by Plutarch
PLUTARCH’S
LIVES
THE LIVES OF THE
NOBLE GRECIANS AND ROMANS
PLUTARCH
The Dryden translation, edited and revised
by Arthur Hugh Clough
VOLUME I
T H E M O D E R N L I B R A R Y
N E W Y O R K
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THESEUS
ROMULUS
THE COMPARISON OF ROMULUS WITH THESEUS
LYCURGUS
NUMA POMPILUS
THE COMPARISON OF NUMA WITH LYCURGUS
SOLON
POPLICOLA
THE COMPARISON OF POPLICOLA WITH SOLON
THEMISTOCLES
CAMILLUS
PERICLES
FABIUS
THE COMPARISON OF FABIUS WITH PERICLES
ALCIBIADES
CORIOLANUS
THE COMPARISON OF ALCIBIADES WITH CORIOLANUS
TIMOLEON
ÆMILIUS PAULUS
THE COMPARISON OF TIMOLEON WITH ÆMILIUS PAULUS
PELOPIDAS
MARCELLUS
THE COMPARISON OF PELOPIDAS WITH MARCELLUS
ARISTIDES
MARCUS CATO
THE COMPARISON OF ARISTIDES WITH MARCUS CATO
PHILOPŒMEN
FLAMININUS
THE COMPARISON OF PHILOPŒMEN WITH FLAMININUS
PYRRHUS
CAIUS MARIUS
LYSANDER
SYLLA
THE COMPARISON OF LYSANDER WITH SYLLA
CIMON
LUCULLUS
THE COMPARISON OF LUCULLUS WITH CIMON
NICIAS
CRASSUS
THE COMPARISON OF CRASSUS WITH NICIAS
INTRODUCTION
BY ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH
THE collection so well known as Plutarch’s Lives, is neither in form nor in arrangement what its author left behind him.
To the proper work, the Parallel Lives, narrated in a series of books, each containing the accounts of one Greek and one Roman, followed by a comparison, some single lives have been appended, for no reason but that they are also biographies. Otho and Galba belonged, probably, to a series of Roman Emperors from Augustus to Vitellius. Artaxerxes and Aratus the statesman are detached narratives, like others which once, we are told, existed, Hercules, Aristomenes, Hesiod, Pindar, Daiphantus, Crates the cynic, and Aratus the poet.
In the Parallel Lives themselves there are gaps. There was a book containing those of Epaminondas and Scipio the younger. Many of the comparisons are wanting, have either been lost, or were not completed. And the reader will notice for himself that references made here and there in the extant lives show that their original order was different from the present. In the very first page, for example, of the book, in the life of Theseus, mention occurs of the lives of Lycurgus and Numa, as already written.
The plain facts of Plutarch’s own life may be given in a very short compass. He was born, probably, in the reign of Claudius, about A.D. 45 or 50. His native place was Chæronea, in Bœotia, where his family had long been settled and was of good standing and local reputation. He studied at Athens under a philosopher named Ammonius. He visited Egypt. Later in life, some time before A.D. 90, he was at Rome “on public business,” a deputation, perhaps, from Chæronea. He continued there long enough to give lectures which attracted attention. Whether he visited Italy once only, or more often, is uncertain.
He was intimate with Sosius Senecio, to all appearances the same who was four times consul. The acquaintance may have sprung up at Rome, where Sosius, a much younger man than himself,1 may have first seen him as a lecturer; or they may have previously known each other in Greece.
To Greece and to Chæronea he returned, and appears to have spent in the little town, which he was loth “to make less by the withdrawal of even one inhabitant,” the remainder of his life. He took part in the public business of the place and the neighbourhood. He was archon in the town, and officiated many years as a priest of Apollo, apparently at Delphi.
He was married, and was the father of at least five children, of whom two sons, at any rate, survived to manhood. His greatest work, his Biographies, and several of his smaller writings, belong to this later period of his life, under the reign of Trajan. Whether he survived to the time of Hadrian is doubtful. If A.D. 45 be taken by way of conjecture for the date of his birth, A.D. 120, Hadrian’s fourth year, may be assumed, in like manner, as pretty nearly that of his death. All that is certain is that he lived to be old; that in one of his fictitious dialogues he describes himself as a young man conversing on philosophy with Ammonius in the time of Nero’s visit to Greece, A.D. 66-67; and that he was certainly alive and still writing in A.D. 106, the winter which Trajan, after building his bridge over the Danube, passed in Dacia. “We are told,” he says, in his Inquiry into the Principle of Cold, “by those who are now wintering with the Emperor on the Danube, that the freezing of water will crush boats to pieces.”
To this bare outline of certainties, several names and circumstances may be added from his writings; on which indeed alone we can safely rely for the very outline itself. There are a few allusions and anecdotes in the Lives, and from his miscellaneous compositions, his Essays, Lectures, Dialogues, Table-Talk, etc., the imagination may furnish itself with a great variety of curious and interesting suggestions.
The name of his great-grandfather, Nicarchus, is incidentally recorded in the life of Antony. “My great-grandfather used,” he says, “to tell, how in Antony’s last war the whole of the citizens of Chæronea were put in requisition to bring down corn to the coast of the gulf of Corinth, each man carrying a certain load, and soldiers standing by to urge them on with the lash.” One such journey was made, and they had measured out their burdens for the second, when news arrived of the defeat at Actium.1 Lamprias, his grandfather, is also mentioned in the same life. Philotas, the physician, had told him an anecdote illustrating the luxuriousness of Antony’s life in Egypt. His father is more than once spoken of in the minor works, but never mentioned by his name.
The name of Ammonius, his teacher and preceptor at Athens, occurs repeatedly in the minor works, and is once specially mentioned in the Lives; a descendant of Themistocles had studied with Plutarch under Ammonius. We find it mentioned that he three times held the office, once so momentous in the world’s history, of strategus at Athens.1 This, like that of the Bœotarchs in Bœotia, continued under the Empire to be intrusted to native citizens, and judging from what is said in the little treatise of Political Precepts, was one of the more important places under the Roman provincial governor.
“Once,” Plutarch tells us, “our teacher, Ammonius, observing at his afternoon lecture that some of his auditors had been indulging too freely at breakfast, gave directions, in our presence, for chastisement to be administered to his own son, because, he said, the young man has declined to take his breakfast unless he has sour wine with it, fixing his eyes at the same time on the offending members of the class.”
The following anecdote appears to belong to some period a little later than that of his studies at Athens. “I remember, when I myself was still a young man, I was sent in company with another on a deputation to the proconsul; my colleague, it so happened, was unable to proceed, and I saw the proconsul and performed the commission alone. Upon my return when I was about to lay down my office, and to give an account of its discharge, my father got up in the assembly and bade me privately to take care not to say I went, but we went, nor I said, but we said, and in the whole narration to give my companion his share.”
Of his stay in Italy, his v
isit to or residence in Rome, we know little beyond the statement which he gives us in the life of Demosthenes, that public business and visitors who came to see him on subjects of philosophy, took up so much of his time that he learned, at that time, but little of the Latin language. He must have travelled about, for he saw the bust or statue of Marius at Ravenna, as he informs us in the beginning of Marius’s life. He undertook, he tells us in his essay on Brotherly Affection, the office, whilst he was in Rome, of arbitrating between two brothers, one of whom was considered to be a lover of philosophy. “But he had,” he says, “in reality, no legitimate title to the name either of brother or of philosopher. When I told him I should expect from him the behaviour of a philosopher towards one, who was, first of all, an ordinary person making no such profession, and, in the second place, a brother, as for the first point, replied he, it may be well enough, but I don’t attach any great importance to the fact of two people having come from the same pair of bodies;” an impious piece of free-thinking which met, of course, with Plutarch’s indignant rebuke and reprobation.
A more remarkable anecdote is related in his discourse on Inquisitiveness. Among other precepts for avoiding or curing the fault, “We should habituate ourselves,” he says, “when letters are brought to us, not to open them instantly and in a hurry, not to bite the strings in two, as many people will, if they do not succeed at once with their fingers; when a messenger comes, not to run to meet him; not to jump up, when a friend says he has something new to tell us; rather, if he has some good or useful advice to give us. Once when I was lecturing at Rome, Rusticus, whom Domitian afterwards, out of jealousy of his reputation, put to death, was one of my hearers; and while I was going on, a soldier came in and brought him a letter from the Emperor. And when every one was silent, and I stopped in order to let him read the letter, he declined to do so, and put it aside until I had finished and the audience withdrew; an example of serious and dignified behaviour which excited much admiration.”
L. Junius Arulenus Rusticus, the friend of Pliny and Tacitus, glorified among the Stoic martyrs whose names are written in the life of Agricola, was in youth the ardent disciple of Thrasea Pætus; and when Pætus was destined by Nero for death, and the Senate was prepared to pass the decree for his condemnation, Rusticus, in the fervour of his feelings, was eager to interpose the veto still attaching in form to the office, which he happened then to hold, of tribune, and was scarcely withheld by his master from a demonstration which would but have added him, before his time, to the catalogue of victims. After performing, in the civil wars ensuing on the death of Nero, the duties of prætor, he published in Domitian’s time a life of Thrasea, as did Senecio one of Helvidius, and Tacitus, probably himself, that of Agricola: the bold language of which insured his death. Among the teachers who afterwards gave instruction to the youthful Marcus Aurelius, we read the name of an Arulenus Rusticus, probably his grandson, united with that of Sextus of Chæronea, Plutarch’s nephew, “who taught me,” says the virtuous Emperor, “by his own example, the just and wise habits he recommended,” and to whose door, in late life, he was still seen to go, still desirous, as he said, to be a learner.
It does not, of course, follow from the terms in which the story is related, that the incident occurred in Domitian’s time, and that it was to Domitian’s letter that Plutarch’s discourse was preferred. But that Plutarch was at Rome in or after Domitian’s reign, seems to be fairly inferred from the language in which he speaks of the absurd magnificence of Domitian’s palaces and other imperial buildings.
His two brothers, Timon and Lamprias, are frequently mentioned in his Essays and Dialogues. They, also, appear to have been pupils of Ammonius. In the treatise on Affection between Brothers, after various examples of the strength of this feeling, occurs the following passage: “And for myself,” he says, “that among the many favours for which I have to thank the kindness of fortune, my brother Timon’s affection to me is one, past and present, that may be put in the balance against all the rest, is what every one that has so much as met with us must be aware of, and our friends, of course, know well.”
His wife was Timoxena, the daughter of Alexion. The circumstances of his domestic life receive their best illustration from his letter addressed to this wife, on the loss of their one daughter, born to them, it would appear, late in life, long after her brothers. “Plutarch to his wife, greeting. The messengers you sent to announce our child’s death, apparently missed the road to Athens. I was told about my daughter on reaching Tanagra. Everything relating to the funeral I suppose to have been already performed; my desire is that all these arrangements may have been so made, as will now and in the future be most consoling to yourself. If there is anything which you have wished to do and have omitted, awaiting my opinion, and think would be a relief to you, it shall be attended to, apart from all excess and superstition, which no one would like less than yourself. Only, my wife, let me hope, that you will maintain both me and yourself within the reasonable limits of grief. What our loss really amounts to, I know and estimate for myself. But should I find your distress excessive, my trouble on your account will be greater than on that of our loss. I am not a ‘stock or stone,’ as you, my partner in the care of our numerous children, every one of whom we have ourselves brought up at home, can testify. And this child, a daughter, born to your wishes after four sons, and affording me the opportunity of recording your name, I am well aware was a special object of affection.”
The sweet temper and the pretty ways of the child, he proceeds to say, make the privation peculiarly painful. “Yet why,” he says, “should we forget the reasonings we have often addressed to others, and regard our present pain as obliterating and effacing our former joys?” Those who had been present had spoken to him in terms of admiration of the calmness and simplicity of her behaviour. The funeral had been devoid of any useless and idle sumptuosity, and her own house of all display of extravagant lamentation. This was indeed no wonder to him, who knew how much her plain and unluxurious living had surprised his philosophical friends and visitors, and who well remembered her composure under the previous loss of the eldest of her children, and again, “when our beautiful Charon left us.” “I recollect,” he says, “that some acquaintance from abroad were coming up with me from the sea when the tidings of the child’s decease were brought, and they followed with our other friends to the house; but the perfect order and tranquillity they found there made them believe, as I afterwards was informed they had related, that nothing had happened, and that the previous intelligence had been a mistake.”
The Consolation (so the letter is named) closes with expressions of belief in the immortality of each human soul; in which the parents are sustained and fortified by the tradition of their ancestors, and the revelations to which they had both been admitted, conveyed in the mystic Dionysian ceremonies.
There is a phrase in the letter which might be taken to imply that, at the time of his domestic misfortune, Plutarch and Timoxena were already grandparents. The marriage of their son Autobulus is the occasion of one of the dinner parties recorded in the Symposiac Questions; and in one of the dialogues there is a distinct allusion to Autobulus’s son. Plutarch inscribes the little treatise in explanation of the Timæus to his two sons, Autobulus and Plutarch. They must certainly have been grown-up men, to have anything to do with so difficult a subject. In his Inquiry as to the Way in which the Young should read the Poets, “It is not easy,” he says, addressing Marcus Sedatus, “to restrain altogether from such reading young people of the age of my Soclarus and your Cleander.” But whether Soclarus was a son, or a grandson, or some more distant relative, or, which is possible, a pupil, does not appear. Eurydice, to whom and to Pollianus, her newly espoused husband, he addresses his Marriage Precepts, seems to be spoken of as a recent inmate of his house; but it cannot be inferred that she was a daughter, nor does it seem likely that the little Timoxena’s place was ever filled up.1
The office of Archon, which Plutarch held i
n his native municipality, was probably only an annual one; but very likely he served it more than once. He seems to have busied himself about all the little matters of the town, and to have made it a point to undertake the humblest duties. After relating the story of Epaminondas giving dignity to the office of Chief Scavenger, “And I, too, for that matter,” he says, “am often a jest to my neighbours, when they see me, as they frequently do, in public, occupied on very similar duties; but the story told about Antisthenes comes to my assistance. When some one expressed surprise at his carrying home some picked fish from market in his own hands, It is, he answered, for myself. Conversely, when I am reproached with standing by and watching while tiles are measured out, and stone and mortar brought up, This service, I say, is not for myself, it is for my country.”
In the little essay on the question, Whether an Old Man should continue in Public Life, written in the form of an exhortation of Euphanes, an ancient and distinguished member of the Areopagus at Athens, and of the Amphictyonic council, not to relinquish his duties, “Let there be no severance,” he says, “in our long companionship, and let neither the one nor the other of us forsake the life that was our choice.” And, alluding to his own functions as priest of Apollo at Delphi, “You know,” he adds in another place, “that I have served the Pythian God for many pythiads1 past, yet you would not now tell me, you have taken part enough in the sacrifices, processions, and dances, and it is high time, Plutarch, now you are an old man, to lay aside your garland, and retire as superannuated from the oracle.”
Even in these, the comparatively few, more positive and matter-of-fact passages of allusion and anecdote, there is enough to bring up something of a picture of a happy domestic life, half academic, half municipal, passed among affectionate relatives and well-known friends, inclining most to literary and moral studies, yet not cut off from the duties and avocations of the citizen. We cannot, of course, to go yet further, accept the scenery of the fictitious Dialogues as historical; yet there is much of it which may be taken as, so to say, pictorially just; and there is, probably, a good deal here and there that is literally true to the fact. The Symposiac, or After-Dinner Questions, collected in nine books, and dedicated to Sosius Senecio, were discussed, we are told, many of them, in the company of Sosius himself, both at Rome and in Greece, as, for example, when he was with them at the marriage festivities of Autobulus. Lamprias and Timon, the author’s brothers, are frequent speakers, each with a distinctly traced character, in conversations; the father, and the elder Lamprias, the grandfather, both take an occasional, and the latter a lively part; there is one whole book in which Ammonius predominates; the scene is now at Delphi, and now at Athens, sometimes perhaps, but rarely, at Rome, sometimes at the celebrations of the Games. Plutarch, in his priestly capacity, gives an entertainment in honour of a poetic victor at the Pythia, there is an Isthmian dinner at Corinth, and an Olympian party at Elis. As an adopted Athenian citizen of the Leontid tribe, he attends the celebration of the success of his friend, the philosophic poet Serapion. The dramatis personæ of the various little pieces form a company, when put together, of more than eighty names, philosophers, rhetoricians, and grammarians, several physicians, Euthydemus his colleague in the priesthood, Alexion his father-in-law, and four or five other connections by marriage, Favorinus the philosopher of Arles in Provence, afterwards favoured by Hadrian, to whom he dedicates one of his treatises, and who in return wrote an essay called Plutarchus, on the Academic Philosophy. Serapion entertains them in a garden on the banks of the Cephisus. They dine with a friendly physician on the heights of Hyampolis, and meet in a party at the baths of Ædepsus. The questions are of the most miscellaneous description, grave sometimes, and moral, grammatical and antiquarian, and often festive and humorous. In what sense does Plato say that God uses geometry? Why do we hear better by night than by day? Why are dreams least true in autumn? Which existed first, the hen or the egg? Which of Venus’s hands did Diomed wound? Lamprias, the grandfather, finds fault with his son, Plutarch’s father, for inviting too many guests to the parties given “when we came home from Alexandria.” Ammonius, in office as general at Athens, gives a dinner to the young men who had distinguished themselves at a trial of skill in grammar, rhetoric, geometry, and poetry; and anecdotes are told on the occasion of verses aptly or inaptly quoted.