Plutarch - On Sparta

ON SPARTA

PLUTARCH (c. c. 120 AD ) 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.

RICHARD TALBERT was born in England in 1947. He is a Cambridge Classics graduate and specialized in Greek history for his doctorate, which led to his first book Timoleon and the Revival of Greek Sicily. While teaching at Queen's University, Belfast, he turned to Roman history and wrote The Senate of Imperial Rome, which won the Goodwin Award of Merit. After three years as Professor of History at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, in 1988 he moved to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, as William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor. He has since served as President of the Association of Ancient Historians, and has been awarded Cambridge's Doctor of Letter's degree. Recent works edited or co-authored by him include Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World (2000), The Romans from Village to Empire (2004) and Space in the Roman World: its Perception and Presentation (2004). With the support of Chapel Hill's Ancient World Mapping Center, he is currently preparing a major new edition of Peutinger's Roman map.

IAN SCOTT-KILVERT was Director of English Literature at the British Council and Editor of Writers and their Works. He translated many of Plutarch's and Cassius Dio's The Roman History for Penguin Classics. He died in 1989.

CHRISTOPHER PELLING is Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University. He published a commentary on Plutarch's Life of Antony in 1988 (Cambridge University Press) and an English version of his 1997 Italian commentary on the Lives of Philopoemen and Flamininus (Rizzoli) is to be published by the Classical Press of Wales. Most of his articles on Plutarch were collected in his Plutarch and History (Classical Press of Wales and Duckworth, 2002).

Revised Edition

Translated with Introduction and Notes by
RICHARD J. A. TALBERT

With Life of Agesilaus translated by
IAN SCOTT-KILVERT
and revised by
RICHARD J. A. TALBERT

With Series Preface by CHRISTOPHER PELLING

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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This translation first published 1988

Revised edition with Life of Agesilaus first published 2005

Translation, Introduction and Notes copyright Richard J. A. Talbert, 1988, 2005

Translation of Life of Agesilaus copyright Ian Scott-Kilvert, 1973;

revised translation copyright Richard J. A. Talbert, 2005

Penguin Plutarch copyright Christopher Pelling, 2005

Previously published as Plutarch on Sparta

All rights reserved

The moral right of the translators 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 publisher's 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: 978-0-14-192550-9

The first Penguin translation of Plutarch appeared in 1958, with Rex Warner's 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 Talbert's 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. 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 Plutarch's 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 Plutarch's 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 Plutarch's 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,