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.