The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  Plutarch, who elsewhere advocates women’s education, had personally taught philosophy to Eurydice (138c). As a future childbearing wife, she would be rather constricted. Nonetheless, she is to continue her philosophical education as best she can, by discussing topics discussed in the classes of her husband (145d–e). Plutarch probably conceived this as primarily ethical instruction, but in any case, a wife’s education was not to stop with marriage. At the end, Plutarch reworks a famous poem of Sappho, praising Eurydice’s literary and philosophical accomplishments and extolling the paideia she has received (146a).

  The Dialogue on Love differs radically from Advice to a Bride and Groom in its defense of women’s intelligence and virtue, even if Advice contained some seeds of a new approach. This was a late work, possibly even completed by Plutarch’s son, and is a full-scale, novelistic, dramatic dialogue, with complex framing, play on past and present, local, foreign, and cosmopolitan identities, and exaltation of the intelligence and heroism of women. The dramatic part involves a wealthy young widow in tiny Thespiae in Boeotia who falls in love with a handsome boy, the kalos, kidnaps, and marries him, while his guardians, and Plutarch (the persona) and his friends debate the fine points of homo- versus heteroerotic love. Basically, it extols the role of erôs in marriage, defends married love against boy love, envisages the constant influence of the gods Eros and Aphrodite in love and marriage, and suggests that the goal of married love is progress toward the Platonic “vision of the beautiful” (764d–765a). Whether provocative (Goldhill 1995, 158–161) or serious, the essay carries to its logical conclusion Plato’s theory that the superior person in intellect and virtue should lead. While seemingly presenting a topsy-turvy world, the essay corresponds to some new realities in the Greco-Roman world of the Imperial period and may be inspired by the emerging novel.

  Plutarch’s role is complex. As one scholar puts it, he was a person “well-equipped to understand what the rich, the powerful, the poor, the self-interested demos, the over-smart and the over-philosophical will miss,” . . . and, thus, represents the idea of the educated pepaideumenoi in the Second Sophistic (Pelling 2011, 56).

  FURTHER READING

  There are two companions to Plutarch: Beck 2014, and Titchener and Zadorozhnyy, forthcoming. For Plutarch’s life, important are Jones 1971 and Russell 1973. More recent is Boulogne 1994. For Plutarch’s place in the Second Sophistic, Richter 2011. Basic for Middle Platonism is Dillon (1977) 1996. More recent are Boys-Stones 2001; Roskam 2007; Bonazzi 2011; Kechagia 2011b. For philosophy and religion, Roig Lanzillotta and Muñoz Gallarte 2012. For religion, Brenk 1987a and 1987b; Hirsch-Luipold 2005; Van der Stockt, Titchener, Ingenkamp, and Jiménez 2011. For ethics, valuable are Pomeroy 1999; Gill 2006; Van Hoof, 2010; Roskam and Van der Stockt, 2011; and Klotz and Oikonomopoulou 2011; on several topics, Opsomer, Roskam, and Titchener 2016.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Becchi, F. 2012. “The Doctrine of the Passions: Plutarch, Posidonius and Galen.” In Plutarch in the Religious and Philosophical Discourse of Late Antiquity, edited by L. Roig Lanzillotta and I. Muñoz Gallarte, 43–54. Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition. Leiden and Boston.

  Beck, M., ed. 2014. A Companion to Plutarch. Oxford.

  Bonazzi, M. 2009. “Antiochus’ Ethics and the Subordination of Stoicism.” In The Origins of the Platonic System: Platonisms of the Early Empire and their Philosophical Contexts, edited by M. Bonazzi and J. Opsomer, 33–54. Collection d’Études Classiques 23. Louvain, Namur, Paris, and Walpole, MA.

  Bonazzi, M., ed. 2011. Pierluigi Donini. Commentary and Tradition: Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Post-Hellenistic Philosophy. Berlin and New York.

  Bonazzi, M. 2012. “Antiochus and Platonism.” In The Philosophy of Antiochus, edited by D. Sedley, 307–333. Cambridge.

  Bonazzi, M., and R. W. Sharples. 2011. “Introduction.” In Pierluigi Donini. Commentary and Tradition: Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Post-Hellenistic Philosophy, edited by M. Bonazzi, 7–12. Berlin and New York.

  Boulogne, J. 1994. Plutarque: Un aristocrat grec sous l’occupation romaine. Lille.

  Boys-Stones, G. R. 2001. Post-Hellenistic Philosophy: A Study of Its Development from the Stoics to Origen. Oxford.

  Brenk, F. E. 1977. In Mist Apparelled: Religious Themes in Plutarch’s Moralia and iLives. Leiden.

  Brenk, F. E. 1987a. “An Imperial Heritage: The Religious Spirit of Plutarch of Chaironeia.” ANRW 2.36.1: 248–349.

  Brenk, F. E. 1987b. Indices. ANRW 2.36.2: 1300–1322.

  Brenk, F. E. 1996. “Time as Structure in The Daimonion of Sokrates.” In Plutarchea Lovaniensia, edited by L. Van der Stockt, 29–51. Leuven. Reprinted in F. E. Brenk, Relighting the Souls: Studies in Plutarch, in Greek Literature, Religion, and Philosophy, and in the New Testament Background, 59–81. Stuttgart, 1998.

  Brenk, F. E. 2012. “Plutarch and ‘Pagan Monotheism.’” In Plutarch in the Religious and Philosophical Discourse of Late Antiquity, edited by L. Roig Lanzillotta and I. Muñoz Gallarte, 73–84. Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition. Leiden and Boston.

  Brenk, F. E. 2016. “Plutarch’s Flawed Characters: The Personae of the Dialogues.” A Versatile Gentleman. Consistency in Plutarch’s Writing, edited by J. Opsomer, G. Roskam, and F. Titchener, 89–100. Leuven.

  Brenk, F. E. 2017. “‘Searching for Truth’?: Plutarch's On Isis and Osiris.” In Platonismus und spätägyptische Religion: Plutarch und die Ägyptenrezeption in der in der römischen Kaiserzeit, edited by M. Erler and M. Stadler, 1–21. Berlin.

  Castelnérac, B. 2007. “Plutarch’s Psychology of Moral Virtue: ‘Pathos,’ ‘Logos,’ and the Unity of the Soul.” Ancient Philosophy 27: 141–164.

  Dawson, D. 1992. Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Alexandria. Berkeley, CA.

  Deuse, W. 2010. “Plutarch’s Eschatological Myths.” In Plutarch. On the Daimonion of Socrates: Human Liberation, Divine Guidance and Philosophy, edited by H.-G. Nesselrath, 169–200. Tübingen.

  Dillon, J. (1977) 1996. The Middle Platonists: 80B.C.toA.D.220. 2nd ed. Ithaca, NY, and London.

  Donini, P. 1988. “Science and Metaphysics: Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism in Plutarch’s On the Face in the Moon.” In The Question of Eclecticism: Studies in Later Greek Philosophy, edited by J. M. Dillon and A. A. Long, 126–144. Berkeley, CA, and London.

  Donini, P. 2011a. “Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism in Plutarch’s On the Face in the Moon.” In Pierluigi Donini. Commentary and Tradition: Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Post-Hellenistic Philosophy, edited by M. Bonazzi, 327–339. Berlin and New York.

  Donini, P. 2011b. Il volto della luna. Corpus Plutarchi Moralium 48. Naples.

  Donini, P. 2011c. “L’eredità academica e i fondamenti del platonismo in Plutarcho.” In Pierluigi Donini. Commentary and Tradition: Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Post-Hellenistic Philosophy, edited by M. Bonazzi, 375–402. Berlin and New York. First published in ΕΝΩΣΙΣΚΑΙΦΙΛΙΑ: Unione e amicizia, edited by M. Barbanti, G. Rita Giardina, and P. Maganaro, 247–273. Catania, 2002.

  Geiger, J. 2011. “Plutarch, Dionysus, and the God of the Jews Revisited (An Exercise in Quellenforschung).” In Daimones, Rituals, Myths and History of Religions in Plutarch’s Works, edited by L. Van der Stockt, F. Titchener, H. G. Ingenkamp, and A. Pérez Jiménez, 211–220. Logan, UT, and Malaga.

  Gill, C. 2006. The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought. Oxford.

  Goldhill, S. 1995. Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality. Cambridge.

  Hirsch-Luipold, R. 2005. “Der eine Gott bei Philon von Alexandrien und Plutarch.” In Gott und die Götter bei Plutarch: Götterbilder, Gottesbilder, Weltbilder, edited by R. Hirsch-Luipold, 141–168. Berlin.

  Hirsch-Luipold, R., ed. 2005. Gott und die Götter bei Plutarch: Götterbilder, Gottesbilder, Weltbilder. Berlin.

  Hirsch-Luipold, R. 2016. “Plutarch.” In Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, edited by G. Schöllge
n et al., 1010–1038. Stuttgart.

  Jones, C. P. 1971. Plutarch and Rome. Oxford.

  Kechagia, E. 2011a. “Philosophy in Plutarch’s Table Talk: In Jest or in Earnest?” In The Philosopher’s Banquet: Plutarch’s Table Talk in the Intellectual Culture of the Roman Empire, edited by F. A. Klotz and K. Oikonomopoulou, 77–104. Oxford.

  Kechagia, E. 2011b. Plutarch against Colotes: A Lesson in History of Philosophy. Oxford.

  Klotz, F. 2011. “Imagining the Past: Plutarch’s Play with Time.” In The Philosopher’s Banquet. Plutarch’s Table Talk in the Intellectual Culture of the Roman Empire, edited by F. A. Klotz and K. Oikonomopoulou, 161–178. Oxford.

  Klotz, F., and K. Oikonomopoulou, eds. 2011. The Philosopher’s Banquet: Plutarch’s Table Talk in the Intellectual Culture of the Roman Empire. Oxford.

  König, J. 2007. “Fragmentation and Coherence in Plutarch’s Sympotic Questions.” In Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire, edited by J. König and T. Whitmarsh, 43–68. Cambridge.

  König, J. 2011. “Self-Promotion and Self-Effacement in Plutarch’s Table Talk.” In The Philosopher’s Banquet: Plutarch’s iTable Talk in the Intellectual Culture of the Roman Empire, edited by F. Klotz and K. Oikonomopoulou, 179–203. Oxford.

  Martin, H. M. 2011. “Plutarchan Morality: Arete, Tyche, and Non-Consequentialism.” In Virtues for the People: Aspects of Plutarchan Ethics, edited by G. Roskam and L. Van der Stockt, 133–150. Leuven.

  McNamara, J. A. 1999. “Gendering Virtue.” In Plutarch’s Advice to the Bride and Groom, and A Consolation to His Wife, edited by S. B. Pomeroy, 151–161. Oxford.

  Opsomer, J. 2005. “Demiurges in Early Imperial Platonism.” In Gott und die Götter bei Plutarch: Götterbilder, Gottesbilder, Weltbilder, edited by R. Hirsch-Luipold, 51–100. Berlin.

  Opsomer, J. 2009. “M. Annius Ammonius, a Philosophical Profile.” In The Origins of the Platonic System: Platonisms of the Early Empire and their Philosophical Contexts, edited by M. Bonazzi and J. Opsomer, 123–186. Collection d’Études Classiques. Leuven.

  Opsomer, J., G. Roskam, and F. Titchener, eds. 2016. A Versatile Gentleman. Consistency in Plutarch’s Writings. Leuven.

  Pelling, C. 2011. “What is Popular about Plutarch’s Popular Philosophy?” In Virtues for the People: Aspects of Plutarchan Ethics, edited by G. Roskam and L. Van der Stockt, 41–58. Leuven.

  Pelling, C. 2016. “Plutarch the Multiculturalist: Is West Always Best?” Ploutarchos 13. 33–52.

  Pomeroy, S. B., ed. 1999. Plutarch’s Advice to the Bride and Groom and A Consolation to His Wife: English Translations, Commentary, Interpretive Essays, and Bibliography. Oxford.

  Preston, R., “Roman Questions, Greek Answers: Plutarch and the Construction of Identity.” In Being Greek under Rome edited by Simon Goldhill, 86–119. Cambridge.

  Richter, D. S. 2011. Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire. Oxford.

  Roig Lanzillotta, L., and I. Muñoz. Gallarte, eds. 2012. Plutarch in the Religious and Philosophical Discourse of Late Antiquity. Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition. Leiden and Boston.

  Roskam, G. 2007. Live Unnoticed. Λάθεβιώσας: On the Vicissitudes of an Epicurean Doctrine. Leiden and Boston.

  Roskam, G., and L. Van der Stockt, eds. 2011. Virtues for the People: Aspects of Plutarchan Ethics. Leuven.

  Russell, D. A. 1973. Plutarch. New York.

  Sidebottom, H. 2009. “Philostratus and the Symbolic Roles of the Sophist and Philosopher.” In Philostratus, edited by E. L. Bowie and J. Elsner, 69–99. Cambridge.

  Stadter, P. A. 2011. “Plutarch’s Latin Reading: The Case of Cicero’s Lucullus.” In Daimones, Rituals, Myths and History of Religions in Plutarch’s Works, edited by L. Van der Stockt, F. Titchener, H. G. Ingenkamp, and A. Pérez Jiménez, 407–418. Logan, UT, and Malaga.

  Stadter, P. A. 2015. Plutarch and His Roman Readers. Oxford.

  Titchener, F., and A. Zadorozhnyy, eds. 2017. The Cambridge Companion to Plutarch. Cambridge.

  Van Hoof, L. 2010. Plutarch’s Practical Ethics: The Social Dynamics of Philosophy. Oxford.

  Van der Stockt, L., F. Titchener, H. G. Ingenkamp, and A. Pérez Jiménez, eds. 2011. Daimones, Rituals, Myths and History of Religions in Plutarch’s Works. Logan, UT, and Malaga.

  Wright, R. A. 2008. “Plutarch on Moral Progress.” In Passions and Moral Progress in Greco-Roman Thought, edited by J. T. Fitzgerald, 136–150. London and New York.

  CHAPTER 20

  PLUTARCH’S LIVES

  PAOLO DESIDERI

  THE CONTEXT

  THE body of Plutarch’s biographical works began an era in the Greek culture of the second-century empire marked by renewed interest in the history of Greece and Rome. In the first century this interest in history had survived only in grammar and rhetoric schools, in the form of readings and comments on history passages, or in expository exemplification while preparing students for proper oratorical activities.1 The nearly complete silence of true political historiography would finally be broken in the second half of the century by great writers such as Arrian, Appian, and Cassius Dio, whose works are, even today, essential documents for reconstructing the history of the Hellenic and Roman ages.2 But even earlier, immediately following Plutarch, and in fact at least in part contemporaneously with his writings, we find that neverending series of historical commemorations in the form of theatrical oratory that made up the fundamental core of the cultural activity carried out by the most important exponents of the Second Sophistic, from Isaeus the Assyrian to Polemon of Laodicea, Scopelian of Clazomenae and Aelius Aristides (to list only some of the best-known orators).3 Local historiography would also experience a substantial new blossoming, whatever political or cultural value we might wish to attribute to this phenomenon.4 Furthermore, Pausanias’s Periegesis would give an idea of the importance of the historical and antiquarian interests of the time, aimed at bringing out the value of Greece’s monuments and urban heritage, to which the work bears essential witness even today.5 And lastly, we cannot forget that this interest is also noticeably displayed in monuments and the figurative arts—but naturally, the scope of this chapter does not permit us to give this type of documentation the attention it deserves.6 It is therefore reasonable to think that the biographical works by Plutarch,7 which clearly corresponded to a renewed demand for history on the part of the Greek cultural context in which our author lived, might also have exerted a considerable influence on the age immediately following his8—though, as we shall see, not without elements of distinction, some of which are substantial. And the importance that the Parallel Lives (Vit.) in particular, having been preserved almost in their entirety during the Byzantine era,9 later had in the history of modern European culture confirms a posteriori (so to speak) that the underlying reasons for writing this work had been so profound and intense as to enable them to survive for centuries after the end of that world in which and for which the work itself had been conceived and written. In any case, all the evidence leads us to believe that Plutarch’s attention to history, which always took form as a biographical sort of writing10 with an ethical and political purpose, did not assume the form of “parallel lives” from the very beginning. In fact, there are extant Lives of his which do not correspond to this formula—that is, they involve individual figures and not pairs: thus we have an Aratus and an Artaxerxes, as well as the two Lives of emperors, Galba and Otho, which belonged, as we can ascertain from the Lamprias catalog, to a series that included all the emperors from Augustus to Vitellius.11

  We may thus imagine, as far as these first writings by Plutarch are concerned, a sort of intellectual progression from simple political biography—a well-traveled path in Greek literature, starting in the fourth century (and later in Roman literature)—to a plan of Lives which cover a specific spatium historicum in order. The latter is an original formula of Plutarch’s, but only in the sense that he gives a diachronic direction to a formula which had already been in us
e in Hellenic and Roman times: the series of Lives of figures who are similar in type.12 Finally, with the Parallel Lives (that is, Lives conceived as a system of pairs, in which Greek and Roman “protagonists” are set side by side), this progression arrives at a revolutionary and highly personal model of biographical writing. And we ought immediately to specify, as far as this last formula is concerned, that this is an “open” system, that is, one that does not develop according to an original plan that is slowly achieved, and which flows into a unified publication at the end. Rather, it gradually accumulates—so to speak—and does so in an unorganized way,13 with pairs or groups of pairs published separately over time. We return later to the biographical nature, especially in its final, parallelistic variant, of Plutarch’s interest in historiography, a feature which, as we shall see, is not merely of technical interest.14 Actually, we must first raise the question of the reason, or reasons, why this new interest in history arose in Plutarch, an interest which would later lead to such considerable developments in second-century Greek culture. Before examining the explanations for this phenomenon that may be gathered from passages of a “theoretical” nature in the Lives, we ought to seek out clues in the rest of his writing: indeed, in the Lives we find above all ideas that might be termed “inside of” the historiographical discourse itself, that is, that relate to the way history is written, or to the specific purposes undertaken in using a given style. Yet the deeper reasons which may have led Plutarch to history must be sought elsewhere, in the series of writings on various subjects (philosophy, science, politics, etc.) forming the other great set of his writings, those which from the Byzantine era forward were grouped to form the collection Ἠθικά, later translated as Moralia in the humanistic literary tradition. And from this point of view, we discover the three dialogues set in Delphi, which go in fact by the name of Delphic (or Pythian) Dialogues, to be particularly insightful. When examined for our specific purposes, these dialogues effectively confirm the benefit of approaching Plutarch’s works with a consideration, beyond the Byzantine divide, for their markedly unified character (in accordance with the theme that guided the 2002 Rhetymnon Convention of the International Plutarch Society [IPS] organized by Anastasios Nikolaidis).15