Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans

Overview

Plutarch was a Greek from Chaeronea in Boeotia, a priest at Delphi, a Roman citizen, and a man who spent his life in a small town while writing about the largest careers in the ancient world. He wrote the Parallel Lives under the emperors Trajan and Hadrian, roughly four centuries after Alexander and a century and a half after Caesar. He is therefore not a witness. He is a reader, working from earlier historians, memoirs, letters, inscriptions and gossip, and he tells you when his sources disagree.

The design is the point. Each pair sets a Greek against a Roman who resembles him in some respect: the two founders, Theseus and Romulus; the two lawgivers, Lycurgus and Numa; the brilliant unreliable men, Alcibiades and Coriolanus; the conquerors, Alexander and Caesar; the orators, Demosthenes and Cicero. Most pairs end with a short synkrisis comparing them, and several of these are the sharpest writing in the book. The effect is to make you judge rather than admire, and to suggest that Greek and Roman excellence are the same thing in different costumes, which was a diplomatic claim to make in a Greek province of a Roman empire.

There is no need to read it in order, or at all completely. It is a shelf, not a book, and it has been read as a shelf since antiquity.

What happens

Take a few threads.

Sparta and Athens. Lycurgus gives the Spartans their land division, their common messes, their iron money and their brutal education, and then starves himself so that his laws can never be repealed. Solon cancels debts in Athens, refuses to become a tyrant, and leaves. Themistocles talks a city into becoming a navy and dies in Persian service. Pericles builds and speaks and presides over a democracy that does not survive him. Alcibiades charms Athens, Sparta and Persia in turn, and ruins each relationship.

Alexander. Plutarch’s best-known life, and mostly a study of a man’s temper: the taming of Bucephalus, the tutorials with Aristotle, the visit to Diogenes, the untying of the Gordian knot, the murder of Cleitus at dinner, the descent into Persian ceremony, and death at Babylon at thirty-two.

The Roman republic and its end. Coriolanus cannot flatter and turns against his own city. The Gracchi try to redistribute land and are killed. Marius and Sulla teach Romans that armies belong to generals. Crassus dies chasing money in Parthia. Pompey is great, then slow, then murdered on an Egyptian beach. Caesar crosses a river, wins everything, and is stabbed twenty-three times. Brutus and Cassius lose at Philippi and fall on their swords. Antony loses himself in Alexandria, and Cleopatra appears here in the version Shakespeare would follow almost line by line. Cato the Younger refuses to accept Caesar’s mercy and kills himself at Utica after a night with a book.

The four unpaired lives are Artaxerxes, Aratus, Galba and Otho, the last two the only lives of men from Plutarch’s own century.

How to read it

Choose a route rather than starting at page one. Three good ones. For the late republic, read Crassus, Pompey, Caesar, Cato the Younger, Brutus, Cicero and Antony in that order, and you have the fall of a constitution told through seven careers. For Greece, read Lycurgus, Solon, Themistocles, Pericles, Alcibiades and Alexander. For the Shakespeare connection, read Caesar, Brutus, Antony and Coriolanus, then the plays.

Always read the comparison at the end of a pair. That is where Plutarch stops narrating and starts judging, and it tells you what he thought the whole exercise was for.

Treat the anecdotes as evidence about values rather than facts. Plutarch is candid that he selects for character, which means his stories are shaped and some are certainly false. Where he matters historically, particularly on Sparta and the early republic, he is working from traditions already centuries old. Read him next to Thucydides or Livy and you will feel the difference between a historian and a moral portraitist immediately.

On versions: the Dryden translation revised by Clough is the one the Great Books sets print, and it is a pleasure in its own right, if archaic. Modern Penguin and Oxford volumes group the lives thematically, which is friendlier if you only want the late republic or the Athenian empire. North’s Elizabethan translation is worth an hour if you care about Shakespeare’s ear.

Questions it raises

• Does pairing a Greek with a Roman illuminate both men, or flatten the differences between two political worlds?
• Plutarch says he writes lives to improve his readers’ characters. Can biography do that, and should it try?
• If the revealing detail is chosen for what it reveals, how do we know it happened?
• He admires both Spartan discipline and Athenian openness. Are those admirations compatible?
• Caesar, Alexander and Alcibiades all had gifts their cities could not contain. Is that a flaw in the men or in the cities?
• Cato’s suicide is presented as the last free act of a republican. Is that courage, or a refusal to live in the world as it is?