The warm appreciation which he displays for every thing that is great in humanity or history is surprising when we remember the incredible hollowness of the surroundings amidst which his heroes were drawn, and the society in which he lived, not as a soured misanthrope, but as a stirring official. The petty Chæronea was hardly the place to prepare the mind for the reception of great thoughts. The population of the municipality, though active and bustling, lived far from the great world. It had its share of orators, sophists, lecturers; it had party divisions to quicken the heart to love and hate; it had games to excite the passions and to stimulate ambition. But what were the questions which the people quarrelled about with all the readiness and vehemence proverbial of the Hellenic race? They were mainly where the best baths might be found; which party was most likely to triumph at the next dog or cock-fight; what kind of man the new official from Rome, or the next travelling sophist, would turn out to be; how such a one had made his fortune, or how Ismenodora, the wealthy widow, could have espoused an obscure man? These were the principal topics which the Chæroneans of Plutarch's day discussed when they went to sleep at night, and resumed again on waking in the morning. And yet how dearly Plutarch loved this small, petty fatherland! How happy he appears to be that it should enjoy the golden peace which at last fell upon the world after the empire had put an end to the terrible civil wars! Under the iron rule of Rome all provinces once more breathed freely. Whatever imperialism meant at the capital, in the provinces it was still popular; and even under Domitian, as Suetonius assures us, the moderation and justice of the Cæsars was the theme of general praise. In contemporary Hellas, in the province of Achaia, the people appreciated these blessings, though they felt most painfully the loss of their former power and renown. Even the monuments of their ancient glory, which attracted annually crowds of strangers, became so many tombstones full of bitter memories, and the explanations of the garrulous guides must have sounded like reproaches in the ears of the degenerate race.
The policy which imperial Rome pursued toward the land from which she had received in the palmy days of her transition to a more refined culture the most admired models in science and art, and from which she obtained in the following centuries the best instructors, the most learned writers, and the most desirable nurses, was a strange compound of severe brutality and flattering caresses. When the great Germanicus, accompanied by a single lictor, reverentially entered the sacred precincts of Athens, and graciously listened to the vaunts of the rhetoricians on the splendor and glory of Greece, and when immediately afterward the brutal Piso descended on the city like a thunderbolt to remind the frightened provincials in a bullying manner that they were no longer Athenians, but the sweepings of nations, (conluvies nationum, Tac. Annal. iii. 54,) then this people learnt by abrupt changes how they stood in the regard of the Romans.
When the Greeks became the subjects of Rome, they were but too speedily taught what she meant by the "liberation of the oppressed." All the accustomed safeguards of the law were suspended at one sweep. No marriage contract, no negotiation, no purchase, no sale, between city and city, village and village, was binding unless ratified by special act of grace from Rome. All sources of prosperity, all public and private rights, passed into Roman hands. Nothing remained to the Greeks save the memory of their former prestige, and the old rivalry between the tribes and cities, which invariably burst out afresh whenever the emperor or one of his lieutenants favored one more than the other. So humiliating and painful were the results of this state of things, that even such a zealous local patriot as Plutarch advises the people, in his pocket oracle for embryo statesmen, to forget the unfortunate words Marathon, Platæa, and Eurymedon. And yet the same Plutarch is so thoroughly Bœotian, that he cannot prevail on himself to forgive the "father of history" the malicious candor with which he relates the bad conduct of the Thebans in the Persian war.
Chæronea, the home of Plutarch, ranked among the most favored cities of the empire, being a municipium, or free city, under the protectorate of Rome, but governed in accordance with its ancient laws by officers elected by the people. Plutarch gives us a very interesting picture of the local administration. His political precepts, and his treatise on the part which it behooves an old man to play in the state, thoroughly enlighten us on all these points. The municipal officers, though merely honorary and unsalaried, were as much an object of contention as in former days when they were lucrative. The candidates were often obliged to make extraordinary exertions for popular support; they erected public edifices; endowed schools and temples; built libraries, aqueducts, baths; distributed bread, money, and cakes; got up games and feasts, and many wealthy men were thus ruined by their ambition. The benefits secured by public office were exemption from local taxation, precedence at the theatres and games, the erection of busts, statues, inscriptions, and pictures; and, after the expiration of office, perhaps promotion in the imperial service.
In addition to the expenses incident to such a canvass, the candidates, if not of low extraction and mean spirit, had to give up many prejudices which must have greatly hurt the pride of every true Greek. Plutarch fully explains in his political precepts what a patriot might expect in those days on entering the public service.
"Whatever position," he tells his young countrymen, "you may attain, never forget that the time is past when a statesman can say to himself with Pericles on putting on the chlamys, Remember that thou presidest over a free people, over Hellenes, or Athenians. Rather remember that though thou hast subjects, thou thyself art a subject. Thou rulest over a conquered people, under imperial lieutenants. Thou must therefore wear thy chlamys modestly; thou must keep an eye on the judgment seat of the proconsul, and never lose sight of the sandals above thy crown. Thou must act like the player, who assumes the attitudes prescribed in his part, and, turning his ear toward the prompter, makes no mien, motion, or sound but such as he is ordered."
Even the officials of this free city were therefore only puppets, whose functions presented no temptation to the ambitious. All that was left to the local government were the inferior market and street police, the care of the local security and order, and a partial participation in the apportionment of the imperial taxes. But while there was nothing to stimulate the ambition of the Chæroneans, the system had a tendency to promote sycophancy. The subordinate officials entirely ceased to think and act independently, and applied to the emperor in person for directions on the veriest trifles, especially when the ruler seemed inclined to encourage this spirit of subserviency. Such an emperor was Trajan, admired by Pliny for his untiring activity, which led him to meddle with every thing. He took up his pen to defend the exchange of two soldiers, to decree the removal of a dead man's ashes, and to assign an athlete's reward. Pliny, his lieutenant, ruled Bithynia like an automaton. In Prusa, Nicodemia, Nicea, not a man, not a sesterce, not a stone, was suffered to change its place without the imperial sanction. The selection of a surveyor was made a question of state. The emperor seems finally to have found the work too much for him; for he writes on one occasion to his lieutenant: "Thou art on the spot, must know the situation, and shouldst determine accordingly." In the correspondence of these two men can be traced the corruption which gradually seized and overwhelmed rulers and ruled in the Roman empire on the inclined plane of a rapidly spreading super-civilization.
It is greatly to the honor of Plutarch that he condemns this mischievous tendency. He does not find fault with it for the political reasons which would lead us to oppose a paralyzing centralization, but for the sake of the manly dignity, the moral self-respect, which should never be forgotten. "Let it suffice," exclaims he, "that our limbs are fettered; it is unnecessary to place our necks also in the halter."
We perceive here in the honest archon of Chæronea still something of the sturdy spirit of ancient Hellas. Not in vain had he read the history of his ancestors; in spite of the unpropitious times, he still holds what survives of their virtues worthy of preservation; and it is gratifying to find a man of this stamp serving an ungrateful public, while the conceited philosophers of his day regarded politics a contamination. Nor was it without a good influence upon the literary labors of Plutarch that he did not boast, with Lucan, to know "no state or country," but was content to contribute his share to a better state of things. Yet it is nevertheless easy to see that in such an atmosphere no state like the one for which Themistocles, Pericles, and Demosthenes had worked and striven on the field and the tribune—no country like that for which heroes had fought and bled at Marathon, Salamis, and Platæa—could hope to thrive. In this cramped, commonplace sphere, amidst the provincial gossip and the petty interests of such surroundings, the fierce passions which had once inspired parties, which in Rome had fired the hearts of the Gracchi and the other martyrs of the declining commonwealth, were altogether impossible. Here were only the citizens of a small provincial town, the descendants of an ancient and highly renowned nobility but of beggarly presence, the wards of a subjugated land. The enthusiasm with which the higher minds of such an era revelled in the reminiscences of departed greatness was perfectly natural; no less natural was the dim twilight in which its heroes appeared to eyes so little accustomed to discriminate. We can understand why such a profound impression should have been made by all that was foreign in the olden times, especially when the means to analyze, probe, and comprehend it were wholly wanting.
Plutarch's keen appreciation of all the qualities in which the ancients had the advantage over his own contemporaries reflects much credit upon him. Yet he is incapable of comprehending them individually, for there was nothing to correspond with them in the world he lived in. His ideas of state and freedom, of country and virtue among the ancients, are distorted, because in his time their meaning had partly been changed, and partly been lost. To Plutarch's susceptible mind, the heroes of Roman and Grecian history appeared like the effigies preserved in some ancestral hall. He experienced, however, something of the thrill of exultation which electrified Sallust, when he, a warm-hearted youth, first tasted the same sensation; but when he endeavors to communicate this feeling to the reader, he succeeds only in demonstrating his unfitness for the task. An historian, in our sense of the word, Plutarch, we know, does not aspire to be; he claims merely to "paint souls" and "to teach virtue," but even herein he fails. His men are no real personages, no flesh and blood beings, whom he makes step out from the frame of tradition, but puppets gaudily and incongruously arrayed in all kinds of odds and ends. He has never produced a single genre portrait, but merely supplied the raw materials; and these may be even more valuable than any artistically finished but misdrawn historical likeness would have been. This is, however, all that can be said in the behalf of Plutarch's creations, and when we have followed him to his home and visited his mental laboratory, we perceive that it could not well have been otherwise. It is in this light that we have to depict to ourselves Plutarch in the character of the romancist of the ancient ideal of state and country. And when, in conclusion, we regard him further as the romancist of the ancient faith, he may be taken for the predecessor of the apostate Emperor Julian, whom David Strauss so admirably sketched twenty years ago as the romancist on the throne of the Cæsars.