Plutarch biography

Dromo's Den

Plutarch Biography

PLUTARCH (Gk. IIλoύrapχos, Ploutarchos) (c.46–c.l25 a.d.). An encyclopædic writer and a charming type of the Greek gentleman and scholar of Roman times. He was born at Chæronea in Bœoeotia, the country of Hesiod and Pindar, to whom he often alludes. His writings introduce us to a pleasant circle of kinsmen and friends, his grandfather Lamprias, his father, brother, and four sons, his wife Timoxena, to whom he addresses a beautiful "consolation" on the death of their little daughter, his Roman friends Sossius Senecio, Metrius Florus, and Junius Arulenus Rusticus. His biography must be collected from his works. He was a student at Athens at the time of Nero's visit to Greece (66 a.d.). Later he traveled in Greece, Egypt, and Italy. He visited Rome more than once and remained there for some time in the reign of Vespasian, enjoying the friendship of prominent men, lecturing on moral philosophy, and gathering the materials for his historical works. Real mastery of the Latin language and genuine insight into Roman institutions, however, he never attained. He established himself for the last years of his life at Chæronea, paying frequent visits to Athens and to Delphi, where he exercised priestly functions. At Chæronea he held the office of archon and that of building inspector, recording his experiences perhaps in the treatise on the precepts of government and the essay on the question whether an old man ought to take part in politics. Greek moral philosophy being at that time the best substitute for religion, he became to many friends and young people a guide, philosopher, spiritual director, and physician of the soul, a rôle which a generation earlier Seneca, the Stoic philosopher (q.v.), had assumed with more self-consciousness and display at Rome. He recalled old memories of Rome and Athens in his "table talk." He wrote out his old lectures and gave new ones to the young people of an informal school that gathered about him. He composed dialogues in the manner of Cicero rather than of Plato. He continued his historical studies and published his parallel Lives of Greeks and Romans. These, the best known of his writings, have been called "the food of great souls" because of their power to kindle emulation in youth and the enormous influence which, through Jacques Amyot (q.v.), Montaigne, and Shakespeare, they have exercised upon modern literature. Forty-six of them are extant, arranged in 22 sets. They cover all classical antiquity from Theseus-Romulus and Lycurgus-Numa to Demosthenes-Cicero and Alexander-Cæsar. They were not composed in the order of chronology or of their present arrangement. There are in addition four single biographies. The formal comparisons that follow most of the pairs are often somewhat forced. They stirred Shakespeare's sense of humor and provoked the delightful parody of Captain Fluellen's comparison of King Henry to Alexander on the basis of the resemblance of Macedon to Monmouth. (Consult King Henry the Fifth.) They may be spurious, as the comparison was a recognized form of rhetorical exercise. The Lives are avowedly character sketches with a moral rather than severe historical studies, but they belong to the small category of the world's books which are read by all educated men, not merely consulted by scholars, and whose influence spreads in ever-widening circles. Our knowledge of antiquity owes more to Plutarch than to any other one writer, and in the loss of his sources it is hardly necessary to add that the Lives become our primary authority for countless facts of history.

Hardly less interesting, though less known than the Lives, are the multifarious discursive or didactic essays and dialogues (some of them spurious) grouped under the title of Moralia. These comprise the nine books of Table Talk or Symposiaca, a curious illustration of the playful pedantry that was accounted good conversation in later Græco-Roman cultured circles; edifying moral disquisitions enlivened by anecdote and quotation on such topics as "How a Young, Man Ought to Read Poetry," "How to Distinguish a Flatterer from a Friend," "On Exile," "On Superstition," "Rules for the Care of the Health," "Advice to the Married," etc.; more elaborate essays or dialogues on religious or philosophical topics—"The Banquet of the, Seven Wise Men," "On Isis and Osiris," a chief source of our knowledge of Egyptian religion, "On the Failure of the Oracles," "On the Genius of Socrates," "On the Contradictions of the Stoics," "On the Creation of the World Soul in Plato's Timæus." Plutarch's intimate knowledge of Plato lends a certain unity and seriousness of tone to all this discursive literary productivity. He was widely read also in the literature of the Stoics and the Epicureans, but he refers to them mainly to refute them when they diverged from Plato.

Plutarch's style is that of an intelligent, widely read man, familiar with the vocabulary of philosophy and the sciences and more concerned for his matter than his manner. He does not affect Attic purism, and the tawdry rhetoric of his age has no attractions for him. He died somewhere between 120 and 130a.d.

The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XVIII (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 747-748.