Plutarch : lives that made Greek history

301 Pages·2012·1.9 MB·English

by  Plutarch.

PLUTARCH
Lives That Made Greek History
PLUTARCH
Lives That Made Greek History
Edited, with Introductions and Notes, by
James Romm
Translated by Pamela Mensch
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
Indianapolis/Cambridge
Copyright © 2012 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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For further information, please address
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
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www.hackettpublishing.com
Cover design by Abigail Coyle
Interior design by Meera Dash
Maps by William Nelson
Composition by William Hartman
Printed at Data Reproductions Corporation Library of Congress Cataloging-in-
Publication Data
Plutarch.
[Lives. English]
Plutarch : lives that made Greek history / edited,
with introductions and notes, by James Romm ; translated
by Pamela Mensch.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60384-846-6 (pbk.) — ISBN 978-1-60384-847-3 (cloth) 1.
Greece—Biography. I. Romm, James S. II. Mensch, Pamela, 1956– III. Title.
IV.
Title: Lives that made Greek history.
DE7.P513 2012
938.009'9—dc23
2012023888
ePub ISBN: 978-1-60384-961-6
Contents
Introduction
Bibliography
Life Spans of the Subjects of Plutarch’s Lives
Maps
Lives That Made Greek History
Theseus
Lycurgus
Solon
Themistocles
Aristides
Cimon
Pericles
Nicias
Alcibiades
Lysander
Agesilaus
Pelopidas
Demosthenes
Alexander
Phocion
Glossary of Names, Places, Peoples, and Military Terms
Index
Introduction
Plutarch’s Lives provide a different experience of Greek history than can be
found elsewhere. The eras Plutarch dealt with, and even the presentation of
important episodes, often overlap closely with the eras covered by the works of
Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, for these were his principal sources. But
the questions Plutarch asked differed from those of earlier writers. He tried to
show how individual character interacts with society and with history, how
ethical qualities either thrive or lead to disaster within the maelstrom of events.
He was not concerned with creating a record, for others before him had done
that. Six centuries of Greek historical writing stretched out behind him, a
treasury in which he delved deep to find the material for his Lives (as well as for
the speeches, dialogues, and essays he wrote throughout his life, collected today
under the title Moralia).
Plutarch distinguished his character-based approach to history from more
traditional narratives in a famous passage at the opening of his Alexander. He
vows there to capture the soul of the person he studies as a portrait painter
captures the face: the limbs and body are not the portraitist’s concern, and
neither are the mere facts of history Plutarch’s. A battle may loom less large in
Plutarch’s pages than a quip or apothegm in which his subject’s spirit stands
revealed. Although Plutarch did not ignore any significant action or episode—
his readers would be puzzled by such an omission—he felt free to give short
shrift where insight into character could not be gleaned.
In his Parallel Lives of the Greeks and Romans, a work probably dating from
the early second century CE, Plutarch created a set of inquiries into how great
leaders succeeded or failed; how they held up under stress of political strife and
warfare; what moral lessons can be learned from them; and, not least
importantly, how the lives of leaders from two different nations, Greece and
Rome, echo or resemble one another. In Plutarch’s scheme, as the title Parallel
Lives indicates, Greek biographies were paired with Roman ones, and most of
these pairs were prefaced by a brief essay in which he compared the two figures
profiled. In other works written separately, he also produced a handful of
unpaired lives, one of which portrayed neither a Greek nor a Roman but a
Persian king. Fifty of Plutarch’s Lives survive, forty-six of which once belonged
to the pairs that made up Parallel Lives. At least twelve additional lives are
known to have perished; possibly many more, unknown to us even by title, were
lost.
Lost, too, are many of the sources Plutarch used for his research, apart from
the three great ones mentioned above. Writers who in his day were considered
nearly as great did not survive the broad dying-off of ancient literary works that
occurred in the European Dark Ages. As a result, Plutarch’s Lives, though not
intended as a historical record, sometimes constitute the best record we have or
provide a valuable comparison with the records preserved by others—especially,
in the classical Greek context, by Herodotus and Thucydides. In many cases the
Lives contain information not found in other sources, the precious relics of
Plutarch’s readings of Theopompus, Ephorus, Hieronymus of Cardia, and others
whose writings have since disappeared.
Plutarch expected his audience to be familiar with the events he deals with, so
he sometimes makes only passing references to even the most crucial of these or
to important secondary characters. Reading the Lives without the same degree of
familiarity is thus often a frustrating endeavor, but this volume is designed to
help. In the footnotes I have tried to restore the historical context that Plutarch
often leaves out. I have also tried to clarify the sequence of events, about which
Plutarch is often vague, since chronology was not his concern. Cross-references
to relevant passages in other Lives, or to the works of other authors, help readers
to compare available accounts, and bring together information about individuals
and episodes into a unified narrative of the classical Greek world.
My interest, as both a teacher and an author, in creating a unified narrative has
led me to exclude certain Greek lives from this collection. Theseus was severely
truncated on the grounds that, as Plutarch himself acknowledged, it does not
have the same grounding in recoverable fact as the lives of other figures. Two
works dealing principally with Greek Sicily—Dion and Timoleon—were omitted
altogether, as were those lives that take place largely or entirely in the
Hellenistic Age, after the death of Alexander the Great (Eumenes, Pyrrhus, Agis,
and Aratus). Also excluded was Artaxerxes, a treatise not originally part of
Parallel Lives, dealing with the life and times of a Persian king. I have tried to
focus entirely on the central sphere of action in the Classical Age, the region we
now call Greece or the Balkan Peninsula, the territory dominated at various
times by Athens, Sparta, or Thebes. The fifteen Lives excerpted in this volume
center on statesmen from those cities, and, in the case of Alexander, on a
Macedonian leader who ineradicably changed the destinies of all three.
A gradual shift in the way the Lives are read, moving away from the ethical
and toward the historical, has been under way for some time. Long ago, the
elegant pairings Plutarch strove so hard to create were broken up; Greeks were
segregated with other Greeks, Romans with Romans. The Penguin Classics
series then further broke up the Lives into volumes organized around
chronological periods—The Age of Alexander and the like—encouraging readers
to consider them in a primarily historical context. My edition takes a further step
in this direction, by excerpting from the Lives the material of greatest historical
significance. I have tried to serve the needs of readers exploring ancient history
through primary sources, while hopefully also aiding those intrigued by
outstanding models of character and behavior.
It has been painful to see some of Plutarch’s best anecdotes, apothegms, and
moral exempla cast aside in the excerpting process. Yet it is precisely this aspect
of his Lives, I believe, that deters many modern readers. Punch lines of
Plutarchan jests often today require explanation or cannot be understood at all.
Although I have excised many of these, I have tried to retain enough to preserve
the basic outlines of Plutarch’s character portraits, for these are, above all, what
make his Lives into documents of enduring power and meaning. I can only hope
Plutarch would consider my excisions a price worth paying for the sake of
gaining a wider modern readership.
In marking excisions, the principle I have followed is to preserve the reader’s
ability to find his way easily to the parallel passage of a Greek text. Thus, cuts
made from the middle of a chapter are marked with an ellipsis (…), but those
that remove the beginning or end of a chapter, or an entire chapter, are not
marked; chapter numbers can in those cases help readers find their way in a
companion text. Short excisions from inside a sentence often simply remove a
name or term that a modern reader might find unfamiliar. Plutarch loved to heap
up parallels and cross-references, counting on his readers to quickly shift
frameworks and recognize a wide array of historical and literary figures. But
students striving to master the cast of characters in a single Life can feel
discouraged, even betrayed, if new names, belonging to an entirely different
cast, are thrown at them out of nowhere. I have tried to eliminate such
disruptions where possible, or else I have used the footnotes to ease their
disorienting effect.
I have made few efforts to eliminate repetition between the Lives of
contemporaneous figures, for Plutarch often retells stories but seldom in quite
the same way. It is fascinating to see how his treatment changes, for example,
when recounting the rivalry between Themistocles and Aristides from the
perspective first of Themistocles, then of Aristides. Stories that overlap with
those found in other ancient authors’ works are also retained here, with the sole
exception of Nicias’ conduct of the Sicilian expedition, which closely and at
great length replicates the account of Thucydides. Cross-references will help the
curious reader compare different versions, which sometimes illustrate Plutarch’s
license as an adapter of his sources, at other times the range of competing and
diverging traditions within the wide spectrum of readings he consulted.
The influence of Plutarch’s Lives on Western literature and thought has been
enormous. In the Renaissance, Jacques Amyot’s French translation of Plutarch’s
works sparked the imagination of Michel de Montaigne, and Sir Thomas North’s
English version supplied Shakespeare with the plots of Julius Caesar, Antony
and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, as well as short episodes in numerous other
plays. In the seventeenth century the poet and critic John Dryden supervised an
elegant translation of the Lives that is still in print today. The American founding
fathers were avid readers of Plutarch, as were the transcendentalists of the
nineteenth century, especially Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Go with mean people and
you think life is mean,” Emerson wrote. “Then read Plutarch, and the world is a
proud place, peopled with men of positive quality, with heroes and demigods
standing around us, who will not let us sleep.”
Plutarch might not accept the phrase “men of positive quality,” for his Lives
capture roguish and amoral behavior as well as virtuous deeds. But he would
certainly endorse the idea that one’s view of the world, even one’s actions, are
influenced by what one knows of great individuals of the past. He created an
unforgettable gallery of portraits in his Lives, and he expected that his readers
would be morally wiser as a result of spending time there. This edition of the
Lives, in the stately new translation of Pamela Mensch, is offered in the hopes
that he was right.
James Romm