by Plutarch
Polybius became the essential source for later writers interested in any aspect of Roman history covered in the Histories as well as in the rise of the Achaean League (he unsurprisingly pays a great deal of attention to the history of his native state). Consequently, his treatment of events strongly influenced Livy – and it makes a crucial contribution to Plutarch’s narratives in various Lives, including those of Fabius Maximus, Marcellus, Aratus, Philopoemen, Flamininus and Aemilius Paullus. Furthermore, it is increasingly clear that Plutarch saw in Polybius an important antecedent to his own intellectual project. Polybius, like Plutarch, was a Greek expert in Roman society, and his Histories, by way of its universality, elevated Greek affairs to a rough equivalence with Roman ones. It is also the case that Polybius, like Plutarch, though with less philosophical rigour, intended his exposition of the past to contribute to the moral improvement of his readers (Polybius 1.1.2). Polybius was much honoured by the Romans and in his native Greece, and in him Plutarch detected a model of dignified and scholarly compliance with the political realities of Roman power.44
For the Lives in this volume, Plutarch often draws on Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a Greek rhetorician, critic and historian resident in Rome during the late first century BC. His Roman Antiquities, in twenty books, begins with the origins of Rome and carries down to the time of the First Punic War. It is a work very much in dialogue with Polybius (an author who writes so poorly, Dionysius complains in a critical essay, no one can bear to read him all the way through: see his essay On the Arrangement of Words 4.30). Dionysius concentrates on the earliest stages of Roman history, observing with emphasis that, in the beginning, the Romans were in fact Greeks (e.g. Dion. Hal. 1.5.1; 1.89.2). Hence, in his view, the acceptability of their governance of the world, in the execution of which the Romans will naturally want to take advantage of the culture of their forebears (4.26.2).45
Dionysius writes in Greek and primarily though not exclusively for a Greek audience. By contrast, Livy (59 BC–AD 17), who covered Roman history in 142 books from its origins to 9 BC, wrote in Latin for Roman consumption. His purpose was moral, and the chief attraction of his work was literary. Livy’s account of Roman history became an instant classic and soon eclipsed all his sources and predecessors, with the exception of Polybius. Livy, although a diligent reader as well as a gifted writer, was only as good a historian as his sources permitted. Nonetheless, for later generations his became the orthodox summary of early Roman history, and so naturally Plutarch turned to Livy for the authentic Roman perspective on Rome’s conquest of Carthage and of Greece. Plutarch confesses that he never became entirely proficient in Latin, but he knew he needed to know enough to read his most important Roman sources – and for Plutarch’s purposes Livy was quite simply indispensable.46
VI. Magistracies, Money and Measurements – and Roman Names
Plutarch assumes his readers are more or less familiar with Roman political offices, and so a brief introduction here may lend some clarity later. Each year the people elected two consuls, the city’s supreme magistrates and the chief commanders of its armies. They also elected praetors, the number of whom eventually reached six by the second century BC. Although obliged to defer to the consuls, they shared the same powers, commanding in the field and, in Rome, routinely managing the courts and summoning the senate to its duties. The remaining magistracies were aediles, who looked after the material fabric of the city and managed its festivals, and quaestors, financial officers and administrative assistants to the consuls and praetors. It was the duty of the tribunes of the people to ensure that no legislation or senatorial decree was passed that diminished the rights of the people (these they could block with their veto) and to protect the rights of individual citizens when they were jeopardized by magisterial excesses. Tribunes could also propose legislation. Every five years or so, the Romans elected two censors, who conducted a census, issued public contracts for significant building projects, like roads or aqueducts, selected the senate, exercised moral supervision over the leading classes and performed a ritual purification of the city. When the authority of any magistrate was extended beyond his term of office, which was often the case for consuls and praetors, they became promagistrates, and so were called proconsuls or propraetors. There was also an extraordinary magistrate, the dictator, appointed in states of emergency. The dictator held absolute power, unchecked by any colleague. His task was to restore the city’s order and safety, often simply by conducting elections when there was no authority competent to do so, but at other times by taking charge of the army in situations so dire that any divisions in command were deemed dangerous. The dictator was assisted by a magistrate called master of the horse (magister equitum), his cavalry commander. It was routine for Romans to proceed through the magistracies by way of a quaestorship, followed, if they were successful, by the praetorship and consulship. The aedileship was never obligatory, nor was the tribunate, from which patricians were excluded.
The most important Roman monetary terms for this volume are the as, sesterce and denarius, tariffed at the rate of 10 asses = 4 sesterces = 1 denarius (around 140 BC the denarius was retariffed and became worth 16 asses). The denarius was in fact only introduced in 216 BC, but is often used by ancient writers to describe values and costs even in earlier periods. Plutarch equates the Roman denarius with the Greek drachma, with the result that 6,000 denarii (or 24,000 sesterces) = 1 talent. Modern equivalences can be misleading, but it is perhaps helpful to recognize that, by the late republic, an ordinary labourer could expect to earn 3 to 6 sesterces for a day’s effort, while a Roman soldier was paid 1,200 sesterces each year. By contrast, a Roman knight was worth at least 400,000 sesterces and a senator at least a million.
Greek writers measure distances in stades. One stade consists of 6 plethra; a plethron is 100 Greek feet but Greek feet varied significantly: an Olympic foot, for instance, was 320 mm (12.6 inches), whereas an Attic foot was 297.7 mm (11.64 inches). It is not obvious that Plutarch was very troubled about consistency in this matter. A Roman mile was 5,000 Roman feet (1,480 m or 4,855.5 modern feet). Plutarch tends to equate 1 Roman mile with 8 stades.
All Romans had two names, a personal first name (praenomen) and a clan (or gentile) name (nomen), to which was often added a third name or cognomen which, in combination with the nomen, defined one’s family (one’s branch of the larger clan). For instance, Marcus Porcius Cato was a member of the clan of Porcii but his specific family were the Porcii Catones. Plutarch is inconsistent in his use of Roman names: Cato is always Cato, but Titus Quinctius Flamininus is always Titus (this use of the first name in narratives is very much a non-Roman habit). Romans also employed honorific names, the most common in this volume being the name given Publius Cornelius Scipio, who, after defeating Hannibal at Zama, was called Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus. Plutarch (incorrectly) believed that Coriolanus was so-called for a similar reason.
NOTES
1. Philostratus, Lives 1.19. Philostratus, a Greek writer popular in imperial circles, lived in the third century AD. The expression Second Sophistic is used both to refer to the renaissance of Greek literature, especially oratory, during this early imperial period, and, more generally, to the Greek cultural scene of the early empire. There is an excellent introduction by T. Whitmarsh, The Second Sophistic (2005); see also the chapters by G. Woolf, E. Bowie and J. M. Dillon in CAH xi (2000), pp. 875–942.
2. The best account of Plutarch’s career is Jones, P&R; see also Swain, H&E, pp. 135–86.
3. A lucid introduction to Plutarch’s style is provided by D. A. Russell, Plutarch (1973), pp. 18–41.
4. For a description of Roman magistracies, see General Introduction VI.
5. Swain, H&E, pp. 171–2.
6. On Plutarch’s network of distinguished friends, see Jones, P&R, pp. 39–64, and B. Puech, ANRW 2.33.6 (1992), 4831–93.
7. See the important paper by M. Beck in P. A. Stadter and L. Van der Stockt (eds.), Sage and Emperor: Plutarch, Greek Intellectua
ls, and Roman Power in the Time of Trajan (98–117 AD) (2002), pp. 163–73.
8. Duff, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 13–51, examines in detail the programmatic statements in Plutarch’s biographies.
9. Although Plutarch naturally hoped for a wide readership, including Romans – see P. A. Stadter in A. G. Nikolaides (eds.), The Unity of Plutarch’s Work (2008), pp. 123–35 – he nevertheless assumes his audience is Greek. The indications for this are several, but the most obvious sign in his biographies is his habit of explaining Roman institutions or translating Latin words, whereas he tends to take for granted a familiarity with all aspects of Greek culture; see Duff, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 299–300.
10. Plutarch’s family knew, from the experiences of his great-grandfather, how dangerous the Romans could be (Antony 68): ‘My great-grandfather Nicarchus used to relate how all the citizens of our native town of Chaeronea were forced [by the Romans] to carry on their shoulders a certain quantity of wheat down to the sea … and how they were urged on by the whip.’
11. This strong consciousness of belatedness was a feature of the Second Sophistic: see G. Woolf, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 40 (1994), pp. 121–32, and T. Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation (2001), pp. 41–89.
12. On imperial Rome’s response to its discontinuity with the republic, see A. M. Gowing, Empire and Memory: The Representation of the Roman Republic in Imperial Culture (2005). Belatedness in imperial Latin literature is discussed by P. Hardie, The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition (1993), pp. 105–19.
13. See Jones, ‘Chronology’, pp. 106–14.
14. Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus (235–183) brought the Second Punic War to an end by defeating Hannibal in the battle of Zama; Scipio Aemilianus (185–129), a son of the Aemilius Paullus included in this volume, was victorious in the Third Punic War. Aemilianus was adopted by Africanus’ son and so was called Scipio Africanus.
15. The Roman Life comes first in Sertorius–Eumenes, Aemilius Paullus–Timoleon and Coriolanus–Alcibiades.
16. Some pairings lack a closing Comparison: Themistocles–Camillus, Alexander–Caesar, Phocion–Younger Cato and Pyrrhus–Marius. The Comparison is sometimes treated by editors as a continuation of the Life it immediately follows and, consequently, the numeration of its chapters simply continues that of the Life preceding it: for instance, the first chapter of the Comparison Theseus–Romulus is, in some editions, Romulus 30 instead of Comparison Theseus–Romulus 1. In this volume, chapters in the Comparisons display both numerations.
17. This point was made long ago by H. Erbse, Hermes 84 (1956), pp. 398–424, and is now well established; see further Duff, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 243–86, and Pelling, P&H, pp. 349–64.
18. See Introductions to both Lives.
19. On Plutarch’s technique for apprehending virtue and its Platonic origins, see P. A. Stadter, Plutarch’s Historical Methods: An Analysis of the Mulierum Virtutes (1965).
20. The practice of publishing the Lives separately is as old as the Renaissance: see N. Humble’s essay in Humble, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 237–65.
21. For instance, at Moralia 813a–c Plutarch stresses the importance of aristocratic unity in dealing with the natural deficiencies of the multitude; on Plutarch’s political views, see Swain, H&E, pp. 161–86.
22. On the values prized by Plutarch in his heroes, see H. M. Martin, GRBS 3 (1960), pp. 65–73; H. M. Martin, American Journal of Philology 82 (1961), pp. 164–75; and Duff, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 72–98.
23. Pelling, ‘Roman heroes’; Swain, ‘Culture’; and Duff, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 74–8.
24. On the Comparisons and their peculiarities, see W. J. Tatum in Humble, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 1–22.
25. Duff, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 243–86.
26. Tatum in Humble, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 1–22.
27. H. Halfmann, Die Senatoren aus dem östlichen Teil des Imperium Romanum bis zum Ende des 2. Jh. n. Chr. (1979); A. R. Birley, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 116 (1997), pp. 209–45; and O. Salomies in O. Salomies (ed.), The Greek East in the Roman Context (2001), pp. 141–87.
28. Jones, P&R, pp. 55–7.
29. See the discussion of the Library of Celsus by B. Burrell in W. J. Johnson and H. N. Parker (eds.), Ancient Literacies: The Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome (2009), pp. 69–96. A similarly complex monument is unpacked by M. Gleason in T. Whitmarsh (ed.), Local Knowledge and Microidentities in the Imperial Greek World (2010), pp. 125–62.
30. R. Syme, Tacitus (1958), p. 504, restating a view that goes back to K. Ziegler, in A. Pauly, G. Wissowa and W. Kroll, Real-Encyclopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft 21.2 (1951), p. 897, and is shared by Jones, P&R, p. 107.
31. See e.g. Duff, Plutarch’s Lives, pp. 301–9; Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire, pp. 117–29; and S. Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism (2002), pp. 254–61.
32. See Swain, H&E, pp. 151–61 (Roman rule and divine providence) and 145–50 (the Greeks’ loss of independence).
33. It must also be remembered that Plutarch’s was an age of intense cultural competitiveness between individuals: see Whitmarsh, Second Sophistic, pp. 38–40.
34. On Plutarch’s methods of historical research, see Pelling, P&H, pp. 1–44 and 91–116.
35. Cornell, Beginnings of Rome, pp. 48–80; and D. Feeney, Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Times and the Beginning of History (2007), pp. 88–100. There was persistent disagreement in antiquity about the date of the fall of Troy and the foundation of Carthage and of Rome. Feeney makes a compelling case for Timaeus as the source for the synchronization of Rome and Carthage.
36. Rome’s first historian, Fabius Pictor, learned it from the Greek writer Diocles of Peparethus, who probably lived in the third century BC.
37. Cornell, Beginnings of Rome, pp. 48–57; Forsythe, Early Rome, pp. 78–124.
38. The traces appear at Livy 3.5–7.
39. T. P. Wiseman, Greece & Rome 45 (1998), pp. 19–26.
40. J. Hornblower, Hieronymus of Cardia (1981); and T. S. Brown, Timaeus of Tauromenium (1958).
41. HRR, vol. 1, pp. 5–39; FGrH 809.
42. A useful introduction to the problems of the historiography of early Rome is Forsythe, Early Rome, pp. 59–77. A more optimistic view of the reliability of early Roman traditions is maintained by Cornell, Beginnings of Rome, pp. 1–25, and S. P. Oakley, A Commentary on Livy, Books 6–10, vol. 1 (1997), pp. 21–108.
43. See Introduction to Aemilius Paullus.
44. Excellent introductions to Polybius include F. W. Walbank, Polybius (1972), and B. McGing, Polybius’ Histories (2010). The influence of Polybius on Plutarch is discussed, with guidance to previous scholarship on the matter, in W. J. Tatum, Historia 59 (2010), pp. 448–61.
45. C. Pelling in J. Marincola (ed.), A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography (2007), pp. 252–8.
46. On Plutarch’s Latin, see Demosthenes 2. A concise but superb introduction to Livy is provided in C. S. Krauss and A. J. Woodman, Latin Historians (1997), pp. 51–81.
List of Surviving Lives by Plutarch
Lives included in this volume are marked with an asterisk.
PARALLEL LIVES
Theseus and Romulus*
Lycurgus and Numa*
Solon and Publicola*
Themistocles and Camillus*
Aristides and Elder Cato*
Cimon and Lucullus
Pericles and Fabius Maximus*
Nicias and Crassus
Coriolanus* and Alcibiades
Lysander and Sulla
Agesilaus and Pompey
Pelopidas and Marcellus*
Dion and Brutus
Aemilius Paullus* and Timoleon
Demosthenes and Cicero
Phocion and Younger Cato
Alexander and Caesar
Sertorius and Eumenes
Demetrius and Antony
Pyrrhus and Marius
Agis & Cleomenes and Tiberius & Caius Gracchus (a double pair)
Philopoemen* and Titus Flamininus*
STAND-ALONE LIVES
Artaxerxes
Aratus*
LIVES OF THE CAESARS
Galba
Otho
Maps
ROMULUS
* * *
Introduction to Romulus
Myth, Legend and History
In the beginning, Rome was ruled by kings. In canonical succession they were Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Tullus Hostilius, Ancus Marcius, Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius and Tarquinius Superbus – Tarquin the Proud. To this list one could add Titus Tatius, the Sabine king who shared Rome’s throne with Romulus, and the mysterious Mastarna, whom the Romans sometimes, for the sake of tidiness, identified with Servius Tullius. Romulus, it is obvious, is an eponymous fiction, as much a myth as the notion of the city’s instant foundation, as if it were a Greek settlement, when in reality the site of Rome was gradually developed over a very long time. That, however, is a conclusion we draw from archaeological evidence. Reliable literary sources for early Rome simply do not exist – and did not exist for the first Greeks and Romans who took an interest in Roman origins. Not that the absence of a historical record did anything to impede their early speculations: we get a glimpse of the Greeks’ and the Romans’ intellectual industry and ingenuity simply by consulting Plutarch’s brief review, at Romulus 1–2, of only a few of their theories explaining how Rome got its name.1