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 We know almost nothing about the life of the author of the most famous of all Lives. He was a Greek of Chæroneia, in Bœotia; and was a youthful student when Nero visited Delphi in 66 A.D. He had an excellent education, and travelled, it is said, in Egypt, where he studied; and we know that he subsequently visited Italy, and spent some time at Rome, teaching rather than learning. He never became deeply versed in Latin literature, nor intimately acquainted with the Roman Empire and its guiding spirits. PLUTARCH, essentially a Greek provincial man of letters, withdrew to his native town, where he wrote voluminous works, devoted himself to local affairs, and to his priesthood of Apollo at Delphi, and to the composition of his famous Parallel Lives. His work on Apophthegms is dedicated to the Emperor Trajan, who died A.D. 117. We know no more. The greatest of all biographers did not write his own life.
Although we know so little of the facts of Plutarch's life, we know intimately the character of the man. He was a well-bred, well-trained, well-read, genial, just, and honourable moralist of the old school: somewhat garrulous, setentious, and credulous: but overflowing with interesting anecdote, a consummate master of lifelike portraiture, with a deep foundation of pure, simple, and humane morality. He was an enlightened and pious polytheist, verging on Monotheism of the Neo-Platonic kind; who, without much sympathy for modern Roman culture, and without much knowledge of the Roman Empire at its highest grandeur, devoted himself to elaborate a spontaneous scheme of practical ethics. His ethical writings, called in Latin Moralia, are amongst the most valuable pictures we possess of antique manners and thoughts. But they are surpassed by the Parallel Lives, or studies of character of illustrious Greeks and Romans in pairs, from Theseus to his own age. There were in all some 50 Lives, of which 14 are lost, and unfortunately in that number are those of Epaminondas, Scipio, and the early Caesars.
Plutarch was not a philosopher, for he had no powers of original thought and very little precision of reasoning; nor was he a historian, or at all interested in the evolution of civilization as a whole. He was, as he justly describes himself, a moralist, a student of character; and his Lives are pictures of human nature, not narratives of events. Like Dr. Johnson, in a much later age, Plutarch always turns to the moral and human side of every incident; he was a great talker, a keen judge of moral actions, and was himself the oracle of a highly cultured society, living apart from the world of affairs towards the latter years of one declining epoch, and profoundly unconscious of the new epoch which was to succeed it. It is significant that Plutarch, a professed student of morality and religion, writing 100 years after Christ, seems never to have heard of Christianity.
It is needless here to describe the Parallel Lives; they have been the subject of famous eulogies from the time of Montaigne and Henry IV down to that of Rousseau and Madame Roland--when the great moralist of antiquity had a very real part in forming the tone of the Revolutionary movement. The Lives appeared in a Latin version in 1470 at Rome; in Greek, at Florence, in 1517; in French, by Amyot, in 1559; in English, by North, in 1579. The Latter was used by Shakespeare as his text-book for Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra. It has been said, and it is hardly an exaggeration, that if all other record of antiquity but Plutarch's were lost, we could still conceive by his aid the general spirit of those ages. And it has often been declared that if we could save but one book in the world, the most valuable to preserve would be this unique record of antiquity as a whole.
Although modern pedantry has turned much of late from the slipshod Greek and the uncritical garrulity of the great anecdote-monger, it may be said still that no known book, not being a work of devotion or of imagination, has ever exerted so great an influence in forming the ideas of generations, or has ever been so well and universally read. Though not a work of history nor of philosophy, Plutarch's Lives still remain for the general public the source of all practical knowledge of the genius of antiquity. His pictures of human nature under military civilization are as immortal as those of Shakespeare and Scott under medieval and modern manners. That Comte places Plutarch not beside Cicero, the younger Pliny, and Epictetus, nor yet with Thucydides, Herodotus, and Polybius, but beside Varro, Strabo, and the elder Pliny, points to the fact that Plutarch collects, in a spontaneous manner, the rudiments of an ethical science in a purely empirical way.
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| This biography is
reprinted from The New Calendar of Great Men. Ed. Frederic
Harrison. London: Macmillan and Co., 1920. |
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