About the very time when Apollonius was bearding the last of the Flavians, and preaching a pagan revival in the porticoes of the Roman temples, it is probable that Plutarch, in some respects a kindred spirit, was making his appearance as a lecturer at Rome.[2104] The greatest of biographers has had no authentic biography himself.[2105] The few certain facts about his life must be gleaned from his own writings. He was the descendant of an ancient family of Chaeronea, famous as the scene of three historic battles, “the War-God’s dancing-place,” and his great-grandfather had tales of the great conflict at Actium.[2106] In the year 66 A.D., when Nero was distinguishing or disgracing himself as a competitor at the Greek festivals, Plutarch was a young student at the university of Athens, under Ammonius,[2107] who, if he inspired him with admiration for Plato, also taught him to draw freely from all the treasures of Greek thought. Plutarch, before he finally settled down at Chaeronea, saw something of the great Roman world. He had visited Alex[pg 402]andria and some part of Asia Minor.[2108] He was at an early age employed to represent his native town on public business,[2109] and he had thus visited Rome, probably in the reign of Vespasian, and again, in the reign of Domitian.[2110] It was a time when original genius in Roman literature was showing signs of failure, but when minute antiquarian learning was becoming a passion.[2111] It was also the age of the new sophist. Hellenism was in the air, and the lecture theatres were thronged to hear the philosophic orator or the professional artist in words.[2112] Although Plutarch is never mentioned beside men like Euphrates, in Pliny’s letters, he found an audience at Rome, and the famous Arulenus Rusticus was once among his hearers.[2113] While he was ransacking the imperial libraries, he also formed the acquaintance, at pleasant social parties, of many men of academic and official fame, some of whom belonged to the circle of Pliny and Tacitus.[2114]
But his native Greece, with its great memories, and his native Chaeronea, to which he was linked by ancestral piety, had for a man like Plutarch far stronger charms than the capital of the world. With our love of excitement and personal prominence, it is hard to conceive how a man of immense culture and brilliant literary power could endure the monotony of bourgeois society in depopulated and decaying Greece.[2115] Yet Plutarch seems to have found it easy, and even pleasant. He was too great to allow his own scheme of life to be crossed and disturbed by vulgar opinion or ephemeral ambition. His family relations were sweet and happy. His married life realised the highest ideals of happy wedlock.[2116] He had the respectful affection of his brothers and older kinsmen. The petty magistracies, in which he made it a duty to serve [pg 403]his native town, were dignified in his eyes by the thought that Epameinondas had once been charged with the cleansing of the streets of Thebes.[2117] His priesthood of Apollo at Delphi was probably far more attractive than the imperial honours which, according to legend, were offered to him by Trajan and Hadrian.[2118] To his historic and religious imagination the ancient shrine which looked down on the gulf from the foot of the “Shining Rocks,” was sacred as no other spot on earth. Although in Plutarch’s day Delphi had declined in splendour and fame,[2119] it was still surrounded with the glamour of immemorial sanctity and power. It was still the spot from which divine voices of warning or counsel had issued to the kings of Lydia, to chiefs of wild hordes upon the Strymon, to the envoys of the Roman Tarquins, to every city of Hellenic name from the Euxine to the Atlantic. We can still almost make the round of its antiquarian treasures under his genial guidance. Probably Plutarch’s happiest hours were spent in accompanying a party of visitors,—a professor on his way home from Britain to Tarsus, a Spartan traveller just returned from far Indian seas,—around those sacred scenes; we can hear the debate on the doubtful quality of Delphic verse or the sources of its inspiration: we can watch them pause to recall the story of mouldering bronze or marble, and wake the echoes of a thousand years.[2120]
Plutarch must have been a swift and indefatigable worker, for his production is almost on the scale of Varro, Cicero, or the elder Pliny. Yet he found time for pleasant visits to every part of Greece which had tales or treasures for the antiquary. He enjoyed the friendship of the brightest intellects of the day, of Herodes Atticus, the millionaire rhetorician,[2121] of Favorinus, the great sophist of Gaul, the intimate friend of Herodes and the counsellor of the Emperor Hadrian, of Ammonius, who was Plutarch’s tutor; of many others, noted in their time, but who are mere shadows to us. They met in a convivial way in many places, at Chaeronea, at Hyampolis, at Eleusis after the Mysteries, at Patrae, at Corinth during [pg 404]the Isthmian games, at Thermopylae, and Athens in the house of Ammonius, or at Aedepsus, the Baden of Euboea, where in the springtime people found pleasant lodgings and brisk intercourse to relieve the monotony of attendance at the baths.[2122] Plutarch had a large circle of relatives,—his grandfather Lamprias, who had tales from an actual witness of the revels of Antony at Alexandria;[2123] Lamprias his elder brother, a true Boeotian in his love of good fare, a war-dance, and a jest;[2124] his younger brother Timon, to whom Plutarch was devotedly attached.[2125] His ordinary society, not very distinguished socially, was composed of grammarians, rhetoricians, country doctors, the best that the district could afford.[2126] The talk is often on the most trivial or absurd subjects, though not more absurdly trivial than those on which the polished sophist displayed his graces in the lecture-hall.[2127] Yet graver and more serious themes are not excluded,[2128] and the table-talk of Greece in the end of the first century is invaluable to the student of society. In such scenes Plutarch not only cultivated friendship, the great art of life, not only watched the play of intellect and character; he also found relief from the austere labours which have made his fame. It is surely not the least of his titles to greatness that, in an environment which to most men of talent would have been infinitely depressing, with the irrepressible vitality of genius he contrived to idealise the society of decaying Greece by linking it with the past.
And, with such a power of reviving the past, even the dulness of the little Boeotian town was easily tolerable. We can imagine Plutarch looking down the quiet street in the still vacant noontide, as he sat trying to revive the ancient glories of his race, and to match them with their conquerors, while he reminded the lords of the world, who, in Plutarch’s [pg 405]early youth, seemed to be wildly squandering their heritage, of the stern, simple virtue by which it had been won. For in the Lives of great Greeks and Romans, the moral interest is the most prominent. It is biography, not history, which Plutarch is writing.[2129] Setting and scenery of course there must be; but Plutarch’s chief object is to paint the character of the great actors on the stage. Hence he may slur over or omit historic facts of wider interest, while he records apparently trivial incidents or sayings which light up a character. But Plutarch has a fine eye both for lively social scenes and the great crises of history. The description of the feverish activity of swarming industry in the great days of Pheidias at Athens, once read, can never be forgotten.[2130] Equally indelible are the pictures of the younger Cato’s last morning, as he finished the Phaedo, and the birds began to twitter,[2131] of the flight and murder of Pompey, of the suicide of Otho on the ghastly field of Bedriacum, which seemed to atone for an evil life. Nor can we forget his description of one of the saddest of all scenes in Greek history, which moved even Thucydides to a restrained pathos,—the retreat of the Athenians from the walls of Syracuse.
Plutarch was before all else a moralist, with a genius for religion. His ethical treatises deserve to be thoroughly explored, and as sympathetically expounded, for the light which they throw on the moral aspirations of the age, as Dr. Mahaffy has skilfully used them for pictures of its social life. He must be a very unimaginative person who cannot feel the charm of their revelation. But the man of purely speculative interest will probably be disappointed. Plutarch is not an original thinker in morals or religion. He has no new gospel to expound. He does not go to the roots of conduct or faith. Possessing a very wide knowledge of past speculation, he might have written an invaluable history of ancient philosophy. But he has not done it. And, as a man of genius, with a strong practical purpose to do moral good to his fellows, his choice of his vocation must be accepted without cavil. He was the greatest Hellenist of his day, when Hellenism was capturing [pg 406]the Roman world. He was also a man of high moral ideals, sincere piety, and absorbing interest in the fate of human character. With all that wealth of learning, philosophic or historical, with all that knowledge of human nature, what nobler task could a man set himself than to attempt to give some practical guidance to a generation conscious of moral weakness, and distracted between new spiritual ideals and the mythologies of the past? The urgent need for moral culture and reform of character, for a guiding force in conduct, was profoundly felt by all the great serious minds of the Flavian age, by Pliny and Tacitus, by Juvenal and Quintilian. But Plutarch probably felt it more acutely than any, and took endless pains to satisfy it. It was an age when the philosophic director and the philosophic preacher were, as we have seen, to be met with everywhere. And Plutarch took his full share in the movement, and influenced a wide circle.[2132] If he did not elaborate an original ethical system, he had studied closely the art of moral reform, and Christian homilists, from Basil to Jeremy Taylor, have drawn freely from the storehouse of his precept and observation. In many tracts he has analysed prevailing vices and faults of his time,—flattery, vain curiosity, irritable temper, or false modesty,—and given rules for curing or avoiding them. In these homilies, the fundamental principle is that of Musonius, perhaps adapted from an oracle to the people of Cirrha “to wage war with vice day and night, and never to relax your guard.”[2133] The call to reform sounded all the louder in Plutarch’s ears because of the high ideal which he had conceived of what life might be made if, no longer left to the play of passion and random influences, character were moulded from early youth to a temperate harmony. To such a soul each passing day might be a glad festival, the universe an august temple full of its Maker’s glories, and life an initiation into the joy of its holy mysteries.[2134]
In the work of moral and religious reconstruction Plutarch and his contemporaries could only rely on philosophy as their guide. Philosophy to Plutarch, Apollonius, or M. Aurelius, had a very different meaning from what it bore to the great [pg 407]thinkers of Ionia and Magna Graecia. Not only had it deserted the field of metaphysical speculation; it had lost interest even in the mere theory of morals. It had become the art rather than the science of life. The teacher of an art cannot indeed entirely divorce it from all scientific theory. The relative importance of practical precept and ethical theory was often debated in that age. But the tendency was undoubtedly to subordinate dogma to edification.[2135] And where dogma was needed for practical effect, it might be drawn from the most opposite quarters. Seneca delights in rounding off a letter by a quotation from Epicurus. M. Aurelius appeals both to the example of Epicurus and the teaching of Plato.[2136] Man might toy with cosmic speculation; the Timaeus had many commentators in the first and second centuries.[2137] But, for Plutarch and his contemporaries, the great task of philosophy was to bring some sort of order into the moral and religious chaos. It was not original thought or discovery which was needed, but the application of reason, cultivated by the study of the past, to the moral and religious problems of the present. The philosopher sometimes, to our eyes, seems to trifle with the smallest details of exterior deportment or idiom or dress; he gives precepts about the rearing of children; he occupies himself with curious questions of ritual and antiquarian interest.[2138] These seeming degradations of a great mission, after all, only emphasise the fact that philosophy was now concerned with human life rather than with the problems of speculation. It had in fact become an all-embracing religion. It supplied the medicine for moral disease; it furnished the rational criterion by which all myth and ritual must be judged or explained.[2139]
Plutarch was an eclectic in the sense that, knowing all the moral systems of the past, he was ready to borrow from any of these principles which might give support to character. Whether, if he had been born four or five hundred years earlier, he might have created or developed an original theory himself, is a question which may be variously answered. One may reasonably hesitate to assent to the common opinion that [pg 408]Plutarch had no genius for original speculation. Had he come under the influence of Socrates, it is not so certain that he might not have composed dialogues with a certain charm of fresh dialectic and picturesque dramatic power. It is a little unhistorical to decry a man of genius as wanting in speculative originality, who was born into an age when speculation had run dry, and thought was only subsidiary to conduct. When the dissonant schools forsook the heights of metaphysic and cosmology to devote themselves to moral culture, an inevitable tendency to eclecticism, to a harmony of moral theory, set in. The practical interest prevailed over the infinitely divisive forces of the speculative reason. Antiochus, the teacher of Cicero,[2140] while he strove to re-establish Platonism, maintained the essential agreement of the great schools on the all-important questions, and freely adopted the doctrines of Zeno and Aristotle.[2141] Panaetius, the chief representative of Roman Stoicism in the second century B.C., had a warm admiration for Plato and Aristotle, and in some essential points forsook the older teaching of the Porch.[2142] Seneca, as we have seen, often seems to cling to the most hard and repellent tenets of the ancient creed. Yet a sense of practical difficulties has led him to soften and modify many of them—the identity of reason and passion, the indifference of so-called “goods,” the necessity of instantaneous conversion, the unapproachable and unassailable perfection of the wise man. Plutarch’s own ethical system, so far as he has a system, is a compound of Platonic and Aristotelian ideas, with a certain tincture of Stoicism.[2143] Platonism, which had shaken off its sceptical tendencies in the first century B.C., had few adherents at Rome in the first century of the Empire.[2144] The Stoic and Epicurean systems divided the allegiance of thinking people till the energetic revival of Hellenism set in. Epictetus indeed speaks of women who were attracted by the supposed freedom of sexual relations in Plato’s Utopia.[2145] Seneca often refers to Plato, and was undoubtedly influenced by his spirit. [pg 409]But in the second century, the sympathetic union of Platonic and Pythagorean ideas with a vigorous religious revival became a real power, with momentous effects on the future of philosophy and religion for three centuries. Plutarch’s reverence for the founder of the Academy, even in little things, was unbounded.[2146] It became with him almost a kind of cult. And he paid the most sincere reverence to his idol by imitating, in some of his treatises, the mythical colouring by which the author of the Phaedo and the Republic had sought to give body and reality to the unseen world.[2147] Plutarch condemned in very strong language the coarse and sophistical modes of controversy with which the rival schools assailed one another’s tenets.[2148] Yet he can hardly be acquitted of some harshness in his polemic against the Stoics and Epicureans. Archbishop Trench, in his fascinating and sympathetic treatment of Plutarch, laments that he did not give a more generous recognition to that noblest and most truly Roman school which was the last refuge and citadel of freedom.[2149] We may join the archbishop in wishing that Plutarch, without compromising principle, had been more tolerant to a system with which he had so much in common, and which, in his day, had put off much of its old hardness. But he was essentially a practical man, with a definite moral aim. He took from any quarter principles which seemed to him to be true to human nature, and which furnished a hopeful basis for the efforts of the moral teacher. But he felt equally bound to reject a system which absorbed and annihilated the emotional nature in the reason,[2150] which cut at the roots of moral freedom, which recognised no degrees in virtue or in vice, which discouraged and contemned the first faint struggles of weak humanity after a higher life, and froze it into hopeless impotence by the remote ideal of a cold, flawless perfection, suddenly and miraculously raised to a divine independence of all the minor blessings and helps to virtue.[2151] [pg 410]Such an ideal may be magnificent, but it is not life. For man, constituted as he is, and placed in such an environment, it is a dangerous mental habit to train the soul to regard all things as a fleeting and monotonous show, to cultivate the taedium vitae, or a calm resignation to the littleness of man placed for a brief space between the two eternities.[2152] The philosophic sufferer may brace himself to endure the round of human duties, and to live for the commonwealth of man; he may he generous to the ungrateful and tolerant to the vulgar and the frivolous; he may make his life a perpetual sacrifice to duty and the higher law, but it is all the while really a pathetic protest against the pitiless Power which has made man so little and so great, doomed to the life of the leaves and the insects, yet tortured with the longing for an infinite future.
On some great central truths, such as the inwardness of happiness and the brotherhood of man, Plutarch and the Stoics were at one. And the general tone of his moral teaching bears many marks of Stoic influence.[2153] But the Stoic psychology, the Stoic fatalism and pantheism aroused all the controversial vehemence of Plutarch.[2154] The Stoic held the essential unity of the soul, that reason and passion are not two distinct principles, but that passion is reason depraved and diverted to wrong objects. It is the same simple, indivisible power which shifts and changes and submits itself to opposing influences. Passion, in fact, is an impetuous and erring motion of the reason, and vice, in the old Socratic phrase, is an error of judgment, a fit of ignorance of the true ends of action. But as, according to Stoic theory, the human reason is a portion of the Divine, depravity becomes thus a corruption of the Divine element, and the guarantee for any hope of reform is lost. For himself, Plutarch adopts the Platonic division of the soul into the rational, spirited, and concupiscent elements, with some Aristotelian modifications.[2155] The great fact of man’s moral nature is the natural opposition between the passions and the rational element of the soul; it corresponds to a similar division in the mundane soul.[2156] All experience attests a con[pg 411]stant, natural, and sustained rebellion of the lower against the higher. Principles so alien and disparate cannot be identified, any more than you can identify the hunter and his quarry.[2157] But, although in the unregulated character, they are in violent opposition, they may, by proper culture, be brought at last into a harmony. The function of the higher element is not to extinguish the lower, but to guide and control and elevate it.[2158] Passion is a force which may be wasted in vagrant, wild excess, but which may also be used to give force and energy to virtue. To avoid drunkenness, a man need not spill the wine; he may temper its strength. A controlled anger is the spur of courage. Passion in effect is the raw material which is moulded by reason into the forms of practical virtue, and the guiding principle in the process is the law of the mean between excess and defect of passion.[2159] This is, of course, borrowed from Aristotle, and along with it the theory of education by habit, which to Plato had seemed a popular and inferior conception of the formation of the virtuous character.[2160] By the strong pressure of an enlightened will, the wild insurgent forces of the lower nature are brought into conformity to a higher law. It is a slow, laborious process, demanding infinite patience, daily and hourly watchfulness, self-examination, frank confession of faults to some friend or wise director of souls.[2161] It needs the minutest attention to the details of conduct and circumstance, and a steady front against discouragement from the backsliding of the wavering will.[2162] In such a system the hope of reform lies not in any sudden revolution. Plutarch has no faith in instant conversion, reversing in a moment the ingrained tendencies of years, and setting a man on a lofty height of perfection, with no fear of falling away. That vain dream of the older Stoicism, which recognised no degrees in virtuous progress, made virtue an unapproachable ideal, and paralysed struggling effort. It was not for an age stricken or blest with a growing sense of moral weakness, and clutching eagerly at any spiritual stay. Plutarch loves rather to think of character under the image of a holy and royal building whose founda[pg 412]tions are laid in gold, and each stone has to be chosen and carefully fitted to the line of reason.[2163]
Plutarch also accepted from the Peripatetic school the principle, which Seneca was in the end compelled to admit, that the finest paragon of wisdom and virtue is not quite self-sufficing, that virtuous activity needs material to work upon,[2164] and that the good things of the world, in their proper place, are as necessary to the moral musician as the flute to the flute-player. Above all, Plutarch, with such a theory of character, was bound to assert the cardinal doctrine of human freedom. He had a profound faith in a threefold Providence, exercised by the remote Supreme Deity, by the inferior heavenly powers, and by the daemons.[2165] But Providence is a beneficent influence, not a crushing force of necessity. To Plutarch fatalism is the blight of moral effort. Foreknowledge and Fate are not conterminous and coextensive. Although everything is foreseen by heavenly powers, not everything is foreordained.[2166] The law of Fate, like the laws of earthly jurisprudence, deals with the universal, and only consequentially with the particular case. Certain consequences follow necessarily from certain acts, but the acts are not inevitably determined.[2167] Man, by nature the most helpless and defenceless of animals, becomes lord of creation by his superior reason, and appropriates all its forces and its wealth by his laborious arts.[2168] And the art of arts, the art of life, neither trusting to chance nor cowed by any fancied omnipotence of destiny, uses the will and reason to master the materials out of which happiness is forged. Thus the hope of a noble life is securely fenced in the fortress of the autonomous will. To the Stoic the vicious man was a fool, whose reason was hopelessly besotted. The Platonist cherished the better hope, that reason, though darkened for a time and vanquished by the forces of sense, could never assent to sin, that there still remained in every human soul a witness to the eternal law of conduct.
With such a faith as this, an earnest man like Plutarch was bound to become a preacher of righteousness and a spiritual director. Many of his moral treatises are the expanded record of private counsel or the more formal instruction of the lecture-hall. He had disciples all over the Roman world, at Rome, Chaeronea, Ephesus, and Athens.[2169] His conception of the philosophic gathering, in which these serious things were discussed, is perhaps the nearest approach which a heathen ever made to the conception of the Christian church.[2170] In theory, the philosopher’s discourse on high moral themes was a more solemn affair than the showy declamation of the sophist, whose chief object was to dazzle and astonish his audience by a display of rhetorical legerdemain on the most trivial or out-worn themes. But the moral preacher in those days, it is to be feared, often forgot the seriousness of his mission, and degraded it by personal vanity and a tinsel rhetoric to win a cheap applause.[2171] The sophist and the philosopher were in fact too often undistinguishable, and the philosophic class-room often resounded with new-fangled expressions of admiration. For all this Plutarch has an indignant contempt. It is the prostitution of a noble mission. It is turning the school into a theatre, and the reformer of souls into a flatterer of the ear. To ask rhetoric from the true philosopher is as if one should require a medicine to be served in the finest Attic ware.[2172] The profession of philosophy becomes in Plutarch’s eyes a real priesthood for the salvation of souls. He disapproves of the habit, which prevailed in the sophist’s lecture theatre, of proposing subtle or frivolous questions to the lecturer in order to make a display of cleverness. But he would have those in moral difficulty to remain after the sermon, for such it was, and lay bare their faults and spiritual troubles.[2173] He watched the moral progress of his disciples, as when Fundanus is congratulated on his growing mildness of temper.[2174] The philosopher was in those [pg 414]days, and often too truly, charged with gross inconsistency in his private conduct. Plutarch believed emphatically in teaching by example. The preacher of the higher life should inspire such respect that his frown or smile shall at once affect the disciple.[2175] Plutarch evidently practised his remedies on himself. His great gallery of the heroes of the past was primarily intended to profit others. But he found, as the work went on, that he was himself “much profited by looking into these histories, as if he looked into a glass, to frame and fashion his life to the mould and pattern of these virtuous noblemen.”[2176]