of the “Opinions of the Philosophers,” the
“Questions,” and the “Symposiacs.” They are, for the most part, very
crude opinions; many of them so puerile that one would believe that
Plutarch in his haste adopted the notes of his younger auditors, some
of them jocosely misreporting the dogma of the professor, who laid
them aside as _memoranda_ for future revision, which he never gave,
and they were posthumously published. Now and then there are hints of
superior science. You may cull from this record of barbarous guesses
of shepherds and travellers statements that are predictions of facts
established in modern science. Usually, when Thales, Anaximenes, or
Anaximander are quoted, it is really a good judgment. The explanation
of the rainbow, of the floods of the Nile, and of the _remora_, &c.,
are just; and the bad guesses are not worse than many of Lord Bacon’s.
His Natural History is that of a lover and poet, and not of a
physicist. His humanity stooped affectionately to trace the virtues
which he loved in the animals also. “Knowing and not knowing is the
affirmative or negative of the dog; knowing you is to be your friend;
not knowing you, your enemy.” He quotes Thucydides, saying, “that
not the desire of honor only never grows old, but much less also the
inclination to society and affection to the State, which continue even
in ants and bees to the very last.”
* * * * *
But though curious in the questions of the schools on the nature and
genesis of things, his extreme interest in every trait of character,
and his broad humanity, lead him constantly to Morals, to the study of
the Beautiful and Good. Hence his love of heroes, his rule of life,
and his clear convictions of the high destiny of the soul. La Harpe
said “that Plutarch is the genius the most naturally moral that ever
existed.”
’Tis almost inevitable to compare Plutarch with Seneca, who, born fifty
years earlier, was for many years his contemporary, though they never
met, and their writings were perhaps unknown to each other. Plutarch
is genial, with an endless interest in all human and divine things;
Seneca, a professional philosopher, a writer of sentences, and, though
he keep a sublime path, is less interesting, because less humane;
and when we have shut his book, we forget to open it again. There is
a certain violence in his opinions, and want of sweetness. He lacks
the sympathy of Plutarch. He is tiresome through perpetual didactics.
He is not happily living. Cannot the simple lover of truth enjoy the
virtues of those he meets, and the virtues suggested by them, so to
find himself at some time purely contented? Seneca was still more a man
of the world than Plutarch; and, by his conversation with the Court
of Nero, and his own skill, like Voltaire’s, of living with men of
business, and emulating their address in affairs by great accumulation
of his own property, learned to temper his philosophy with facts. He
ventured far—apparently too far—for so keen a conscience as he inly
had. Yet we owe to that wonderful moralist illustrious maxims; as
if the scarlet vices of the times of Nero had the natural effect of
driving virtue to its loftiest antagonisms. “Seneca,” says L’Estrange,
“was a pagan Christian, and is very good reading for our Christian
pagans.” He was Buddhist in his cold abstract virtue, with a certain
impassibility beyond humanity. He called “pity, that fault of narrow
souls.” Yet what noble words we owe to him: “God divided man into men,
that they might help each other;” and again, “The good man differs from
God in nothing but duration.” His thoughts are excellent, if only he
had a right to say them. Plutarch, meantime, with every virtue under
heaven, thought it the top of wisdom to philosophize, yet not appear to
do it, and to reach in mirth the same ends which the most serious are
proposing.
Plutarch thought “truth to be the greatest good that man can receive,
and the goodliest blessing that God can give.” “When you are persuaded
in your mind that you cannot either offer or perform any thing more
agreeable to the gods than the entertaining a right notion of them, you
will then avoid superstition as a no less evil than atheism.” He cites
Euripides to affirm, “If gods do aught dishonest, they are no gods,”
and the memorable words of Antigone, in Sophocles, concerning the moral
sentiment:—
“For neither now nor yesterday began
These thoughts, which have been ever, nor yet can
A man be found who their first entrance knew.”
His faith in the immortality of the soul is another measure of his deep
humanity. He reminds his friends that the Delphic oracles have given
several answers the same in substance as that formerly given to Corax
the Naxian:—
“It sounds profane impiety
To teach that human souls e’er die.”
He believes that the doctrine of the Divine Providence, and that of the
immortality of the soul, rest on one and the same basis. He thinks it
impossible either that a man beloved of the gods should not be happy,
or that a wise and just man should not be beloved of the gods. To him
the Epicureans are hateful, who held that the soul perishes when it is
separated from the body. “The soul, incapable of death, suffers in the
same manner in the body, as birds that are kept in a cage.” He believes
“that the souls of infants pass immediately into a better and more
divine state.”
I can easily believe that an anxious soul may find in Plutarch’s
chapter called “Pleasure not attainable by Epicurus,” and his “Letter
to his Wife Timoxena,” a more sweet and reassuring argument on the
immortality than in the Phædo of Plato; for Plutarch always addresses
the question on the human side, and not on the metaphysical; as Walter
Scott took hold of boys and young men, in England and America, and
through them of their fathers. His grand perceptions of duty lead him
to his stern delight in heroism; a stoic resistance to low indulgence;
to a fight with fortune; a regard for truth; his love of Sparta, and
of heroes like Aristides, Phocion, and Cato. He insists that the
highest good is in action. He thinks that the inhabitants of Asia came
to be vassals to one only, for not having been able to pronounce one
syllable; which is, No. So keen is his sense of allegiance to right
reason, that he makes a fight against Fortune whenever she is named. At
Rome he thinks her wings were clipped: she stood no longer on a ball,
but on a cube as large as Italy. He thinks it was by superior virtue
that Alexander won his battles in Asia and Africa, and the Greeks
theirs against Persia.
But this Stoic in his fight with Fortune, with vices, effeminacy, and
indolence, is gentle as a woman when other strings are touched. He is
the most amiable of men. “To erect a trophy in the soul against anger
is that which none but a great and victorious puissance is able to
achieve.”—“Anger turns the mind out of doors, and bolts the door.”
He has a tenderness almost to tears when he writes on “Friendship,”
on “Marriage,” on “the Training of Children,” and on the “Love of
Brothers.” “There is no treasure,” he says, “parents can give to their
children, like a brother; ’tis a friend given by nature, a gift nothing
can supply; once lost, not to be replaced. The Arcadian prophet, of
whom Herodotus speaks, was obliged to make a wooden foot in place
of that which had been chopped off. A brother, embroiled with his
brother, going to seek in the street a stranger who can take his place,
resembles him who will cut off his foot to give himself one of wood.”
All his judgments are noble. He thought, with Epicurus, that it is more
delightful to do than to receive a kindness. “This courteous, gentle,
and benign disposition and behavior is not so acceptable, so obliging
or delightful to any of those with whom we converse, as it is to those
who have it.” There is really no limit to his bounty: “It would be
generous to lend our eyes and ears, nay, if possible, our reason and
fortitude to others, whilst we are idle or asleep.” His excessive and
fanciful humanity reminds one of Charles Lamb, whilst it much exceeds
him. When the guests are gone, he “would leave one lamp burning, only
as a sign of the respect he bore to fires, for nothing so resembles
an animal as fire. It is moved and nourished by itself, and by its
brightness, like the soul, discovers and makes every thing apparent,
and in its quenching shows some power that seems to proceed from a
vital principle, for it makes a noise and resists, like an animal
dying, or violently slaughtered;” and he praises the Romans, who, when
the feast was over, “dealt well with the lamps, and did not take away
the nourishment they had given, but permitted them to live and shine by
it.”
I can almost regret that the learned editor of the present
republication has not preserved, if only as a piece of history,
the preface of Mr. Morgan, the editor and in part writer of this
Translation of 1718. In his dedication of the work to the Archbishop
of Canterbury, Wm. Wake, he tells the Primate that “Plutarch was the
wisest man of his age, and, if he had been a Christian, one of the
best too; _but it was his severe fate to flourish in those days of
ignorance, which, ’tis a favorable opinion to hope that the Almighty
will sometime wink at; that our souls may be with these philosophers
together in the same state of bliss_.” The puzzle in the worthy
translator’s mind between his theology and his reason well re-appears
in the puzzle of his sentence.
* * * * *
I know that the chapter of “Apothegms of Noble Commanders” is rejected
by some critics as not a genuine work of Plutarch; but the matter is
good, and is so agreeable to his taste and genius, that if he had found
it, he would have adopted it. If he did not compile the piece, many,
perhaps most, of the anecdotes were already scattered in his works.
If I do not lament that a work not his should be ascribed to him, I
regret that he should have suffered such destruction of his own. What
a trilogy is lost to mankind in his Lives of Scipio, Epaminondas, and
Pindar!
His delight in magnanimity and self-sacrifice has made his books, like
Homer’s Iliad, a bible for heroes; and wherever the Cid is relished,
the legends of Arthur, Saxon Alfred, and Richard the Lion-hearted,
Robert Bruce, Sydney, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Cromwell, Nelson,
Bonaparte, and Walter Scott’s Chronicles in prose or verse,—there will
Plutarch, who told the story of Leonidas, of Agesilaus, of Aristides,
Phocion, Themistocles, Demosthenes, Epaminondas, Cæsar, Cato, and
the rest, sit as the bestower of the crown of noble knighthood, and
laureate of the ancient world.
The chapters “On the Fortune of Alexander,” in the “Morals,” are
an important appendix to the portrait in the “Lives.” The union in
Alexander of sublime courage with the refinement of his pure tastes,
making him the carrier of civilization into the East, are in the
spirit of the ideal hero, and endeared him to Plutarch. That prince
kept Homer’s poems, not only for himself under his pillow in his tent,
but carried these for the delight of the Persian youth, and made them
acquainted also with the tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles. He
persuaded the Sogdians not to kill, but to cherish their aged parents;
the Persians to reverence, not marry their mothers; the Scythians to
bury, and not eat their dead parents. What a fruit and fitting monument
of his best days was his city Alexandria to be the birthplace or home
of Plotinus, St. Augustine, Synesius, Posidonius, Ammonius, Jamblichus,
Porphyry, Origen, Aratus, Apollonius, and Apuleius.
If Plutarch delighted in heroes, and held the balance between the
severe Stoic and the indulgent Epicurean, his humanity shines not less
in his intercourse with his personal friends. He was a genial host and
guest, and delighted in bringing chosen companions to the supper-table.
He knew the laws of conversation and the laws of good-fellowship quite
as well as Horace, and has set them down with such candor and grace as
to make them good reading to-day. The guests not invited to a private
board by the entertainer, but introduced by a guest as his companions,
the Greeks called _shadows_; and the question is debated whether it
was civil to bring them, and he treats it candidly, but concludes:
“Therefore, when I make an invitation, since it is hard to break the
custom of the place, I give my guests leave to bring shadows; but when
I myself am invited as a shadow, I assure you I refuse to go.” He
has an objection to the introduction of music at feasts. He thought
it wonderful that a man having a muse in his own breast, and all the
pleasantness that would fit an entertainment, would have pipes and
harps play, and by that external noise destroy all the sweetness that
was proper and his own.
* * * * *
I cannot close these notes without expressing my sense of the valuable
service which the Editor has rendered to his Author and to his
readers. Professor Goodwin is a silent benefactor to the book, wherever
I have compared the editions. I did not know how careless and vicious
in parts the old book was, until in recent reading of the old text, on
coming on any thing absurd or unintelligible, I referred to the new
text, and found a clear and accurate statement in its place. It is the
vindication of Plutarch. The correction is not only of names of authors
and of places grossly altered or misspelled, but of unpardonable
liberties taken by the translators, whether from negligence or freak.
One proof of Plutarch’s skill as a writer is that he bears translation
so well. In spite of its carelessness and manifold faults, which, I
doubt not, have tried the patience of its present learned editor and
corrector, I yet confess my enjoyment of this old version for its
vigorous English style. The work of some forty or fifty University men,
some of them imperfect in their Greek, it is a monument of the English
language at a period of singular vigor and freedom of style. I hope the
Commission of the Philological Society in London, charged with the duty
of preparing a Critical Dictionary, will not overlook these volumes,
which show the wealth of their tongue to greater advantage than many
books of more renown as models. It runs through the whole scale of
conversation in the street, the market, the coffee-house, the law
courts, the palace, the college, and the church. There are, no doubt,
many vulgar phrases, and many blunders of the printer; but it is the
speech of business and conversation, and in every tone, from lowest to
highest.
We owe to these translators many sharp perceptions of the wit and humor
of their author, sometimes even to the adding of the point. I notice
one, which, although the translator has justified his rendering in a
note, the severer criticism of the Editor has not retained. “Were there
not a sun, we might, for all the other stars, pass our days in Reverend
Dark, as Heraclitus calls it.” I find a humor in the phrase which might
well excuse its doubtful accuracy.
* * * * *
It is a service to our Republic to publish a book that can force
ambitious young men, before they mount the platform of the county
conventions, to read the “Laconic Apothegms” and the “Apothegms of
Great Commanders.” If we could keep the secret, and communicate it
only to a few chosen aspirants, we might confide that, by this noble
infiltration, they would easily carry the victory over all competitors.
But, as it was the desire of these old patriots to fill with their
majestic spirit all Sparta or Rome, and not a few leaders only, we
hasten to offer them to the American people.
Plutarch’s popularity will return in rapid cycles. If over-read in
this decade, so that his anecdotes and opinions become commonplace,
and to-day’s novelties are sought for variety, his sterling values
will presently recall the eye and thought of the best minds, and his
books will be reprinted and read anew by coming generations. And thus
Plutarch will be perpetually rediscovered from time to time as long as
books last.