Chapter I: Part 1

Selected Essays of Plutarch

SELECTED ESSAYS OF PLUTARCH

TRANSLATED WITH INTRODUCTION

BY

T. G. TUCKER

LITT.D. (CAMB.), HON. LITT.D. (DUBLIN)
PROFESSOR OF CLASSICAL PHILOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

Volume I.

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1913

HENRY FROWDE, M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK, TORONTO
MELBOURNE AND BOMBAY

PREFACE

The essays here rendered into English have not been selected as the very best pieces in Plutarch’s _Moralia_, but, first, as typical examples of his writing in that kind, and, second, as covering between them a tolerably large field of interesting matter. The _Moralia_ offer us perhaps the best of all extant material for judging the civilization of the middle classes of society just before and after the year 100 of our era. From them and from Pliny’s _Letters_ we are able to form a fairly complete picture of a large part of that sounder social element which lay between the froth and the dregs.

In the Introduction some remarks are offered concerning Plutarch’s literary style. Here it will suffice to say that the English version does not seek to be either more formal or more vivacious, either more imposing or more humorous, than the original. An attempt has been made to preserve the tone as faithfully as the substance. In making Plutarch write as he does in the following pages the translator hopes that _il ne luy a au moins rien presté qui le desmente ou qui le desdie_. It is fair to add that no modern version of the _Moralia_ has been consulted for the purposes of this rendering. In the Introduction, however, one cannot fail to owe much suggestion to Gréard and Volkmann.

In the spelling of Greek proper names every modern scholar must follow his own best judgement. It does not follow that, because it is necessary to say ‘Plato’ and usual to say ‘Parmenio’, it is equally judicious to say ‘Chilo’. Nor can any safe rule be laid down for a choice between ‘Pisistratus’ and ‘Peisistratus’. Perhaps the most advisable course is to safeguard, as far as possible, the pronunciation of those who are unfamiliar with Greek, and the spelling ‘Pheidias’ may do something towards correcting the common English tendency to pronounce the first syllable as it is pronounced in ‘fiddle’. Notes upon the proper names will be found after the text by readers who may require them.

The text generally adopted is that of Bernardakis in the Teubner series, but recourse has been had throughout to Wyttenbach, and in a number of places which are commonly acknowledged to be corrupt the translator has ventured on a modest emendation of his own. These places are marked in the translation by an asterisk in the margin, and the readings adopted will be found at the end of the book in an appendix on the Greek text. Critics would have saved themselves much trouble if they had observed that, though hiatus is regularly avoided in the genuine writings of Plutarch, no hiatus is created by a word ending in iota or upsilon, vowels which carry a semi-vowel glide in themselves.

The orthodox order, Greek and Latin titles, and sectional references of the pieces here chosen are as follows. The English titles belong to the present version.

ON BRINGING UP A BOY (περὶ παίδων ἀγωγῆς: _De liberis educandis_),
1-14 C.

ON THE STUDENT AT LECTURES (περὶ τοῦ ἀκούειν: _De recta ratione
audiendi_), 37 C-48 D

ON FAWNER AND FRIEND (πῶς ἄν τις διακρίνειε τὸν κόλακα τοῦ φίλου:
_Quomodo adulator ab amico internoscatur_), 48 E-74 E.

ADVICE TO MARRIED COUPLES (γαμικὰ παραγγέλματα: _Coniugalia
praecepta_), 138 B-146.

DINNER-PARTY OF THE SEVEN SAGES (τῶν ἑπτὰ σοφῶν συμπόσιον: _Septem
sapientum convivium_), 146 B-164 D.

ON GARRULOUSNESS (περί ἀδολεσχίας: _De garrulitate_), 502 B-515.

CONCERNING BUSYBODIES (περὶ πολυπραγμοσύνης: _De curiositate_), 515
B-523 B.

ON MORAL IGNORANCE IN HIGH PLACES (πρὸς ἡγεμόνα ἀπαίδευ τον: _Ad
principem ineruditum_), 779 D-782 F.

ON OLD MEN IN PUBLIC LIFE (εἰ πρεσβυτέρῳ πολιτευτέον: _An seni
respublica gerenda sit_), 783 B-797 F.

INTRODUCTION

The age in which Plutarch was educated and in which he wrote his _Ethica_ is, from the literary point of view, closely similar to the so-called ‘Augustan’ age of English writing. Of all the periods of English style and thought, he would probably have found himself most at home in that of Pope, Addison, and Steele, or in its continuation with Goldsmith and Johnson. He flourished at a time when intellectual interests were remarkably keen, if not very profound; when literature, if for the most part it ventured on no high imaginative flights, did at least aim at some practical bearing upon the conduct of life; when men found entertainment, and probably some measure of moral or social help, in the readable essay or the friendly epistle; when facts, merely as such, were accepted as interesting if interestingly set forth; and when Philosophy, if she deigned to keep her feet upon the ground and to speak as one of the mortals, met with a due welcome from either sex. An eighteenth-century Plutarch might conceivably have written the moral papers of Johnson without Johnson’s ponderousness, or have contributed to the _Spectator_ papers more full than Addison’s of those ‘ideas’ in which Matthew Arnold found that writer so deficient. He might have written, though in a prose form, the _Essay on Man_, being meanwhile as willing as Pope to owe the bulk of his matter to other minds, but not so willing as Pope to play the expositor without first playing the earnest and critical student. Plutarch did not, so far as we are aware, try his hand at verse. To judge by his comments upon poetic duty and by his quotations—which are regularly taken from the best writers of a classical age already far remote—his conception of the poetic office was too exalted to permit of his dabbling in that domain. Had he done so, and had he followed the fashion of his times, he would perhaps have come nearer to our ‘Augustans’ even than in his prose. In poetry it was the age of description, reflection, satire, and moralizing, in the highest degree sensible, studiously informed with ‘wit’—in the broader Queen Anne sense of that word—and characterized by extreme deftness of pointed and quotable phrase, but in no sense creative, imaginative, or inspired. Its ideal contents consisted of ‘what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed’. The attitudes of both prose-writer and poet belonged to the intellectual and aesthetic spirit of the period, and so far as that spirit finds an individual embodiment in the Greek half of the Roman Empire, it finds him in Plutarch of Chaeronea.

It would be difficult to suggest with any precision the place which Plutarch might have filled in Victorian literature. A distinguished and popular ‘man of letters’ and an educator of public opinion he assuredly would have been. Given a width of reading, a persistent self-culture, and a careful but unpedantic style, corresponding to those which he practised in his own generation, he might have made—as he did then—an admirable biographer and essayist. He might have been a contributor of substantial papers to the quarterlies and other higher reviews. He might, and probably would, have been an eminent lecturer; possibly, with a broad practical Christianity substituted for his broad practical Platonism, a preacher not only eminent but also in the best sense popular. He would certainly have made a brilliant expositor of whatever he undertook to expound. He was no Plato or Aristotle; he would have been no Carlyle or Herbert Spencer; but he might have been much that Macaulay was outside of politics.

As to the date of Plutarch’s birth there can be no certainty. Approximately it may be put down as A. D. 48. It is accepted that his death did not occur before the year 120; it may have taken place somewhat, though not much, later. Born in the days of Claudius, he lived through the reigns of Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, Nerva, and Trajan, and saw at least the first three years of the rule of Hadrian. He must have been nearly fifty before the last tyrant of the early Empire fell, but the remainder of his life was spent under the most beneficent régime, and amid the greatest peace and prosperity, ever experienced in the ancient world. The _pax Romana_ was at its profoundest, the sense of security at its fullest; the fact of general well-being was everywhere most palpable. There was at the same time, or in consequence, a vigorous revival of intellectual life. At no period of antiquity would it have been possible for a man of studious habits and of mild and genial disposition to enjoy a leisure so undisturbed or a society so free from those forms of preoccupation which preclude an engrossing interest in things purely of the mind. For the orator who is fired by the natural heat of democratic politics, for the patriotic poet from whom thrilling verse must be wrung by the wrongs, the decline, or the yet unrealized aspirations of his country, there was indeed no stimulation or scope. But for the cultivation of the humanities, for the indulgence of a taste for art and _belles-lettres_, for the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity, for the search after interesting knowledge—physical, mathematical, antiquarian, historical, philological—and for the thoughtful observation of men and manners, the time was almost ideal. In the absence of anxious and absorbing problems of the present there was leisure for a contemplative and critical survey of the past, and for making acquaintance with ‘the best that had been thought and said’ by it. Since the immediate human environment was no longer distracted and distracting with the clamorous urgencies of external or internal strife and danger, it was possible to look abroad over a wider field, to contemplate the more spacious world of man and his work, of Nature and her facts, beauties, and marvels. It was therefore the age of the encyclopaedist, the traveller, the commentator, the describer, the collector—collector of curiosities, of objects of art, of books, of stories from history, of apophthegms, of pointed and interesting quotations. The prevailing aim was mental and social culture. This was the one object of education, however much its professors might dissent from each other according to the degrees of philistinism in their respective temperaments.

The aim of contemporary education—generally realized with more definiteness than educational aims are wont to be in modern times—was to turn the pupil into a gentleman, to equip him for the art of living and conducting himself as such. There could, of course, hardly fail to be those who regarded this _kalokagathia_ too much from the exterior point of view, while others fixed their attention more decidedly, and often perhaps too exclusively, upon the inward and spiritual grace. There were also considerable differences between the Greek and Roman conceptions of a gentleman. But in the main this end was universally avowed—to turn the raw material of the boy into a man both capable and clubbable, whether from a public or a private standpoint. The things to be sought were the right accomplishments, the right morals, and the right manners. The accomplishments included, beyond all else, literary information and culture, argumentative dexterity, and a capacity for speech. The right morals were based mainly upon reasoned self-command. The right manners were chiefly those of urbanity, dignity, and that care of the person, the voice, the dress, and the deportment upon which all ages have insisted according to their several lights or tastes. It might be that the teaching ‘philosopher’, whose concern was with the soundness of the morals, had his quarrel with the teaching ‘sophist’, whose business was with the rhetoric and its excellence for exhibition purposes or for the gaining of various forms of influence. The philosopher might think the sophist superficial, showy, and often actually pernicious, while the sophist might look upon the philosopher as visionary, pedantic, and often a positive clog upon practical efficiency. Nevertheless no typically cultured person of the day would have questioned that, in order to be complete—or, as Coleridge calls it, ‘orbicular’—education must include its due measure of both forms of teaching.

After his years of infancy the boy, under the supervision of his _paedagogus_—ideally a slave of superior character, but too often a person who was merely useless for harder work—passed into a school, where he was first taught his letters and then proceeded to the reading, learning, and recital of classical poetry, to the study of music, and to some acquaintance with elementary arithmetic and geometry. Next, taken in hand by the rhetorical teacher in a higher school, he was made to write and deliver descriptions and essays, mostly on trite and unreal themes of a historical or pseudo-historical nature, to develop his powers of invention on either side of a chosen topic, and to cultivate a fastidious diction, pointed phrase, and the elocutionary arts and graces. From artificial harangues and the ‘speaking of a piece’ he advanced to the imaginary pleading of forensic cases, in which the law was often as fictitious as the facts. When, upon reaching the age for assuming the _toga virilis_, he was emancipated from the custody of the _paedagogus_ and the discipline of the school, his formal education commonly ceased. If he proceeded further, as many did, to what may be considered as the equivalent of a university course, he might elect to study philosophy, to study ‘sophistic’, or to dally with both in such measure as seemed likely to set off the abilities or consolidate the culture of a gentleman. Even in the more mature years of life the intellectually-disposed grandee had a habit of maintaining near his person a salaried philosopher as a kind of domestic monitor, and audiences of wealth and fashion readily gathered in Rome and elsewhere to listen to lectures on philosophy by professors who properly understood the art of clear and pleasant exposition. For the most part the typical Roman, less genuinely impassioned than the Greek for thought pure and simple, looked upon any ‘specializing’ in philosophy as likely to lead either to too cloistered a virtue or to the acquisition of eccentric, if not dangerous, views. A certain modicum of philosophical knowledge might be an adornment to life, and a certain modicum of philosophical training might impart a steadiness to character, but the study must not be pursued to the point at which the student himself stood in danger of becoming a ‘philosopher’. With the Greeks philosophical specializing was commonly subject to no such reprehension, partly because of the inborn Hellenic ardour for study and esteem of learning, partly because in this domain, even more than in the rhetorical, the Greeks were the accepted teachers throughout the Roman sphere.

This, or nearly this, was the attitude of the educational world in the first decades of the second century, and it was in this world that Plutarch of Chaeronea became a figure of special eminence and distinction. For in whatever light the modern reader may regard Plutarch as a man of letters, to his own times he was first and foremost an educator. It is from this point of view that we must consider both his _Parallel Lives_ and his _Moral Essays_, if we are to perceive in them that unity of character and purpose which he intended all his work to possess.

Plutarch, then, was born about A. D. 48 in the very heart of Greece, at the comparatively small town of Chaeronea, famous as the scene of the decisive victory of the Macedonians over the southern Greeks, and also of that in which the forces of Mithridates were routed by Sulla. His family must have been of high local standing, and the fact that his father—a man of cultivated tastes and refined manners—was the owner of the ‘finest kind of horses’ is enough to show, to those who appreciate the significance of the word _hippotrophia_, that he must have been possessed of considerable means. The same conclusion may be drawn both from what Plutarch himself incidentally reveals concerning his brothers, Lamprias and Timon, as well as other members of the family circle, and also from what is known of his own life and upbringing. That as a boy he passed through the orthodox curriculum, is obvious from his wide acquaintance with literature and his intelligent, if not particularly profound, references to both music and mathematics. When of an age to receive an education in philosophy, he was placed, or placed himself, chiefly under the distinguished Ammonius, an Alexandrian philosopher of a broad semi-Platonist, semi-Peripatetic school, who had become established in a prominent intellectual and public position at Athens. It was the accepted rule for the student to attend, but not necessarily to confine himself to, the lectures of a selected teacher. Often he lived in that teacher’s house, or at least, in intimate connexion therewith. If the philosopher was strictly conscientious he felt it his duty to watch over the developing character of his pupil, to visit him with any deserved reproof,[1] to serve as his father confessor, to answer his questions, and to meet his moral and intellectual difficulties. The familiar phrase ‘guide, philosopher, and friend’ perhaps describes the relations with unusual exactness. We find both Plutarch and his brother in the company of Ammonius at Delphi when Nero, in the year 66, graced that city with his imperial and artistic presence.

His formal education completed, we discover little of the younger manhood of Plutarch, except that he must have been in high local estimation, partly, perhaps, from the position of his family, but doubtless no less on account of his own conspicuous gifts. Had this not been the case, he would hardly have been appointed as one of a delegation of two sent on a mission to the Roman proconsul of the province. At what age he was first entrusted with civic functions as aedile, or with a Delphic priesthood (then merely a ceremonial office open to any layman), or with other public positions, we cannot say. We can only be sure that to his learning he added a recognizable capacity for public business. However many hours he may have devoted to study and to the compilation of those ample commonplace-books which evidently served him in such good stead, he prided himself on carrying his philosophic attainments into the local Chamber or on to the local platform. In his judgement this procedure was not only a vindication of philosophy and a method of keeping the faculties energetic; it was also a patriotic duty.

As has been already said, this was an age of travel. Facilities of transport were plentiful; the seas and main roads were secure from pirate or enemy; journeys were at least as expeditious as at any modern time until the employment of steam. We know of visits made by Plutarch to Alexandria, various parts of Greece, Rome, and the north of Italy. Rome he must have visited at least twice, and in this metropolis and ‘epitome of the world’ he made acquaintance with a large circle of men of distinction, transacted public business (presumably on behalf of his native town, of which he may have been sent as representative), delivered lectures,[2] and apparently acted as a sort of consulting physician to morally perturbed members of Roman society. He must have spoken always in Greek, for he confesses that—like most other Greek writers—he had given almost no attention to Latin; nor is any such avowal needed from a person who, even after looking into the language, believed _sine patris_ to be the Latin for ‘without a father’. Greek, however, was then as much the universal language of the cultured as, until recently, French was the universal accomplishment of fashion, diplomacy, and the traveller.

The Rome with which Plutarch was immediately acquainted was the Rome of Vespasian and of the earlier half of Domitian’s reign. Had his sojourn in the capital taken place some fifteen or twenty years later, it is in the highest degree probable that he would have been further known to us through an acquaintance with Pliny or some other Roman writer of that date. That a Greek, and especially one who had a difficulty in reading Latin, should make no mention of contemporary Latin authors—that in his heart he should rather despise them—is only characteristic of the Hellenic attitude of the time. But that the amiable Pliny, who has an appreciative word to say of almost every one within his social horizon, including comparatively obscure philosophers like Euphrates, should say nothing of so eminent a figure as Plutarch, amounts to evidence that the two had never met. A man who could make close friends of consulars like Sosius Senecio and Mestrius Florus, and who enjoyed an intimacy with Paccius and Fundanus, could not have failed to win the notice of the Horace Walpole of his day. Quintilian, Silius, Statius, Martial, Pliny, Suetonius, and Juvenal were all writing when Plutarch was already the coryphaeus of Greek culture, and if not one of them mentions his name, it is because he was living in remote Chaeronea and forgathering only with his chosen circle of philosophers, men of letters, artists, or musicians in that town or in Athens, Corinth, and other Greek centres near at hand.

To Chaeronea Plutarch must have retired by middle life. There he married Timoxena, a lady of position, but of quiet tastes, had issue four sons and a daughter, identified himself with the civic and religious concerns of his town, delivered lectures, imparted instruction on the lines of a modified or latitudinarian Platonic philosophy, industriously read the books in his moderate but useful library, made copious extracts therefrom, wrote his _Lives_ and those occasional papers known as his _Ethica_ or _Moral Essays_, and enjoyed the discussion of many a knotty question—often perhaps of little or no importance beyond the fact of its forming a problem—in the agreeable society of his relatives or his cultivated friends and guests. At such gatherings he was the leader, doubtless dominating the conversation—though in his more courteous way—somewhat as Johnson dominated the coterie described by Boswell. Often, we gather, he varied this quiet course of life by means of excursions to other Greek cities—Athens, Sparta, Aedepsus—where he most probably delivered an occasional lecture, and where, as we are certain, he thoroughly enjoyed himself in table-talk.[3]

That he gave philosophical education, though apparently not of a systematic and pedagogic kind, to persons of both sexes is known from his own references to the practice. Whether he did so for money or not, we cannot tell. The later Platonists by no means felt bound to adopt the attitude of Socrates and Plato towards the taking of fees. The world had changed, and the _res angusta_ was often more powerful than a principle which had ceased to appear entirely rational. But there is every reason to suppose that Plutarch was a man of independent means; we know further that a genial frugality was the rule of his household, and that he entertained a becoming contempt for the obsequious or the advertiser. The day of the endowed professor, whether of philosophy or sophistic, was still to dawn for Greece under Marcus Aurelius, and it never dawned at all for so small a town as Chaeronea. We may take it therefore that, whether with or without fee or present, Plutarch was able to choose his own pupils—in all likelihood the sons and daughters of his friends—and that, in dealing with them or with a wider audience, he maintained the fullest dignity and independence, and practised all the amiable candour which he explicitly recommends.

For any lack of originality, of speculative audacity, of profundity (or the obscurity which is so often mistaken for that virtue), Plutarch fully compensates. To his generation he served as a milch-cow of practical philosophy on its ethical side. He browsed on literature and thought, secreted the most valuable constituents, and yielded the cream to his hearers or readers. So far as he belonged to a philosophic school, it was that of the Old Academy. In other words, he would have labelled himself a Platonist. It is probable that he was as much attracted by the superb literary style of Plato, the nature of the man, and the nobility of his conceptions, as by anything capable of crystallization into a philosophy. These qualities attracted even the dilettante, while in the more specially philosophic world time had done much to refract the real Plato, to extract dogma from him, and to create a large _Aberglaube_ about his writings. Be that as it may, there is much in Plato that Plutarch does not accept, and there is much outside of Plato to which he gives a welcome. Towards Stoics and Epicureans—whose doctrines, like those of the Christians, would logically withhold men from public activity—he is distinctly, though never virulently, hostile, and when his pen ranges itself against particular schools, it is against these.[4] It is easier, in fact, to say to what sect Plutarch did not belong than to associate him definitively with any other. Nevertheless it is as a Platonist that he would have classed himself, and it is especially by the later Neo-Platonists that he was quoted as a divinely gifted writer who lent literary charm and potency to wisdom. So broad, however, was his teaching, and in many respects so adaptable even to Christianity, that early writers of the Church had no scruple in borrowing liberally from him.[5]

Into whatever shape he may have systematized his views, and however popular his treatment of them, Plutarch ranked with the philosophers. If he was opposed to Stoicism and Epicureanism, he was, like other philosophers, no less opposed to sophistic. To him the representatives of that art were apt to seem shallow and showy.[6]

He held, with the Socratics in general, that the basis of right action is knowledge, and he had no belief in empiricism. Not that he rejected either established moral views or established religion. He was no sceptic, still less an atheist. As Friedländer has well argued, there was no ancient cult of atheism. Plutarch, indeed, is remarkably receptive in the matter of deities. The Egyptian worship of Isis and Osiris, which had made great progress throughout the Roman Empire, appeared to him equally tenable with the worship practised by his own ancestors. In the polytheism in which he acquiesced, such divinities were only other forms of those known in Hellas, and he found no difficulty in reconciling and combining the two sets of notions and cults. He was deeply tinged with Orientalism, though his culture and his natural good taste made him despise corybantic demonstrations and what Friedländer has called ‘dirty mortifications’. He held the Eranian belief in daemonic agencies, which acted upon mankind from the one side as the gods did from the other. If he appears to rise to the conception of ‘God’ in the singular, the word is rather to be taken as denoting the sum of divine wisdom and beneficent dispensation. Like all the best minds of his own and many a previous generation, he found moral difficulties in accepting the characters ascribed to the deities in the best literature of earlier Greece, and therefore, while approving of the established education in poetry, he necessarily felt some qualms as to the possible effects. Poetry served in the schools ‘as introduction to philosophy, history, geography, and astronomy’, and it had much to do with the formation of religious and ethical notions. Homer, Pindar, Sophocles, and Menander were ‘learned and wise’, and boys were brought to regard them as inspired. Hence Plutarch’s treatise on _Poets as Moral Teachers of the Young_. The point of view in that essay is not, indeed, entirely rational. It was not so easy for Plutarch as it is for us to realize that moral and religious ideas in Greek literature had passed through an evolution corresponding to the development of intellect and society. Instead of frankly recognizing the limitations of Homer or the inconsistencies of the dramatists in this respect, he puts a highly ingenious constraint upon the connexion between any dubious sentiment and its context. It is only when he fails in such a _tour de force_ that he consents to censure the poet. In this procedure he was by no means the first. The battle of the ‘takers of objection’ (προβληματικοί) and the ‘solvers of difficulties’ (λυτικοί) was centuries old. That Plutarch should range himself as far as possible with the solvers is a circumstance which would naturally follow both from his love of literature and from his constitutionally reverential temperament.

As has been often observed, the purpose running through the _Parallel Lives_ and the _Moral Essays_ is one and the same. The philosophy of Plutarch was ethical. For logic and dialectic he shows no liking. His object was to relate philosophy to life, to bring home a philosophy which could be lived. By philosophy he meant the best conduct of life, based on an understanding of the nature of virtue—τὸ καλόν, the right, the honourable, the becoming. From philosophy we are to learn not only what is due to ourselves, but what is due to the gods, to the laws, to parents, children, friends, enemies, fellow-citizens, and strangers. The _Essays_, like those of Seneca or Bacon, deal with separable components or manifestations of right and wrong character, with duties and circumstances: the _Lives_ meanwhile afford us concrete examples or object lessons from history.[7] Yet life, even that of a philosopher, is not made up entirely of preaching and exhortation, least of all when the philosopher is at the same time a man of the world and a man of letters. Plutarch felt a lively interest in all such posers as were mooted in the talk of the table or of the loungers’ club. He therefore includes among his occasional papers—whether written by request or under the fashionable fiction of a request—a number of treatises on physical, antiquarian, literary, and artistic topics which can hardly be said to bear with any immediateness upon the ethical perfection of the reader. As a change, therefore, from the treatment of _Superstition_ or _Inquisitiveness_ or _The Restraint of Anger_, of _Rules for Married Couples_ and _Rules of Health_ and rules for _The Student at Lecture_, he may in a spare moment discuss such matters as _The Face in the Moon_ or questions in Roman custom.

The majority of the pieces in the present selection speak for themselves. With the one exception to be mentioned immediately, they all bear the impress of the man. There is the same moral broadmindedness and sobriety, the same shrewd sense of _le bonhomme Plutarque_, the same faculty for popularizing[8] without descending to vapidity, the same knack of relieving the sermon by means of anecdote, quotation, or interesting item of information at the point where the discourse threatens to become tedious. It is true that the German critic, in his indefatigable search for the _unecht_, has impugned the authorship of the _Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages_[9] on grounds unintelligible to those who do not expect a dinner-table conversation to be a systematic treatise, and who are satisfied to believe that a mixture of serious talk, banter, and narrative, and a frequent transition of subject, are precisely the things for which one would look on such an occasion. Every feature of the style is Plutarchan, and, if Plutarch did not write the piece, we can only feel unmixed regret that he did not, and unmixed surprise that its real author should sacrifice the credit of his performance. With the article on _The Bringing-up of a Boy_ the case is different. Wyttenbach has sufficiently pointed out its frequent feebleness of argument, its turbid arrangement, the exceeding triteness of its ideas, and its unaccountable omissions. To us moderns it is of great interest for the light which it throws on the education of the period, and for its incidental revelations of the conditions of domestic life and the domestic affections. Otherwise it is a puerile performance and savours of nothing but the student essay. If it be argued that it is one of Plutarch’s juvenile works, the answer is that it is unlike him to be disingenuous; and disingenuous he must be, if in his early youth he pretends to have ‘often impressed upon parents’ this or that. Antiquity produced far too many amateur essays in imitation of great authors—imitations actually ascribed to those authors by a recognized fiction of the schools—for us to do an injustice to Plutarch when an easier solution lies so close to our hands. Perhaps, again, the piece on _Fawner and Friend_[10] suffers from an occasional _longueur_, but there are few writers who do not at some less felicitous moment perpetrate paragraphs less vivacious than their average.

As a stylist Plutarch is apt to be underrated. He is, it is true, no laborious atticist, and makes no point of writing like a purist in the classic manner of a Plato or a Lysias. But this does not mean that he is in the least negligent in either word or sentence. On the contrary, his words are selected with extreme care, and his sentences—where the text is sound, as for the most part it is—are rounded off and interlinked as watchfully as any natural writing need require. It is true that his vocabulary is large and his expression full, but, when his words are properly weighed and their metaphorical and other differentiations duly perceived, no understanding reader will call him verbose.[11] He displays an immense command of language, but no word plays an idle part, and if (like Cicero, whom in many respects he resembles) he is fond of joining what are erroneously called synonyms, it needs but little appreciation of verbal values to realize that the added words invariably carry some amplification, some more precise definition, or some emphasis helpful to a full grasp upon the sense. It is true also that his sentences are apt to appear—like the sentences of Ruskin’s earlier days—somewhat lengthy; nevertheless they commonly atone by lucidity of construction for any demand they may make upon sustained attention.[12] In a modern English dress they must necessarily be broken up, but a practised reader of Plutarch finds no more difficulty with them in the original than he would find with a passage of Demosthenes or Plato. To one who becomes familiar with them they are at least as agreeable as the staccato brevities of Seneca. What chiefly exacts some effort from the reader of Plutarchan Greek is the fact that its words are extraordinarily charged with metaphor and allusion.[13] His choice of one word rather than another is always nicely calculated. This truth once recognized, a reader cannot fail to admire both the consistency with which the writer maintains his similitude while he is upon it, and also the copious resources of vocabulary upon which he draws for the purpose. Meanwhile, despite any length of sentence and fullness of praise, Plutarch neither irritates with tricks and mannerisms nor wearies with pedantry and ponderousness. A pedant he could not be. He is no writer of Johnsonese. To him the best words are those which best suit their context, and he has no objection whatever to a dash of the colloquial or a touch of the homely or naïve. It is one of his characteristic merits that he knows when to take the higher and when the lower road of diction. He also knows when he is in danger of stylistic monotony. Plutarch was a teacher, but, like all truly intelligent members of that profession, he recognized that the most uninspiring attitude to adopt is the severely and unremittingly pedagogic. ‘The knack of style,’ it has been said, ‘is to write like a human being,’ and Plutarch, a professor of humanity without a chair, is always and entirely human. That his pen must have moved with extraordinary facility is evident from the number of his publications. Apart from his _Lives_ (of which not all are extant), his _Moralia_ include over eighty pieces, long or short, and it is certain that many others had disappeared[14] before the present collection became available in its eleventh-century MS.

It is not here implied that he is never culpable, never over-loaded. There are times, though rare ones, at which we feel that his memory or his notebook has been unduly exploited. We feel that he might have spared us an illustration which does not illustrate or a similitude which is deficient in similarity. To a certain extent he is a Euphuist, and though Guevara perhaps owed nothing directly to him (as he did to Seneca[15]), it is manifest that Plutarch sometimes strains a point in order to achieve an over-ingenious comparison. The contagion of the thing, like that of Euphuism in the Elizabethan age, was in the air, and Plutarch assuredly does not err more often or more heinously with one generation than Shakespeare did with another. Wide reading and natural fecundity easily slip into sins which narrow resources and slow invention are impotent to commit.

* * * * *

There are numerous signs that the pendulum of classical interest is swinging in the direction of the literature of the early Empire. The exclusive _toujours perdrix_ of the Attic and Ciceronian periods has apparently begun to jade the palate, and writers like Seneca and Plutarch are coming into their own once more. There was a time when these authors were perhaps better known than any others. That they were worthy of prime consideration is manifest from the immense influence which they exercised upon the ardent and inquiring spirits of the sixteenth and following centuries, in England no less than on the Continent. Authors who could make such an appeal to Montaigne, to the Elizabethan dramatists, to Bacon, or to Jeremy Taylor,[16] are surely not to be despised because they belong stylistically to a ‘silver’ age, or because their strength lies mostly in the fact that they are a mine of ideas, wise saws, and pointed moral instances. Seneca, as being a writer of Latin, was naturally the earlier and more widely read,[17] but from the publication of the _editio princeps_ of Plutarch by Aldus in 1509 our author sprang into peculiar estimation among the recovered spirits of antiquity. It was, however, due to Amyot that both his _Lives_ and his _Essays_ became accessible to those who had little or no Greek. The _Essays_ were rendered into idiomatic French by that admirable translator in the year 1572,[18] and Montaigne was by no means the only reader among _nous autres ignorans_ who made the Plutarch of Amyot his breviary, and who ‘drew his water incessantly’ from him. It was not the literary etiquette of the Elizabethan age to acknowledge all the obligations one might owe even to a contemporary, much less to the ancients, and the stores of Plutarch might be rifled without much fear of detection, and certainly with no fear of reproach. When Lyly, in _Euphues and his Ephoebus_,[19] takes it in hand to bring up a child in the way he should go, he is in a large measure simply translating, expanding, and emphasizing the pseudo-Plutarch on the _Bringing-up of a Boy_ and interspersing the discourse with pickings from other essays, particularly that on _Garrulousness_.[20] Montaigne, of course, with his bland unreserve, credits Plutarch via Amyot with a multitude of observations, while Bacon, when following the new vogue of the essay, sometimes refers us to ‘Plutarke’, and at least on one occasion informs us that ‘Mountaigny saith’ a thing which on reference to the said ‘Mountaigny’ we find to be Plutarchan.

Though it is no part of the present Introduction to examine in detail the influence of the philosopher of Chaeronea upon modern writers, or to make an inventory of his contributions to English literature, it is at least worth asking whether an author whom genius once delighted to exploit, and from whom so many good things have filtered down to us through various channels, may not be well worth reading at first hand. To Professor Mahaffy[21] Plutarch ‘is a pure and elevating writer, full of precious information, and breathing a lofty moral tone’, and to Professor Gilbert Murray[22] he is ‘one of the most tactful and charming of writers, and one of the most lovable characters in antiquity’. Said Emerson[23]: ‘Plutarch will be perpetually rediscovered from time to time as long as books last.’

Footnote 1:

The reproof might ostensibly be general, but its particular
application was readily felt. Musonius, we are told by Epictetus, made
all his hearers feel ‘as if some one had been talking to him about
them’.

Footnote 2:

See _Concerning Busybodies_, 522 E.

Footnote 3:

Over and above his resemblances to Macaulay as a writer of essays and
biographical history, there is a distinct similarity between their
conversational tastes. We can imagine a Plutarch fully at home with
Macaulay at one of those astonishing early Victorian breakfast-parties
where a man might be asked if he ‘knew his Popes’, and where he might
be endured while he recited them. Plutarch’s _Table-Talk_, like his
_Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages_, reveals for contemporary Greek
society the same deliberate cult of intellectual conversation
sharpened by challenge and debate. In such conversation he must
himself have played a conspicuous part. Nevertheless, it may fairly be
gathered that the Greek or Graeco-Roman interlocutors in the reign of
Trajan were the more ingenuously athirst for reciprocal enlightenment,
however dubiously we may regard the value of the information or
misinformation actually gained. Nor is it easy to believe that
Plutarch would have thought it etiquette to indulge in the protracted
monologues to which the more modern society submitted with such grace
as it best could.

Footnote 4:

e.g. in his _De repugnantiis Stoicorum_ and his _Non posse suaviter
vivi secundum Epicurum_. Yet, as Mahaffy says, ‘it would be hard to
say whether the number of Stoic dogmas which he rejects exceeds that
which he quotes with approval’ (_The Greek World under Roman Sway_,
pp. 300 sqq.).

Footnote 5:

Volkmann names in particular Clement of Alexandria and Basil.

Footnote 6:

This does not mean that he had no friends among the rhetorical
teachers (the contrary is shown by his reference to ‘our Niger’ in
_praec. san._, § 16), but only that he distrusted the type. He refused
to approve of a fluent and polished style as an end in itself. Pliny
describes how the amazingly voluble Isaeus would offer his audience a
choice of subject and allow it to dictate the side which he should
take. He would then rise and demonstrate his extemporizing powers with
much show of rhetorical ornament.

Footnote 7:

Volkmann says of the _Lives_, ‘Das Werthvolle an ihnen sind nicht die
historischen Details, die er giebt, sondern die eingestreuten
Reflexionen, die ethischen Betrachtungen, das Eingehen auf
individuelle Stimmungen und Leidenschaften der grossen Männer.’

Footnote 8:

_Aulicis tantum scripsit, non doctis_, says Scaliger.

Footnote 9:

Volkmann guesses that it is _ein Produkt der späteren Sophistik_. If
so, we may congratulate the Sophist on his perfect reproduction of
Plutarch’s style and of his non-sophistic tone.

Footnote 10:

Bacon’s Essay _Of Followers and Friends_ owes almost nothing to
Plutarch beyond the title. We do, however, find him borrowing the
words ‘for there is no such Flatterer as a Man’s selfe’.

Footnote 11:

As Volkmann happily puts it, he writes ‘with comfortable breadth’.

Footnote 12:

The sentences would doubtless have been easier still if Plutarch had
not felt bound to follow the fashion of the time and elaborately avoid
hiatus.

Footnote 13:

Perhaps this is why Plutarch, as seen through Amyot, appeared to
Montaigne ‘close and thorny,’ while his sense was nevertheless
‘closely-jointed and pithily-continued’.

Footnote 14:

Stobaeus (sixth century) had access to much of Plutarch that is now
lost.

Footnote 15:

See an observation of Professor Summers, _Seneca Select Letters_,
Introduction, p. lxxiv.

Footnote 16:

Plutarch ‘is the theme of more than 230 allusions or direct references
on the part of Jeremy Taylor’ (Sandys, _A History of Classical
Scholarship_, i. 300).

Footnote 17:

He was familiar reading of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and
appears in the _Gesta Romanorum_. Later the _Adagia_ of Erasmus draw
freely upon him.

Footnote 18:

‘Il a en quelque sorte créé Plutarque,’ says Demogeot.

Footnote 19:

_Euphues_ appeared in 1579. Jusserand (_The English Novel in the Time
of Shakespeare_, p. 127) remarks that Euphues ‘addresses moral
epistles to his fellow men to guide them through life’, but he appears
to be unaware that Lyly borrowed this object, as well as so large a
quantity of his matter, from Plutarch.

Footnote 20:

We meet, for example, with the story of Zeno, ‘the olde man in Athens
that amiddest the pottes could hold his peace.’

Footnote 21:

_History of Greek Classical Literature_, ii. 427.

Footnote 22:

_The Literature of Ancient Greece_, p. 396.

Footnote 23:

Quoted by Sandys (_A History of Classical Scholarship_, i. 300).

CONTENTS

Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages 27

On Old Men in Public Life 65

Advice to Married Couples 96

Concerning Busybodies 113

On Garrulousness 130

On the Student at Lectures 157

On Moral Ignorance in High Places 180

Fawner and Friend 187

On Bringing up a Boy 241

Notes on Persons and Places 267

Appendix: Notes on the Greek Text 295

_In the following imaginary ‘Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages’ the supposed narrator is a certain Diocles of Corinth, a professional diviner and expiator of omens connected with the court of Periander, who was despot of Corinth from 625_ B. C. _to 585_ B. C. _The dramatic date is towards the close of that period. It must not be assumed that Plutarch is pretending to be historical, and anachronisms must be disregarded._

_The Seven Sages are here Thales, Bias, Pittacus, Solon, Chilon, Cleobulus, Anacharsis (see Notes on Persons and Places). The list varies with different writers, but Thales, Bias, Pittacus, and Solon are invariably, and Chilon is regularly, included in the canon. Periander is himself sometimes made one of the number, and a certain Myson also appears._

_The qualities which constituted a ‘sage’ in this connexion were those of keen practical sense and insight, and a power of crystallizing the results into pithy maxims. He was not a ‘philosopher’ in the later sense of that word._

DINNER-PARTY OF THE SEVEN SAGES

We [Sidenote: 146 B] may be sure, Nicarchus, that in process of time facts will become so obscured as to be altogether beyond ascertainment, seeing that in the present instance, where they are so fresh and recent, the world accepts accounts of them which are pure concoctions. In the first place, the party at dinner did not consist—as you have been told—merely of seven, but of [Sidenote: C] more than twice that number. I was myself included, both as being professionally intimate with Periander and as the host of Thales, who had taken up his quarters with me by Periander’s directions. In the second place, whoever related the conversation to you, reported it incorrectly. Presumably he was not one of the company. Inasmuch, therefore, as I have plenty of spare time and my years do not warrant me in putting off the narrative with any confidence, I will—since you are all so eager—tell you the whole story from the beginning.

Periander [Sidenote: D] had prepared his entertainment, not in the city, but in the banquet-hall at Lechaeum, close to the temple of Aphrodite, the festival being in her honour. For after having refused to sacrifice to Aphrodite since the love-affair which led to his mother’s suicide, he was now for the first time, thanks to certain dreams on the part of Melissa, induced to pay honour and court to that goddess.