Timothy Duff - Plutarch: The Age of Alexander

Ten Greek Lives by Plutarch

Artaxerxes Pelopidas Dion Timoleon
Demosthenes Phocion Alexander Eumenes
Demetrius Pyrrhus

Revised edition

Translated by
IAN SCOTT-KILVERT and TIMOTHY E. DUFF

Introductions and Notes by
TIMOTHY E. DUFF

With Series Preface by
CHRISTOPHER PELLING

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This translation first published 1973
This edition first published in Penguin Classics 2011

Translation copyright Estate of Ian Scott-Kilvert, 1973
Revisions to these translations and translations of Artaxerxes and Eumenes Timothy E. Duff, 2012
Introductions and Notes copyright Timothy E. Duff, 2012
Series Preface copyright Christopher Pelling, 2005

Cover: Detail of a vase painting depicting the battle between Alexander and Darius by the Darius Painter, in the archaeological museum, Naples (Photograph The Art Archive/Alfredo Dagli Orti)
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ISBN: 978-0-14-197038-7

PENGUIN CLASSICS

PLUTARCH (c. AD 45120) was a Greek philosopher from the small town of Chaeronea in Boeotia. He lived at the height of the Roman Empire and is author of one of the largest collections of writings to have survived from Classical antiquity. His work is traditionally divided into two: the Moralia, which include a vast range of philosophical, scientific, moral and rhetorical works, and the Lives or biographies. Almost fifty such biographies survive, most from his collection of Parallel Lives, in which biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen are arranged in pairs. Plutarchs philosophical and moral interests are apparent in the Lives, as are his considerable literary talent, his vast knowledge of the ancient world and his careful research. Both the Lives and Moralia have been extremely influential since they were first translated in the Renaissance.

IAN SCOTT-KILVERT was Director of English Literature at the British Council and editor of Writers and Their Works. He also translated Cassius Dios The Roman History as well as Plutarchs The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives and Makers of Rome for Penguin Classics. He died in 1989.

TIMOTHY E. DUFF is Reader in Classics at the University of Reading. He is author of Plutarchs Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice (1999) and the Greek and Roman Historians (2003) and has published extensively on Plutarch.

CHRISTOPHER PELLING is Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University. He has published a commentary on Plutarchs Life of Antony (1988) and a commentary on Plutarchs Life of Caesar (2011). His other books include Literary Texts and the Greek Historian (2000). Most of his articles on Plutarch were collected in his Plutarch and History (2002).

The first Penguin translation of Plutarch appeared in 1958, with Rex Warners version of six Roman Lives appearing as FalloftheRomanRepublic. Other volumes followed steadily, three of them by Ian Scott-Kilvert (The Rise and Fall of Athens in 1960, Makers of Rome in 1965 and The Age of Alexander in 1973), and then Richard Talberts PlutarchonSparta in 1988. Several of the moral essays were also translated by Robin Waterfield in 1992. Now only fourteen of the forty-eight Lives remain. It is planned to include these remaining Lives in a new edition, along with revised versions of those already published.

This is also an opportunity to divide up the Lives in a different way, although it is not straightforward to decide what that different way should be. Nearly all Plutarchs surviving biographies were written in pairs as ParallelLives: thus a book for Plutarch was not just Theseus or Caesar but TheseusandRomulus or AlexanderandCaesar. Most, but not all, of those pairs have a brief epilogue at the end of the second Life comparing the two heroes, just as many have a prologue before the first Life giving some initial grounds for the comparison. Not much attention was paid to this comparative technique at the time when the Penguin series started to appear, and it seemed natural then to separate each Life from its pair and organize the volumes by period and city. The comparative epilogues were not included in the translations at all.

That now looks very unsatisfactory. The comparative technique has come to be seen as basic to Plutarchs strategy, underlying not only those brief epilogues but also the entire pairings. (It is true, though, that in the last few years scholars have become increasingly alert to the way that all the Lives, not just the pairs, are crafted to complement one another.) It is very tempting to keep the pairings in this new series in a way that would respect Plutarchs own authorial intentions.

After some agonizing, we have decided nevertheless to keep to something like the original strategy of the series, though with some refinement. The reason is a practical one. Many, perhaps most, readers of Plutarch will be reading him to see what he has to say about a particular period, and will wish to compare his treatment of the major players to see how the different parts of his historical jigsaw fit together. If one kept the pairings, that would inevitably mean buying several different volumes of the series; and if, say, one organized those volumes by the Greek partner (so that, for instance, Pericles Fabius, Nicias Crassus and Coriolanus Alcibiades made one volume), anyone primarily interested in the Roman Lives of the late Republic would probably need to buy the whole set. That is no way to guarantee these finely crafted works of art the wide reading that they deserve. Keeping the organization by period also allows some other works of Plutarch to be included along with the Lives themselves, for instance the fascinating essay