Plutarch. - Makers of Rome, nine lives Coriolanus, Fabius Maximus, Macellus, Cato the Elder, Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius Gracchus, Sertorius, Brutus, Mark Antony

THE present selection has been drawn up on principles similar to those adopted in my volume of Greek Lives, The Rise and Fall of Athens, Instead of following Plutarchs arrangement of grouping Greeks and Romans in pairs, I have selected eight representative figures whose careers range from the earliest years of the Republic to the establishment of the Empire under Octavius Caesar. Among these I have included the three Shakespearean heroes, Coriolanus, Brutus, and Mark Antony, whose biographies, besides their dramatic appeal, are particularly interesting examples of Plutarchs fondness for a semifictional rather than a factual treatment of history.

Two themes dominate the cycle of Plutarchs Roman Lives, the valour and tenacity of the Roman people in war, and their genius for political compromise. The creators of the pax Romano were first of all the children of Mars, and so Plutarch depicts them, often defeated but never subdued, and in the end triumphant over one dreaded enemy after another, the Volscians, the Gauls, Pyrrhus and his elephants, the Carthaginians and their matchless cavalry. Lastly the army moves into politics, the enemies of the Republic become her own legions led by their contending generals, and the clash of arms is only finally stilled when, after the victory of Actium, Octavius Caesar symbolically closes the everopen doors of the temple of Janus.

This brings us to Plutarchs second motif, the problems of statecraft and the struggle for power between patrician and plebeian, the Senate and the popular leaders. It is here, for all the ruthlessness of Roman public life, that Plutarch pays tribute to the political instinct, the ability to close ranks in a moment of crisis, which eventually raised this tribal confederation of Italian farmers to the mastery of the world and the absence of which proved the ruin of the Greek city-state. The tragedy of Greece and the triumph of Rome form the political poles of the Lives viewed as a whole, and Plutarch passes judgment on his fellow-countrymen in a memorable passage from the Life of Flamininus:

For if we except the victory at Marathon, the sea-fight at Salamis, the battles of Plataca and Thermopylae, and Cimons exploits at Eurymedon Greece fought all her battles against and to enslave herself. Every one of her trophies stands as a memorial to her own shame and misfortune, and she owed her ruin above all to the misdeeds and the rivalries of her leaders.

The peculiarly Roman virtues as Plutarch sees them best exemplified perhaps in the careers of Fabius, Marccllus, and Sertorius include not only courage and the power of leadership, but also generosity and forbearance, the qualities which create harmony between rulers and ruled. But the real source of Roman supremacy and object of Plutarchs admiration is the idea of Rome, a spiritual heritage undreamed of in Greece, which at moments of supreme crisis seems to descend upon the citys fallible representatives, to work through them and to shape their ends. Heine expresses something of this conception in his Reisebilder.

They were not great men, but through their position they were greater than the other children of earth, for they stood on Rome. Immediately they came down from the Seven Hills they were small. The greater Rome grew, the more this idea dilated; the individual lost himself in it: the great men who remain eminent are borne up by this idea, and it makes the littleness of the little men more pronounced.

Some such notion is surely in Plutarchs mind on the many occasions when he finds a supernatural power at work in the crises of Roman history. Time and again he returns to this theme, in Valerias sudden intuition that only the women of Rome can move Coriolanus, in Fabiuss power to inspire his countrymens resistance after the dbcle of Cannae, in the delayed news of victory which destroys Brutus at Philippi; and he reiterates his belief in a divine providence which seems to stand guard over the fortunes of Rome.