Plutarch - The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives

INTRODUCTION

SIR THOMAS NORTH entitled his great translation of Plutarch The Lives of The Noble Grecians and Romans. Noble was his own importation, but it was a peculiarly well-chosen epithet, for it serves to emphasize the qualities which distinguish Plutarch from the Greek historians of the golden age. It reminds us of the distance which separates him from his subjects and of the heroic aura which had grown up around them in the meanwhile. Plutarch is, as it were, a backward-looking writer standing on the last range which divided the pagan civilization from the Christian. He lacks the startlingly original and impersonal quality of Periclean literature, just as that literature lacks his intimacy on the one hand and the breadth of his tolerance and philanthropy on the other. He was no Thucydides, applying a ruthlessly objective analysis to uncover the historical process. He was a lover of tradition, and his prime object was at once to cherish and understand the greatness of the past and to re-assert it as a living ideal.

Plutarchs life-time of some seventy-five years stretches from the middle forties A.D. to the beginning of Hadrians reign. It is the period at which the blend of Greek and Roman culture reached its highest point of development: almost all the major writers had done their work and Plutarchs writings are in many ways a summing up of that culture. He came of an ancient Theban family and he never strayed for long from his home-town of Chaeronea, a small city lying in the midst of the great Boeotian plain which the Greeks called the dancing-floor of Ares and which had witnessed the decisive battles of Haliartus, Leuctra, Chaeronea itself, and many more. Not that his own outlook was provincial in any narrowing sense. He studied philosophy in Athens as a young man, travelled in Greece and Egypt, earned a high reputation both as a scholar and a diplomat in Rome, making many influential friends in the process, and may even have been granted honorary consular rank.

Plutarch himself assiduously practised the ideal of the city-state, that the educated man should play his part in public life; and he held a succession of magistracies at Chaeronea and a priesthood at Delphi. In any political sense, of course, Greece had lost the last vestiges of her independence at the sack of Corinth two centuries before. Meanwhile not only had her population shrunk, but the riches and other material rewards of Italy and Asia had attracted many of her ablest soldiers, administrators, and scholars to emigrate, so that in his own time, according to Plutarchs estimate, Greece could scarcely have put three thousand armed men into the field. In the directly practical sphere no Greek could do anything to alter these realities, and yet it was no mere antiquarian sentiment which influenced Plutarch to keep his Hellenism as intact as possible rather than embark, say, on the career of an imperial civil servant. For the governing class of his day Roman and Greek education had become inseparably intermingled, and in the Roman Empire, which was now beginning to enjoy the benefits of stable government and yet possessed neither a moral nor an intellectual centre, a teacher of Plutarchs stature could still hope to benefit his fellow-men by inspiration and example.

The form of Plutarchs writings suggests that his gifts were for the essay rather than the full-length history. Apart from the biographies his other major work, the Moralia, is a collection of comparatively short treatises and dialogues which cover an immense range of subjects, literary, ethical, political, and scientific. There is a distinct correspondence between the two, the