Plutarch

Greek biographer

• Born: c. 46
• Birthplace: Chaeronea, Boeotia, Greece
• Died: After 120
• Place of death: Chaeronea, Boeotia, Greece

Plutarch was the greatest biographer of antiquity. He taught his successors how to combine depth of psychological and moral insight with a strong narrative that evokes the greatness and excitement of subjects’ lives.

Early Life

Plutarch (PLEW-tahrk) did not accomplish most of his writing until his late middle age. He was born in a Roman province to an old and wealthy Greek family. He received a comprehensive education in Athens, where he studied rhetoric, physics, mathematics, medicine, the natural sciences, philosophy, and Greek and Latin writing. His worldview was strongly influenced by Plato, and he took considerable interest in theology, serving as the head priest at Delphi in the last twenty years of his life. By the time he was twenty, he had rounded out his education by traveling throughout Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt. Before his writing career began, Plutarch worked in Chaeronea as a teacher and was its official representative to the Roman governor. Later, he undertook diplomatic trips to Rome, where he befriended several important public servants.

The prestige of Greek learning stood very high in the Roman Empire, and Plutarch eventually was invited to lecture in various parts of Italy on moral and philosophical subjects. Sometime in his late thirties, he began to organize his notes into essays. There is evidence to suggest that by the time he was forty, Plutarch enjoyed a highly receptive audience for his lectures. This was a time in which the Roman emperors were particularly favorable to Greek influences.

Although Plutarch could easily have made a career of his Roman lecture tours, he returned to his home in Chaeronea at about the age of fifty. There, he served in many administrative posts with the evident intention of reviving Greek culture and religion. His principal great work, Bioi paralleloi (c. 105-115 c.e.; Parallel Lives, 1579), was written in these years when his sense of civic responsibility and leadership had matured and when he was able to draw on his considerable experience of political power.

Life’s Work

In Parallel Lives, better known simply as Lives, Plutarch chose to write about historical figures. The lives were parallel in the sense that he paired his subjects, so that Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, Demosthenes and Cicero, could be discussed in terms of each other. It was important to have a basis of comparison, to show how equally famous men had arrived at their achievements in similar and different circumstances, with personalities that could be contrasted and balanced against each other. Plutarch’s aim was not merely to describe lives but to judge them, to weigh their ethical value and to measure their political effectiveness. Clearly, he believed that human beings learned by example. Thus, he would present exemplary lives, complete with his subjects’ strengths and weaknesses, in order to provide a comprehensive view of the costs and the benefits of human accomplishment.

Plutarch has often been attacked for being a poor historian. What this means is that sometimes he gets his facts wrong. On occasion he is so interested in making a moral point, in teaching a lesson, that he ruins the particularity and complexity of an individual life. He has also been guilty of relying on suspect sources and of taking reports at face value because they fit a preconceived notion of his subject.

While these faults must be acknowledged and compensated for, they should not be allowed to obscure the enormous value of Plutarch’s biographies. In the first place, he realized that he was not writing histories but lives and that some of his sources were questionable. Unlike the historian, he was not primarily interested in the events of the past. On the contrary, it was the personalities of his subjects that had enduring value for him. To Plutarch, there was a kind of knowledge of human beings that could not be found in the close study of events or in the narration of historical epochs. As he puts it, “a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities.” Plutarch found his evidence in the seemingly trifling anecdotes about great personages. He was of the conviction that an intense scrutiny of the individual’s private as well as public behavior would yield truths about human beings not commonly found in histories.

Plutarch thought of himself as an artist. He was building portraits of his subjects:

Just as painters get the likenesses in their portraits from the face and the expression of the eyes, wherein the character shows itself, but make very little account of the other parts of the body, so I must be permitted to devote myself rather to the signs of the soul in men, and by means of these to portray the life of each, leaving to others the description of their great contests.

As the founder of modern biography, Plutarch was pursuing psychological insight. Individuals were the expressions of a society, the eyes and face of the community, so to speak. He would leave to historians the description of society, “the other parts of the body.”

What makes Plutarch convincing to this day is his keen perception. No biographer has surpassed him in summing up the essence of a life—perhaps because no modern biographer has believed as intensely as Plutarch did in “the soul in men.” Each line in Plutarch’s best biographical essays carries the weight and significance of a whole life. It is his ability to make his readers believe that he is imagining, for example, Caesar’s life from the inside, from Caesar’s point of view, that makes the biographer such an attractive source that William Shakespeare and many other great authors borrowed from him.

It has often been said that no biographer can truly penetrate his or her subject’s mind. Plutarch perfected a way of reading external events, of shaping them into a convincing pattern, until—like a great painting—his prose seems to emit the personality of his subject. Here, for example, is his account of Caesar’s ambition:

Caesar’s successes . . . did not divert his natural spirit of enterprise and ambition to the enjoyment of what he had laboriously achieved, but served as fuel and incentive for future achievements, and begat in him plans for greater deeds and a passion for fresh glory, as though he had used up what he already had. What he felt was therefore nothing else than emulation of himself, as if he had been another man, and a sort of rivalry between what he had done and what he purposed to do.

These two long sentences, with their complex clauses, are imitative of Caesar’s life itself, for they demonstrate how ambition drove him on—not satisfying him but actually stimulating more exploits. Here was a great man who had set such a high example for himself that his life had turned into a competition with itself. Plutarch manages the uncanny feat of having Caesar looking at himself and thereby gives his readers the sensation of occupying Caesar’s mind.

Plutarch was by no means interested only in men of great political and military accomplishment. His pairing of Demosthenes and Cicero, for example, is his way of paying respect to mental agility and the power of the word. Both men prepared for their public careers as orators through long, careful training, but their personalities were quite different. Cicero was given to extraordinary boasting about himself, whereas Demosthenes rarely spoke in his own favor. If Cicero was sometimes undone by his penchant for joking, there was nevertheless a pleasantness in him almost entirely lacking in Demosthenes. That two such different men should have parallel careers is surely part of Plutarch’s point. There is no single pathway in life to success or failure, and personal faults—far from being extraneous—may determine the fate of a career. Shakespeare realized as much when he based much of his Coriolanus (c. 1607-1608) on Plutarch’s interpretation of the Roman leader’s choleric character.

Significance

Most of the Lives and its companion volume, Ethika (after c. 100; Moralia, 1603), seem to have been written in the last twenty years of Plutarch’s life—precisely at that point when he was most seriously occupied as a religious official, statesman, and diplomat. It is likely that his Moralia, or moral reflections on life, helped to give him the worldly perspective, tolerance, and acute judgment that are so evident in his masterpiece, the Lives. His studies of philosophy and religion surely gave him the confidence to assess the lives from which he would have his readers learn. He died an old man in peaceful repose, recognized for his good services by his fellow Boeotians, who dedicated an inscription to him at Delphi.

It has been suggested that Plutarch was most concerned with the education of his heroes, whose stories proceeded from their family background, education, entrance into the larger world, climax of achievement, and their fame and fortune (good and bad). He exerted a profound influence on the Roman world of his time, on the Middle Ages, and on a group of important writers—chiefly Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Shakespeare, John Dryden, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. If his impact is less obvious in modern times, it is probably because there is less confidence in the moral patterns Plutarch so boldly delineated. What modern biographer can speak, as Plutarch did, to the whole educated world, knowing that he had behind him the prestige and the grandeur of Greek literature and religion?

Bibliography

Barrow, Reginald Hayes. Plutarch and His Times. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967. Emphasizes Plutarch’s Greek background, with chapters on his role as a teacher and his relationship to the Roman Empire. The bibliography is divided between English and foreign titles. Includes map of central Greece.

Duff, Tim. Plutarch’s “Lives”: Exploring Virtue and Vice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Explains how Plutarch’s Parallel Lives offers insight into issues of psychology, education, morality, and cultural identity in ancient Greece and Rome.

Gianakaris, C. J. Plutarch. New York: Twayne, 1970. An excellent short introduction to Plutarch. Includes detailed chronology, discussions of all Plutarch’s important works, an annotated bibliography, and a useful index. Gianakaris writes with a firm grasp of the scholarship on Plutarch, corrects errors of earlier writers, and conveys great enthusiasm for his subject.

Russell, Donald Andrew. Plutarch. London: Duckworth, 1973. Draws on the best English and French scholarship. Slightly more difficult than Gianakaris as an introduction. Includes chapters on language, style, and form, on the philosopher and his religion, and on Plutarch and William Shakespeare. Contains several appendices, including one on editions and translations, and a general bibliography and index.

Scardigli, Barbara, ed. Essays on Plutarch’s “Lives.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Collection includes essays on Plutarch’s life, his methodology; choice of subjects and sources, compositional techniques, and more.