Pelling C. B. R. - Rome in crisis : nine lives : Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius Gracchus, Sertorius, Lucullus, Younger Cato, Brutus, Antony, Galba, Otho

PENGUIN CLASSICS

ROME IN CRISIS

PLUTARCH (c. 50c. 120 CE ) was a writer and thinker born into a wealthy, established family of Chaeronea in central Greece. He received the best possible education in rhetoric and philosophy, and travelled to Asia Minor and Egypt. Later, a series of visits to Rome and Italy contributed to his fame, and it was said that he had received official recognition by the emperors Trajan and Hadrian. Plutarch rendered conscientious service to his province and city (where he continued to live), as well as holding a priesthood at nearby Delphi. His voluminous surviving writings are broadly divided into the moral works and the Lives of outstanding Greek and Roman leaders. The former (Moralia) are a mixture of rhetorical and antiquarian pieces, together with technical and moral philosophy (sometimes in dialogue form). The Lives have been influential from the Renaissance onwards.

IAN SCOTT-KILVERT was Director of English Literature at the British Council and Editor of Writers and Their Works. For Penguin Classics, he translated Plutarchs The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives, Makers of Rome and The Age of Alexander, and Cassius Dios The Roman History. He died in 1989.

CHRISTOPHER PELLING is Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University. He has published a commentary on Plutarchs Life of Antony (Cambridge University Press, 1988) and a commentary on Plutarchs Life of Caesar will be published shortly in the Clarendon Ancient History series. His other books include Literary Texts and the Greek Historian (Routledge, 2000). Most of his articles on Plutarch were collected in his Plutarch and History (Classical Press of Wales and Duckworth, 2002).

Tiberius Gracchus Gaius Gracchus

Sertorius Lucullus

Younger Cato Brutus Antony

Galba Otho

Translated by IAN SCOTT-KILVERT

and CHRISTOPHER PELLING

Introduction and Notes by

CHRISTOPHER PELLING

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This collection first published in Penguin Classics 2010

Translations of Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius Gracchus, Sertorius, Brutus and Antony copyright Ian Scott-Kilvert, 1965

Revisions to these translations, translation of Lucullus, Younger Cato, Galba and Otho, and editorial material copyright Christopher Pelling, 2010

All rights reserved

The moral right of the translators and editor has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-195973-3

ROME IN CRISIS

The first Penguin translation of Plutarch appeared in 1958, with Rex Warners version of six Roman Lives appearing as Fall of the Roman Republic. 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 Plutarch on Sparta in 1988. Several of the moral essays were also translated by Robin Waterfield in 1992. Now only fourteen of the forty-eight Lives remain. These remaining Lives will now be included in the new edition, along with revised versions of those already published. The present volume includes four of those fourteen previously unpublished Lives.

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 Parallel Lives: thus a book for Plutarch was not just Theseus or Caesar but Theseus and Romulus or Alexander and Caesar. 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, PericlesFabius, NiciasCrassus and CoriolanusAlcibiades 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 On the Malice of Herodotus with the Lives of Themistocles and Aristides and (as before) several Spartan essays with the Spartan Lives.

Of course the comparative epilogues must now be included, and they will be translated and printed along with the second Life of each pair, just as the prologues are conventionally printed before the first Life. Each volume will now also usually include more extended introductions to each Life, which will draw attention to the importance of the comparison as well as other features of Plutarchs technique. This is a compromise, and an uncomfortable one; but it still seems the better way.