Having noted the presence of magic in works so especially devoted to natural science as those of Pliny, Galen, and Ptolemy, we have now to illustrate the prominence both of natural science and of magic in the life and thought of the Roman Empire by a consideration of some writers of a more miscellaneous character, who should reflect for us something of the interests of the average cultured reader of that time. Of this type are Plutarch, Apuleius and Philostratus, whom we shall consider in the coming chapters in the order named, which also roughly corresponds to their chronological sequence.
Life of Plutarch.
Plutarch flourished during the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian at the turn of the first and second centuries, but The Letter on the Education of a Prince to Trajan[912] probably is not by him, and the legend that Hadrian was his pupil is a medieval invention. He was born in Boeotia about 46-48 A. D. and was educated in rhetoric and philosophy, science and mathematics, at Athens, where he was a student when Nero visited Greece in 66 A. D. He also made several visits to Rome and resided there for some time. He held various public positions in the province of Achaea and in his small native town of Chaeronea, and had official connections with the Delphic oracle and amphictyony. Artemidorus in the Oneirocriticon states that Plutarch’s death was foreshadowed in a dream.[913]
Superstition in Plutarch’s Lives.
With Plutarch’s celebrated Lives of Illustrious Men, as with narrative histories in general, we shall not be much concerned, although they of course abound in omens and portents, in bits of pseudo-science which details in his narrative bring to the mind of the biographer, and in cases of divination and magic. Thus theories are advanced to explain why birds dropped dead from mid-air at the shout set up by the Greeks at the Isthmian games when Flamininus proclaimed their freedom. Or we are told how Sulla received from the Chaldeans predictions of his future greatness, how in the dedication to his Memoirs he admonished Lucullus to trust in dreams, and how Lucullus’s mind was deranged by a love philter administered by his freedman in the hope of increasing his master’s affection towards him.[914] Such allusions and incidents abound also of course in Dio Cassius, Tacitus, and other Roman historians.
His Morals or Essays.
But we shall be concerned rather with Plutarch’s other writings, which are usually grouped together under the title of Morals, or, more appropriately, Miscellanies and Essays. Not only is there great variety in their titles, but in any given essay the attention is usually not strictly held to one theme or problem but the discussion diverges to other points. Some are by their very titles and form rambling dialogues, symposiacs, and table-talk, where the conversation lightly flits from one topic to other entirely different ones, never dwelling for long upon any one point and never returning to its starting-point. This dinner-table and drinking-bout type of cultured and semi-learned discourse has other extant ancient examples such as the Attic Nights of Aulus Gellius and the Deipnosophists of Athenaeus, but Plutarch will have to serve as our main illustration of it. His Essays reflect in motley guise and disordered array the fruits of extensive reading and a retentive memory in ancient philosophy, science, history, and literature.
Question of their authenticity.
The authenticity of some of the essays attributed to him has been questioned, and very likely with propriety, but for our purpose it is not important that they should all be by the same author so long as they represent approximately the same period and type of literature. The spurious treatise, De placitis philosophorum, we have already considered in the chapter on Galen, to whom it has also been ascribed. The essay On Rivers and Mountains we shall treat by itself in the present chapter. The De fato has also been called spurious.[915] Superstitious content is not a sufficient reason for denying that a treatise is by Plutarch,[916] since he is superstitious in writings of undoubted genuineness and since we have found the leading scientists of the time unable to exclude superstition from their works entirely. Moreover, many of the essays are in the form of conversations expressing the divergent views of different speakers, and it is not always possible to tell which shade of opinion Plutarch himself favors. Suffice it that the views expressed are those of men of education.
Magic in Plutarch.