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Plutarch
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Image:Plutarch.gif thumb|250px|right|Plutarch
'''Mestrius Plutarchus''' (c.
46-
127) was a
Ancient Greece Greek historian,
biographer, and
essayist.
Born in the small town of
Chaeronea, in the Greek region known as
Boeotia, probably during the reign of the Roman Emperor
Claudius, Plutarch travelled widely in the
Mediterranean world, including twice to
Rome. Due to his parents' wealth, after
67, Plutarchus was able to study philosophy,
rhetoric, and mathematics at the Academy of Athens.
He had a number of influential friends, including
Soscius Senecio and
Fundanus, both important
Roman Senate Senators, to whom some of his later writings were dedicated. He lived most of his life at Chaeronea, and was initiated into the
mystery religion mysteries of the Greek god
Apollo. However, his duties as the senior of the two priests of Apollo at the
Delphic_Oracle#Delphic_Sibyl.2C_the_Pythia Oracle of Delphi (where he was responsible for interpreting the auguries of the Pythia or priestess/oracle) apparently occupied little of his time - he led an active social and civic life and produced an incredible body of writing, much of which is still extant.
Work as magistrate and ambassador
In addition to his duties as a priest of the Delphic temple, Plutarch was also a magistrate in Chaeronea and he represented his home on various missions to foreign countries during his early adult years. His friend
Lucius Mestrius Florus, a Roman
consul, sponsored Plutarch as a Roman citizen and, according to the
10th century historian George Syncellus, late in life, the Emperor
Hadrian appointed him
procurator of
Achaea (Roman province) Achaea – a position that entitled him to wear the vestments and ornaments of a consul himself. (The
Suda, a
medieval Greek encyclopedia, states that Hadrian's predecessor
Trajan made Plutarch procurator of
Illyria, but most historians consider that unlikely, since Illyria was not a procuratorial province, and Plutarch probably did not speak
Illyrian languages Illyrian).
''Parallel Lives''
His best-known work is the ''
Parallel Lives'', a series of
biography biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, arranged as dyads to illuminate their common
moral virtues or failings. The surviving ''Lives'' contain twenty-three pairs of biographies, each pair containing one Greek Life and one Roman Life, as well as four unpaired single Lives. As he explains in the first paragraph of his ''Life of Alexander'', Plutarch was not concerned with writing histories, as such, but in exploring the influence of
moral character character — good or bad — on the lives and destinies of famous men. Some of the more interesting Lives — for instance, those of
Heracles and
Philip II of Macedon — no longer exist, and many of the remaining Lives are truncated, contain obvious
lacunae, or have been tampered with by later writers.
''Life of Alexander''
His ''Life of Alexander'' is one of the five surviving tertiary sources about the Macedonian conqueror and it includes
anecdotes and descriptions of incidents that appear in no other source. Likewise, his portrait of
Numa Pompilius, an early Roman king, also contains unique information about the early
Roman calendar.
Other works
The ''Moralia''
The remainder of his surviving work is collected under the title of the ''
Moralia'' (loosely translated as ''Customs and Mores''). It is an eclectic collection of seventy-eight essays and transcribed speeches, which includes ''On the Fortune or the Virtue of
Alexander the Great'' - an important adjunct to his Life of the great general, ''On the Worship of
Isis and
Osiris'' (a crucial source of information on
Ancient Egypt Egyptian religious rites), and ''On the Malice of
Herodotus'' (which may, like the orations on Alexander's accomplishments, have been a
rhetorical exercise), wherein Plutarch criticizes what he sees as systematic bias in the Herodotus's work, along with more philosophical treatises, such as ''On the Decline of the Oracles'', ''On the Delays of the Divine Vengeance'', ''On Peace of Mind'' and lighter fare, such as ''
Odysseus and
Gryllus'', a humorous
dialogue between
Homer's Ulysses and one of
Circe's enchanted pigs. The ''Moralia'' was composed first, while writing the Lives occupied much of the last two decades of Plutarch's own life.
Some editions of the ''Moralia'' include several works now known to be
pseudepigrapha: among these are the ''Lives of the Ten Orators'' (biographies of the
Ten Orators of ancient
Athens, based on
Caecilius of Calacte), ''The Doctrines of the Philosophers'', and ''On Music''. One "
pseudo-Plutarch" is held responsible for all of these works, though their authorship is of course unknown. Though the thoughts and opinions recorded are not Plutarch's and come from a slightly later era, they are all classical in origin and have value to the historian.
''Quaestiones''
A pair of interesting minor works is the ''Questions'', one on obscure details of Roman habits and cult, one on Greek ones.
Plutarch's influence
Plutarch's writings had enormous influence on
English Literature English and
French literature. In his plays,
William Shakespeare Shakespeare paraphrased parts of
Thomas North's translation of selected ''Lives'', and occasionally quoted from them verbatim.
Ralph Waldo Emerson and the
Transcendentalism Transcendentalists were greatly influenced by the ''Moralia'' (Emerson wrote a glowing introduction to the five volume
19th century edition of his ''Moralia'').
James Boswell Boswell quoted Plutarch's line about writing lives, rather than biographies in the introduction to his own ''Life of
Samuel Johnson''. His other admirers include
Ben Jonson,
John Dryden,
Alexander Hamilton,
John Milton, and
Sir Francis Bacon, as well as such disparate figures as
Cotton Mather,
Robert Browning and
Michel de Montaigne Montaigne (whose own ''Essays'' draw deeply on Plutarch's ''Moralia'' for their inspiration and ideas).
Quotations
*"Wickedness frames the engines of her own torment. She is a wonderful artisan of a miserable life."
*"It is a desirable thing to be well descended, but the glory belongs to our ancestors."
*"The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled." —''On Listening to Lectures''
*"But for the sake of some little mouthful of flesh, we deprive a soul of the sun and light and of that proportion of life and time it had been born into the world to enjoy." —''On the Eating of Flesh''
References
*''Plutarch's "Lives"'' by Alan Wardman ISBN 0-236-17622-6
*''Plutarch's "Lives: exploring virtue and vice"'' by Timothy E. Duff (Oxford UP: 2002 pb) ISBN 0-199-25274-2
*''"The Echo of Greece"'' by Edith Hamilton. The Norton Library, W.W. Norton and Company, Inc. 1957. p. 194. ISBN 0-393-00231-4
External links
{{wikiquote}}
*{{gutenberg author| id=Plutarch | name=Plutarch}}
**A [http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/4/0/3/14033/14033-h/14033-h.htm#LIFE_OF_PLUTARCH biography of Plutarch] is included in: {{gutenberg | no=674 | name=Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans}}, 18th century
English language English translation under the editorship of Dryden (further edited by Arthur Hugh Clough).
-
Plutarch's Isis and Osiris
-
Plutarch page at LacusCurtius (20th century English translation of most of the ''Lives'', ''On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander'', ''On the Fortune of the Romans'', ''Roman Questions'', and other excerpts of the ''Moralia'')
-
Plutarch of Chaeronea by Jona Lendering at Livius.Org
-
The International Plutarch Society
{{Persondata
|NAME=Plutarch, Mestrius
|ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
|SHORT DESCRIPTION=Greek writer- historian and essayist
|DATE OF BIRTH=
46-
127
|PLACE OF BIRTH=
Chaeronea,
Boeotia
|DATE OF DEATH=
46-
127
|PLACE OF DEATH=
}}
Category:45 births
Category:120 deaths
Category:Ancient Greeks
Category:Essayists
Category:Roman era biographers
Category:Vegetarians
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