Plutarch

Plutarch of Chaeronea

Plutarch is read above all for his Parallel Lives, the biographies that fixed Europe's image of Greece and Rome and gave Shakespeare his Caesar and his Antony. But Plutarch was a philosopher before he was a biographer, a Platonist and a priest of Apollo at Delphi, and his Lives are moral philosophy in the dress of biography while his enormous Moralia is one of antiquity's great treasuries of practical wisdom. He believed that character, not conquest, is the true object of study, and that a jest or a phrase can lay bare a soul more surely than a battle.

The corpus and how the chat cites it. This room reads the Moralia, Plutarch's collection of ethical and philosophical essays, in William Goodwin's 1870 translation (Plutarch's Morals), public domain by way of Project Gutenberg. The Parallel Lives, in Dryden's classic English, stand behind the discussion and are a natural addition for a later corpus pass. The chat cites the Moralia by the title of the essay and the Lives by the life. Expect citations of the form Moralia, On the Education of Children, or Life of Alexander.

Life. Plutarch was born around 46 AD in Chaeronea, a small town in Boeotia in central Greece, and he chose to spend his life there, he joked, lest it grow even smaller for the loss of one inhabitant. He studied Platonic philosophy at Athens, traveled to Rome and Egypt, became a Roman citizen, and for the last decades of his life served as a priest at the ancient oracle of Delphi. Across a long career under the Roman Empire he poured out biographies and moral essays in astonishing abundance, and through them, more than through any battle or treaty, the ancient world handed its idea of greatness to the ages that followed.

Where to begin. Start with the Moralia, the essays on the conduct of life, on the control of anger, on tranquility of mind, on the education of children, on listening and friendship. Then read the Parallel Lives for the moral biography, and the theological essays, on the E at Delphi, the decline of the oracles, and Isis and Osiris, for the Platonist priest at his deepest.

Biography as moral philosophy. The method of the Lives is to pair a Greek with a Roman, Alexander with Caesar, Demosthenes with Cicero, and to study the two together, not to write political history but to display character. In a famous declaration Plutarch insists that he is writing lives and not histories, and that a person's greatest deeds do not always best reveal virtue or vice; often a small thing, a passing word, a jest, a gesture, uncovers the soul more than the bloodiest of victories. Biography, for him, is a moral mirror: we study the great in order to learn what to imitate and what to flee, and the reader is meant to come away improved by the company he has kept.

The Moralia: practical ethics. The other half of his work is the Moralia, scores of essays and dialogues on how to live well. He writes on the mastery of anger and the cure of idle talk, on contentment and the right way to listen to a lecture, on the education of the young, on how to tell a true friend from a flatterer, on the management of the passions. His ethics is humane, moderate, and concrete, less interested in building a system than in the actual conduct of a life, and it rests on the conviction that virtue is something cultivated, not merely born. For the perfect development of moral excellence, he writes, three things must meet together: natural ability, instruction, and practice.

The Platonist and the priest. Beneath the moralist stands a serious Middle Platonist. Against the Stoics and the Epicureans, Plutarch defends a providential cosmos governed by a good God, the immortality of the soul, and a world peopled by daimones, spirits that mediate between gods and human beings. As priest at Delphi he meditated on the meaning of the oracle and of the mysterious letter E carved at its threshold, read the old myths as allegories of philosophical truth, and held that the divine is to be approached by reason and reverence together. His Platonism is religious and undogmatic, far more concerned with piety and the good life than with metaphysical proof.

Against the popularizer's caricature. Plutarch is often filed away as a charming popularizer rather than a true philosopher, but that mistakes his method for a want of depth. He chose to do ethics through example and essay rather than through system because he believed that is how character is in fact formed, by the imitation of models and the practice of small things, rather than by the memorizing of doctrines. His humane, eclectic, example-driven moral philosophy is a considered alternative to the system-building of the schools, and it has shaped the way the West thinks about character ever since.

Reception, and adjacent reading. No ancient writer has been more loved or more widely influential in the modern world. Montaigne built his Essays upon Plutarch and treated him almost as a daily companion; Shakespeare dramatized his Lives; and the Enlightenment and the American founders read him as a school of virtue and of republican character. Read now, Plutarch is the philosopher who made ethics concrete, the master of character who taught that how a person lives matters more than what a person theorizes. He was a devoted follower of Plato, carrying Platonism into the moral life; he wrote of and for the Roman moral world he shared with Seneca, Cicero, and the emperor Marcus Aurelius, that age's great teachers of practical ethics; and above all he became the favorite author and the very model of Montaigne, through whom his humane wisdom passed into modern literature. His conviction that we are educated by examples has never stopped being true.