Selected Essays of Plutarch, Vol. I.

by Plutarch

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.