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.’
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.