Atypical Lives: Systems of Meaning in Plutarch's Teseus-Romulus by Joel Martin Street A ...

160 Pages·2015·1.06 MB·English

by  Joel Street

Atypical Lives: Systems of Meaning in Plutarch's Teseus-Romulus
by
Joel Martin Street
A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in
Classics
in the
Graduate Division
of the
University of California, Berkeley
Committee in charge:
Professor Mark Griffith, Chair
Professor Dylan Sailor
Professor Ramona Naddaff
Fall 2015
Abstract
Atypical Lives: Systems of Meaning in Plutarch's Teseus-Romulus
by
Joel Martin Street
Doctor of Philosophy in Classics
University of California, Berkeley
Professor Mark Griffith, Chair
Tis dissertation takes Plutarch’s paired biographies of Teseus and Romulus as a path to
understanding a number of roles that the author assumes: as a biographer, an antiquarian, a
Greek author under Roman rule. As the preface to the Teseus-Romulus makes clear, Plutarch
himself sees these mythological fgures as qualitatively different from his other biographical sub-
jects, with the consequence that this particular pair of Lives serves as a limit case by which it is
possible to elucidate the boundaries of Plutarch’s authorial identity. Tey present, moreover, a set
of opportunities for him to demonstrate his ability to curate and present familiar material (the
founding of Rome, Teseus in the labyrinth) in demonstration of his broad learning. To this end,
I regard the Teseus-Romulus as a fundamentally integral text, both of whose parts should be read
alongside one another and the rest of Plutarch’s corpus rather than as mere outgrowths of the tra-
ditions about the early history of Athens and Rome, respectively. Accordingly, I proceed in each
of my four chapters to attend closely to a particular thematic cluster that appears in both Lives,
thereby bringing to light the complex fgural play by which Plutarch enlivens familiar material
and demonstrates his virtuosity as author.
In chapter 1, I take the preface to the Lives as my starting point, placing particular
emphasis on the cartographic metaphor by which Plutarch fgures the writing of biography about
these mythological fgures as a journey outward into unknown territories. In accounting for the
surprising and counterintuitive aspects of this metaphor, I argue that Plutarch is engaging with
competing models of the world, correlated with generic distinctions, and resolving them by the
rhetorical strategy of syneciosis, the alignment of opposites. He is, moreover, inviting the reader
to attend closely to the spatiotemporal dynamics of the Teseus and Romulus narratives, which
one can understand as a set of movements along various axes and which unfold both alongside
and against the metanarrative journey upon which Plutarch imagines himself as embarking in the
preface to these Lives.
In chapter 2, I build upon this spatial framework in order to explore the role of opsis
(sight, vision) in Plutarch’s approach to history and biography. Proceeding from Plutarch’s inten-
tion, as he expresses it in the preface, to make the mythological material “take on the look of his-
tory,” I argue that opsis serves as a thematic preoccupation for Plutarch in the Teseus-Romulus,
both on the level of his biographical project and within the narratives of these Lives. In surveying
incidents of sight in both parts, I note that way in which opsis can grant discursive authority to
the one who sees something happen (most paradigmatically, a messenger such as Proculus at the
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end of Romulus) but can also overwhelm or “captivate” viewers and deprive them of agency. In-
deed, it is this twofold potential of opsis that informs Plutarch’s nuanced model of how biography,
myth, and history might “look.”
For chapter 3, I turn to mimetic and imitative ideas in the Teseus-Romulus and under-
score how Plutarch employs the recursive and iterative capacities of mimēsis to build large net-
works that serve to connect reader, author, and both biographical subjects in various ways. Since
it is a term that can take a wide range of people and objects as “input” and “output,” it appears in
a particularly diverse set of circumstances in these Lives, and with a range of ethical evaluations
that do not always align with the idea of ethical exemplarity implicit in Plutarch’s project in the
Parallel Lives. At the same time, engagement with mimetic behavior is a key respect by which
Plutarch differentiates his two biographical subjects in the Teseus-Romulus: the former is heavily
bound up in imitation, especially in his relationship to Heracles and his institution of the crane
dance on Delos, while Plutarch emphasizes the latter’s special status as founder of the new city of
Rome by describing him as fundamentally non-imitative.
In the fnal chapter, I turn to the motif of lēthē (forgetting) in the Teseus-Romulus, taking
as my starting point Teseus 22, where Teseus neglects to change the sail on his ship to indicate
his survival and Aegeus kills himself in the mistaken belief that his son is dead. I contend that
Plutarch’s version of the story, which explains Teseus’ lapse as the result of his joy, relies on the
pseudo-etymological link between joy (chara) and (choros) that Plato lays out in Laws II (645a).
Broadening my focus, I look to the rest of the Teseus-Romulus and argue that Plutarch constructs
a model of lēthē as a necessary element in cultural survival rather than a solely negative or de-
structive process. To reinforce this model, I suggest the familiar Ship of Teseus paradox at Te-
seus 23 as well as the trough in which Romulus and Remus survive at Romulus 7-8 as emblems of
preservation in the face of change. More broadly, I contend that the survival, in Plutarch’s own
day, of Greek identity in the face of Roman domination is bound up with the capacity of lēthē to
accommodate cultural transformation without annihilation.
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Table of Contents
Introduction: Cracking a Biographical Code p. 1
1: "A map of days outworn": Spatiotemporality in the Teseus-Romulus p. 17
2: "Te conquest of thy sight": Vision and the Messenger p. 48
3: "Nothing like the sun": Recursion, Mimesis, and the Labyrinth p. 78
4: "To import forgetfulness": Cultural Transformation in the Teseus-Romulus p. 112
Bibliography p. 143
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Acknowledgements
Outside of my committee, I am most indebted to Leslie Kurke and Donald Mastronarde from
the classics department at UC Berkeley for their support, as well as to Greta Hawes and Jessica
Priestley, who together organized the 2013 Bristol Myth Conference. Out of many supportive
colleagues, I would like to thank Sarah Olsen and Seth Estrin especially.
Lastly, but vitally, I must express signifcant gratitude for my family and for a number of friends
who helped me throughout this process: Sarah Jean Johnson, Matt O'Connor, Lindsey Balogh,
Sam Maurer, Jeff Johnson, Joseph Frislid, Derek Braun, Bob Masys, Jason Damas, Daniel Red-
man, Stuart Schussel, Tim Dent, and James Pipe.
ii
Introduction
Cracking a Biographical Code
Plutarch's Teseus-Romulus is a pair of his Parallel Lives that is notable for the anteriority
of its subjects. For Plutarch, just as they would be for a modern reader, Teseus and Romulus are
mythological fgures, about whom any biographical information would have to be acquired by a
scrutiny of rich and varied cultural traditions that would, in turn, yield tentative or uncertain his-
torical conclusions. Our biographer himself, writing around the year 100 of the common era,
fnds them to be atypical targets for his biographical project in the Parallel Lives and, consequent-
ly, a reader in the twenty-frst century cannot seek to interpret them without accounting for their
oddity. An Athenian culture-hero and the founder of Rome, respectively, Teseus and Romulus
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stand out against the pairs of Lives that one might see as more typical of Plutarch's biographical
project, the bulk of whose biographical subjects lived between the sixth century BCE and the end
of the Roman Republic.
Te unusual nature of the choices of Teseus and Romulus also represents, however, an
opportunity for us to better understand the underlying logic of Plutarch's approach to biography.
Since, as I will note frequently, Plutarch registers this shift back in time as an expansion of or ad-
justment to his model of biography, the anteriority of the subject material also offers us the
chance to understand with greater clarity where the essence of Plutarchan biography lies. Tis is
bound up closely with the problem of rationalizing myth. After all, if myth and legend could be
uniformly transformed into history by any consistent and reliable process, then the choice of sub-
ject matter would not necessitate great adjustments in the approach to biography. Even in antiq-
uity, however, a prose writer such as Plutarch would fnd that much of his material cannot be re-
solved beyond a reasonable doubt. Unlike the modern reader, he would seem to have no doubt of
the existence of a fgure such as Teseus or Heracles, but the ability to gain access to the historic-
ity of such individuals requires some tolerance for probabilities over certainties and, as he notes in
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his preface to these Lives, a pardoning attitude from these readers.
Rather than a project of rationalizing, then, the Teseus-Romulus is at its core an expan-
sion of the Parallel Lives into domains (myth, epic, poetry) that are under normal circumstances
held distinct from the category of biography. I would argue, however, that the new turn apparent
in this pair of Lives is in fact an aid to better understanding Plutarch's model of biography and of
the uses of the genre. In particular, it should serve to remind the reader that Plutarch's corpus
(comprising a number of Lives, most of them Greek-Roman parallels, and a large mass of sur-
viving and authentic Moralia) has its own preoccupations and its own centers of gravity, and that
Plutarch's texts can be the start, rather than the endpoint, of a great number of inquiries.
1. Note that capitalized and italicized Life (and Lives) will refer to Plutarch's biographies.
2. Teseus 1-2.
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After all, many readers come to Plutarch by virtue of his infuence on later European au-
thors. In the case of Montaigne, he is a frequently quoted source of fodder for the essayist's ru-
3
minations. For readers of Shakespeare, he is also an indirect source through Tomas North's
translation (itself a translation of Jacques Amyot's French translation from two decades prior) of
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overarching plotlines and of small turns of phrase. Even for those interested more directly in the
ancient world, one might expect that Plutarch is presented not only as a means of satisfying in-
terest in other topics, but as himself a focus of interest. In practice, however, even classics and
those disciplines most closely allied with it often turn the Chaeronean writer into a conduit for
other interests and still struggle to contextualized his words within the texts to which they belong
and, in turn, his texts within the broader intellectual currents out of which they have emerged.
Although Plutarch's fate and esteem have improved greatly within the discipline of clas-
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sics within the past decades, it might be helpful to note how the generalist typically encounters
Plutarch: in translation. Although Dryden's translations from the seventeenth century are widely
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available, contemporary translations of Plutarch's Lives are typically Parallel in name only. Te
Penguin editions, for instance, sort the biographical material by milieu (Athens, Sparta, the Age
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of Alexander, Rome) and, in the case of one volume, includes Xenophon's Constitution of Sparta.
Another recent volume, called Lives Tat Made Greek History, takes the dismemberment one step
further, omitting any of Plutarch's prefaces (in as much as they address the parallelism with the
Roman biographical subject) and, in the case of Teseus, much of the mythological material that
so drew Plutarch to the difficult project. Te title is deceptive, then: if these short Lives, them-
selves halves of Plutarch's pairings, really "made" Greek history, one might at least expect them to
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appear unabridged. Of course, these are not scholarly editions by any stretch, but the fact re-
mains that Plutarch is encountered by the typical English-language reader in a thematic collec-
tion or, failing that, in the language of Restoration England. So while the scholars involved in the
above collections may believe in the fundamental integrity of Plutarch's corpus, the contempo-
rary marketplace for books makes clear the persistent headwinds against which good scholarship
must struggle.
Bearing this context in mind, my own approach proceeds from a few fairly simple premis-
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es. Te frst is that parallelism, with apologies to Euclid, is by necessity a textual "contact" be-
3. See Calhoun (2015) pp. 13-48 for recent work on the "two Plutarchs" that appear in
Montaigne and Plutarch's embedding of autobiography into the biography of others.
4. Te best treatment remains Hongimann (1959).
5. See, however, below (p. 10ff ) f o rt h ew ay si n w h i c hs i m i l apr e r s p e c t i vaepsp e a er ve ni n m o re
s p e c i a l i z e d a n d s e r i o u s wo rk s .
6 . B e c a u s et h e ya re s om e w h amt o ree x p e n s i vaen d i n c l u d ef a c i n gG re e ka n d r u d i m e n t a r y
a p p a r a t u s c r i t i c i , I a m s e t t i n g a s i d e t h e L o e b e d i t i on s i n m y a r g u m e n t h e re .
7 . Ta l b e r t a n d Pe l l i n g ( 2 0 0 5 ) .
8 . R om m a n d M e n s c h ( 2 0 1 2 ) .
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tween the two biographical subjects, which Plutarch, after all, would introduce overtly as com-
paranda for one another. Second, the underlying anatomy of the Lives bears recognition as well as
interpretations that reconcile the parts to one another: outside of the predictable biographical
material, a pair of Lives may consist of prefatory material, concluding comparisons (synkriseis),
and, as I will repeatedly note, all manner of digressions from the overarching topic. As something
of a counterpoint, my last tenet is that the texts of Plutarch's Lives allow, or even demand reading
not exclusively as a derivative text or a source text, but rather as a literary text that can stand in
any variety of relationships with other texts, whether they are part of Plutarch's corpus (Moralia
and portions of other Lives) or works by other authors.
Implicit in this last assertion is the underlying drive to understand Plutarch as an author,
and to reinforce the sense that inhabits a meaningful political and intellectual context that will
necessarily inform the subtlest crannies of his textual labyrinths. If one is encountering a mere
curator or collector, one expects to understand their criteria of inclusion, but I will posit that a
fully authorial reading demands that the elements of the text be read alongside one another. Cer-
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tainly, I do not have the space in this introduction to propose a full theory of the author, but I
would suggest at the very least that an author will, whatever his or her stated intentions, shape
the elements he assembles to a degree beyond simply selection and arrangement.
Te nature and extent of this authorial imprimatur will, of course, vary from author to au-
thor and from text to text, but the reader will by and large be steered toward a reading that inte-
grates the elements that comprise the text rather than searching solely for their sources. Accord-
ingly, I will begin my readings of Plutarch not with a passage from the Teseus-Romulus itself but
rather, perhaps counterintuitively, with a brief discourse on cryptography to be found in the frst
half of the Lysander-Sulla, a pair of Lives that is much more typical in the historicity of its sub-
jects. While my readings in the chapters to come will, of course, emerge from key passages in the
Teseus-Romulus, I bring in the description of a Spartan technology of cryptography, called the
11 12
skytalē, as a kind of proof of concept for my approach to reading those Lives.
9. See the defnition in Elements 1.23.
10. See however Talamo (2013), Irwin (2002), North (2001), Ede and Lunsford (2001), Trimbur
(2000), Stillinger (1991), Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1989), Pappas (1989), Foucault (1977),
Benjamin (1973) and Barthes (1967).
11. Troughout the text, I will use transliteration and italicizing where the Greek term functions
syntactically as part of an English sentence. Tis includes a few fairly common terms (synkrisis,
mimēsis) that might appear elsewhere in less markedly Greek forms ("syncrisis," "mimesis").
When, on the contrary, the Greek is matched with an English translation and is placed in a block
quote or parentheses, I will retain the original Greek. Depending on context, some Greek could
be seen as either explaining my claim or as generally translated by my English, and so both
transliterated and untransliterated Greek may appear within parentheses.
12. Compare the reading of the plot of Poe's "Purloined Letter" for theoretical models of
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Plutarch's biographical subject in this passage, the Spartan admiral Lysander, is being
summoned, which sets the author up to diverge from the narrative mode to a non-narrative di-
gression. In this case, the subject matter is the technology by which the Spartans communicate
privately: amid growing criticisms of Lysander's character, the Spartan ephors have sent a mes-
sage, encoded by means of this system of skytalē, that orders him to leave the Hellespont and re-
turn home to them in Sparta. Indeed, this message itself is called a skytalē. Te word had original-
ly referred to the pieces of wood with which the messages were encrypted and decrypted, but
here refers to the very message that Lysander receives. In a relatively intuitive sort of semantic ex-
13
tension, however, the document itself had also acquired the name in the typical Greek of
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Lysander's day (19.5-7):
Ἔστι δὲ ἡ σκυτάλη τοιοῦτον. ἐπὰν ἐκπέμπωσι ναύαρχον ἢ στρατηγὸν οἱ ἔφοροι , ξύλα
δύο στρογγύλα μῆκος καὶ πάχος ἀκριβῶς ἀπισώσαντες , ὥστε ταῖς τομαῖς ἐφαρμόζειν
πρὸς ἄλληλα , τὸ μὲν αὐτοὶ φυλάττουσι , θάτερον δὲ τῷ πεμπομένῳ διδόασι . ταῦτα δὲ τὰ
ξύλα σκυτάλας καλοῦσιν . ὅταν οὖν ἀπόρρητόν τι καὶ μέγα φράσαι βουληθῶσι , βιβλίον
ὥσπερ ἱμάντα μακρὸν καὶ στενὸν ποιοῦντες περιελίττουσι τὴν παρ ' αὐτοῖς σκυτάλην ,
οὐδὲν διάλειμμα ποιοῦντες , ἀλλὰ πανταχόθεν κύκλῳ τὴν ἐπιφάνειαν αὐτῆς τῷ βιβλίῳ
καταλαμβάνοντες . τοῦτο δὲ ποιήσαντες ἃ βούλονται καταγράφουσιν εἰς τὸ βιβλίον ,
ὥσπερ ἐστὶ τῇ σκυτάλῃ περικείμενον · ὅταν δὲ γράψωσιν , ἀφελόντες τὸ βιβλίον ἄνευ τοῦ
ξύλου πρὸς τὸν στρατηγὸν ἀποστέλλουσι . δεξάμενος δὲ ἐκεῖνος ἄλλως μὲν οὐδὲν
ἀναλέξασθαι δύναται τῶν γραμμάτων συναφὴν οὐκ ἐχόντων , ἀλλὰ διεσπασμένων , τὴν δὲ
παρ ' αὑτῷ σκυτάλην λαβὼν τὸ τμῆμα τοῦ βιβλίου περὶ αὐτὴν περιέτεινεν , ὥστε , τῆς
ἕλικος εἰς τάξιν ὁμοίως ἀποκαθισταμένης , ἐπιβάλλοντα τοῖς πρώτοις τὰ δεύτερα , κύκλῳ
τὴν ὄψιν ἐπάγειν τὸ συνεχὲς ἀνευρίσκουσαν . καλεῖται δὲ ὁμωνύμως τῷ ξύλῳ σκυτάλη τὸ
βιβλίον , ὡς τῷ μετροῦντι τὸ μετρούμενον .
authoring and reading. See Muller and Richardson (1988), especially Lacan's reading in the frst
quarter of the volume.
13. Cf. how a Xerox is made by means of a Xerox machine.
14. Compare, in turn, Aulus Gellius' highly derivative account (17.9-15), where the practice is
described entirely in the past tense and the Latin "surculus" is employed instead of the Greek
term until the end. Compare Gellius' phrasing for the parts of Plutarch's explanation that I have
underlined: “pari crassamento eiusdemque longitudinis” (7); “resolutio autem lori litteras truncas
atque mutilas reddebat membraque earum et apices in partis diversissimas spargebat” (12); “atque
ita litterae per eundem ambitum surculi coalescentes rursum coibant integramque et incorruptam
epistulam et facilem legi praestabant. hoc genus epistulae Lacedaemonii skytalen appellant”
(14-15).
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