Indeed, Plutarch is so often decidedly Christian in spirit, and in many passages of his writings there is such an almost manifest transcript of the thought of the Divine Founder of our religion, that it has been frequently maintained that he drew from Christian sources. This, I must believe, is utterly false in the sense in which it is commonly asserted, yet in a more recondite sense true. If Plutarch had known anything about Christians or the Christian Scriptures, he could not have failed to refer to them; for he is constantly making references to contemporary persons and objects, sects and opinions. We know of no Christian church at Cheroneia in that age, and indeed it is exceedingly improbable
that there should have been one in so small a town. The circulation of thought, and consequently the diffusion of a new religion from the great centres of population to outlying districts or villages, was infinitesimally slow. Our word pagan is an enduring witness of this tardiness of transmission. It had its birth (in its present sense) after Christianity had become the legally established religion of the Empire, and had supplanted heathen temples and rites in the cities, while in the pagi, or villages, the old gods were still in the ascendant. There were indeed Christian churches in Athens and in Rome; but they would most probably have eluded the curiosity and escaped the knowledge of a temporary resident, especially as most of their chief members were either Jews or slaves. Yet I cannot doubt that an infusion of Christianity had somehow infiltrated itself into Plutarch’s ethical opinions and sentiments, as into those of Seneca, who has been represented as an acquaintance and correspondent of St. Paul, though it is historically almost impossible that the two men ever saw or heard of each other.
In one respect, the metaphor by which we call the Author of our religion the Sun of Righteousness has a special aptness. The sun, unlike lesser luminaries, lights up sheltered groves and grottos that are completely dark under the full moon, and sends its rays through every chink and cranny of roof or wall. In like manner there seems to have been an indirect
and tortuous transmission of Christian thought into regions where its source was wholly unknown. In the ethical writings of the post-Christian philosophers, of Plutarch, Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius, there may be traced a loftiness, precision, delicacy, tenderness, breadth of human sympathy, and recognition of holiness in the Divine Being as the archetype of human purity, transcending all that is most admirable in pre-Christian moralists. Thus, while I cannot but regard Cicero’s “De Officiis” as in many respects the world’s master-work in ethical philosophy, containing fewer unchristian sentences than I could number on the fingers of one hand, there is nothing in it that reminds me of the Gospels; while these others often shape their thoughts in what seem to be evangelic moulds.
Now I think that we may account for the large diffusion of Christian thought and sentiment among persons who knew not Christianity even by name. The new religion was very extensively embraced among slaves in all parts of the Roman Empire, and slave then meant something very different from what it means now. It is an open question whether there was not, at least out of Greece, more of learning, culture, and refinement in the slave than in the free population of the Empire. We must remember how many illustrious names in Greek and Roman literature—such names as those of Aesop, Terence, Epictetus—belonged to slaves. Tiro, Cicero’s slave, was not only one of his dearest friends, but foremost
among his literary confidants and advisers. Most of the rich men who had any love of literature owned their librarians and their copyists, and the teachers of the children were generally the property of the father. Among Christian slaves there were undoubtedly many who felt no call to martyrdom, (which can have been incumbent on them only when the alternative was apostasy and denial of their faith,) who therefore made no open profession of their religion, while in precept, conversation, and life they were imbued with its spirit,—a spirit as subtile in its penetrating power as it is refining and purifying in its influence. From the lips of Christian slaves many children, no doubt, received in classic forms moral precepts redolent of the aroma breathed from the Sermon on the Mount. If the social medium which Plutarch represents is a fair specimen of the best rural society of the Empire in his time, there must have been a ready receptivity for the highest style of ethical teaching,—a genial soil for the germination of a truly evangelic righteousness of moral conception, maxim, and principle.
Probably no book except the Bible has had more readers than Plutarch’s Lives. These biographies have been translated into every language of the civilized world; they have been among the earliest and most fascinating books for children and youth of many successive generations; and down to the present time, when fiction seems to have almost
superseded history and biography, and to have destroyed the once universal appetency for them among young people, they have exercised to a marvellous degree a shaping power over character. They are, indeed, underrated by the exact historian, because modern research has discovered here and there some mistake in the details of events. But such mistakes were in that age inevitable. Historical criticism was then an unknown science. Documents and traditions covering the same ground were deemed of equal value when they were in harmony, and when they differed an author followed the one which best suited his taste, or his purpose for the time being. Thus Cicero, in one case, in the same treatise gives three different versions of the same story. Thus, too, there were several stories afloat about the fate of Regulus; but Roman writers took that which Niebuhr thinks farthest from the truth, yet which threw the greatest odium on the hated name of Carthage. Now I have no doubt that, whenever there were two or more versions of the same act or event, Plutarch chose that which would best point his moral. But it is only in few and unimportant particulars that he has been proved to be inaccurate.
It has been also objected to Plutarch, that he attaches less importance to the achievements of his heroes in war and in civic life, than to traits and anecdotes illustrative of their characters. This seems to me a feature which adds not only to the charm
of these Lives, but even more to their historical value. The events of history are at once the outcome and the procreant cradle of character, and we know nothing of any period or portion of history except as we know the men who made it and the men whom it made. Biography is the soul; history the body, which it tenants and animates, and which, when not thus tenanted, is a heap of very dry bones. The most thorough knowledge of the topography of Julius Caesar’s battles in Gaul, the minutest description of the campaign that terminated in Pharsalia, the official journal of the Senate during his dictatorship, would tell us very little about him and his time. But a vivid sketch of his character, with well-chosen characteristic anecdotes, would give us a very distinct and realizing conception of the antecedent condition of things that made a life like his possible, and of his actual influence for good and for evil on his country and his age.