Part 2

Nor is the value of such a biography affected in the least by any doubts that we may entertain as to the authenticity of incidents, trivial except as illustrative of character, which occupy a large space in Plutarch’s Lives. Indeed, the least authentic may be of the greatest historical value. An anecdote may be literally true, and yet some peculiar combination of circumstances may have led him of whom it is told to speak or act out of character. But a mythical anecdote of a man, coming down from his own time and people, must needs owe its origin and complexion to his known character.

It is perfectly easy to see throughout these biographies the author’s didactic aim. If I may use sacred words, here by no means misapplied, his prime object was “reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness.” He evidently felt and mourned the degeneracy of his age, was profoundly aware of the worth of teaching by example, and was solicitous to bring from the past such elements of ethical wisdom as the records of illustrious men could be made to render up. True to this purpose, he measures the moral character of such transactions as he relates by the highest standard of right which he knows, and there is not a person or deed that fails to bear the stamp, clear-cut, yet seldom obtrusive, of his approval or censure.

The Lives, though the best known of Plutarch’s writings, are but a small part of them, and hardly half of those still extant. His other works are generally grouped under the title of “Moralia,”[xx:1] or Morals, though among them there are many treatises that belong to the department of history or biography, some to that of physics. Most of these works are short; a few, of considerable length. Some of them may have been lectures; some are letters of advice or of consolation; some are in a narrative form; many are in the form of dialogue, which, sanctioned by the prestige of Plato’s pre-eminence, was very largely employed by philosophers of later times, possessing, as it does, the great advantage of putting opposite and diverse opinions in the mouths of interlocutors, and thus giving to the treatise the vivacity and the dramatic interest of oral discussion. Some of these dialogues have a _symposium_, or supper party, for their scene, and introduce a numerous corps of speakers. In these Plutarch himself commonly sustains a prominent part, and the members of his family often have their share in the conversation, or are the subjects of kindly mention. In several instances the occasion, circumstances, and conversation are described so naturally as to make it almost certain that the author simply wrote out from memory what was actually said. At any rate, these festive dialogues present very clearly his idea of what a _symposium_ ought to be, and in its entire freedom from excess and extravagance of any kind it would bear the strictest ordeal with all modern moralists, the extreme ascetics alone excepted.

Had not the Lives been written, I am inclined to believe that the Moralia alone would have given Plutarch as high a place as he now holds, not only in the esteem of scholars, but in the interest and delight of all readers of good books; and I am sure that there is no loving reader of the Lives who will not be thankful to have his attention drawn to the Moralia. They exhibit throughout the same moral traits which their author shows as a biographer. He treats, indeed, incidentally, of some subjects which a purer ethical taste in the public mind might have excluded. He recognizes the existence of immoralities, which, not discreditable in the best society of unevangelized Greece and Rome, have almost lost their place and name in Christendom. Some of his dialogues have among the interlocutors those with whom as good a man as he would in our time associate only in the hope of converting them. But his own opinion and feeling on all moral questions are uniformly and explicitly in behalf of all that is pure, and true, and right, and reverent.

Many of these Moralia are on what are commonly, yet wrongly, called the minor morals, that is, on the evils that most of all infest and destroy the happiness of families and the peace of society, and on the opposite virtues,—on such subjects, for instance, as “Idle Talking,” “Curiosity,” “Self-Praise,” and the like. Others are on such grave topics as “The Benefits that a Man may derive from his Enemies,” and “The Best Means of Self-Knowledge.” There is in all these treatises a large amount of blended common sense and keen ethical insight; and so little does human nature change with its surroundings that the greater part of Plutarch’s cautions, counsels, and precepts are as closely applicable to our own time as if they had been written yesterday.

One of the most remarkable writings in this collection is Plutarch’s letter to his wife on the death of a daughter two years old, during his absence from home. It not only expresses sweetly and lovingly the topics of consolation which would most readily occur to a Christian father; it gives us also a charming picture of a household united by ties of spiritual affinity, and living in a purer, higher medium than that of affluence and luxury. A few sentences may convey something of the tone and spirit of this epistle. “Since our little daughter afforded us the sweetest and most charming pleasure, so ought we to cherish her memory, which will conduce in many ways, or rather many fold, more to our joy than our grief.” “They who were present at the funeral report this with admiration, that you neither put on mourning, nor disfigured yourself or any of your maids, neither were there any costly preparations nor magnificent pomp; but all things were managed with silence and moderation, in the presence of our relatives alone.” “So long as she is gone to a place where she feels no pain, why should we grieve for her?” “This is the most troublesome thing in old age, that it makes the soul weak in its remembrance of divine things, and too earnest for things relating to the body.” “But that which is taken away in youth, being more soft and tractable, soon returns to its native vigor and beauty.” “It is good to pass the gates of death before too great a love of bodily and earthly things be engendered in the soul.” “It is an impious thing to lament for those whose souls pass immediately into a better and more divine state.” “Wherefore let us comply with custom in our outward and public behavior, and let our interior be more unpolluted, pure and holy.”

Now, when I remember that in the pre-Christian Greek and Roman world the strongest utterances about immortality had been by Socrates, if Plato reported him aright, when he expressed strong hope of life beyond death, yet warned his friends not to be too confident about a matter so wrapped in uncertainty,—and by Cicero, who, when his daughter died, confessed that his reasonings had left no conviction in his own mind,—I cannot doubt that some Easter morning rays had pierced the dense Boeotian atmosphere, and that the risen Saviour had in that lovely Cheroneian household those whom he designates as “other sheep, not of this fold.”

There is among the Moralia another letter of consolation, to Apollonius on the death of his son, longer, more elaborate, and evidently intended as a literary composition, to be preserved with the author’s other works, which breathes the same spirit of submission and trust.

Another of the Moralia, which has a special interest as regards the author’s own family, is on the “Training of Children,”—a series of counsels—including the careful heed of the parents to their own moral condition and habits—to which the experience of these intervening centuries has little to add, while it could find nothing to take away.

In one sense, the miscellanies brought together under the name of “Moralia” bear that title not inappropriately; for, as I have intimated, Plutarch could not but be didactic in whatever he wrote, and the ethical feeling, spirit, and purpose are perpetually, yet never ostentatiously or inappropriately, coming to the surface on all kinds of subjects. But there is a great deal in the collection not professedly or directly ethical. There are many scraps of history and biography, and a very large number and variety of characteristic anecdotes, both of well-known personages, and of others who are made known to us almost as vividly by a single trait, deed, or saying as if we had their entire life-record. There is an invaluable series of “Apophthegms”[xxv:1] of kings and great commanders,[xxv:2] and another of “Laconic [or Spartan] Apophthegms,” which are much more than their name implies, some of them being condensed memoirs. There are, also, several papers that give us more definite notions than can be found anywhere else of the science and natural history of the author’s time. Withal, we have here so many references to manners, customs, and habits, such pictures of home with all that could give it the sweetness and grace that belong to it, such views of society, both in city and in country, in ordinary intercourse and on festive occasions, that one can learn more of life in that age in the Roman Empire from these volumes than from any other single author; and the writer of a book like Becker’s “Gallus” might find here almost all the materials that he would need, except for the delineation of the night-side of Roman extravagance, gluttony, drunkenness, debauchery, and depravity, which came not within Plutarch’s experience.

The most remarkable of all Plutarch’s writings, the most valuable equally in a philosophical and an ethical point of view, and the most redolent of what we almost involuntarily call Christian sentiment, is that “On the Delay of the Divine Justice,” or, to give a more literal translation of the original title, “Concerning those who are punished slowly by the Divine [Being].”[xxvi:1] It treats of what from the earliest time has been a mystery to serious minds, and has been urged equally by malignant irreligion and by honest scepticism against the supremacy of the Divine justice in the government of the world; namely, the postponement of the penal consequences of guilt, sometimes till there are no witnesses of the crime left to behold the punishment, sometimes till the offender himself has lost the thread between the evil that he did and its retribution, sometimes till the sinner has gone to the grave in peace, and left innocent posterity to suffer for his sins. Plutarch, with his unquestioning faith in immortality, doubts not that guilt, unpunished in this life, will be overtaken by just retribution in the life to come. But, as he says, retribution, though it may be consummated only in the future life, is not delayed till then. It seems late, because it lasts long. The sentence is passed upon the guilt when it is committed; and, however its visible execution may be postponed, the sinner is from that moment a prisoner of the Divine justice, awaiting execution. He may give splendid suppers, and live luxuriously; yet still he is within prison walls from which there is no escape.

This is undoubtedly true, and yet there are many cases, and those of the worst kind, in which it seems to be not true. A moderately bad man, in most instances, feels profoundly the shame and misery that he has brought upon himself. But a thoroughly wicked man takes contentedly a position which we may fitly term sub-human. If we suppose a man possessed of a magnificent house, luxuriously and tastefully furnished, who yet chooses never to ascend a stair, and lives in the basement shabbily and meanly, with the coarsest appliances of physical comfort, we might take him as the type of not a few bad men who seem entirely at their ease. They live in the basement. They have thrown away the key to the upper rooms. They have lost all appreciation of the higher, better modes of human living, and they are contented and satisfied as a well-fed beast is, in the absence of all spiritual cravings and ambitions. But this life, poor and mean as it is at the best, becomes still more narrow and sordid with the lapse of time. Many have looked with envy on prosperous guilt early or midway in its career; none can have witnessed its lengthened age without pity and loathing. Especially is this the case with the several forms of sensual vice. As age advances, the power of enjoyment wanes, while the morbid craving grows, even under the consciousness of added misery with its continued indulgence. The body becomes the soul’s dungeon, and its walls thicken inward and close up the wonted entrances of enjoyment. The senses, deadened on the side of pleasure, no longer avenues of beauty or of harmony, seem to serve only as means of prolonging a death in life, and as open inlets of discomfort and pain.

But the suspense of sentence has in not a few cases, according to Plutarch, a directly merciful purpose. As the most fertile soil may before tillage produce the rankest weeds, so in the soul most capable of good there may be, prior to culture, a noisome crop of evil, and yet God may spare the sinner for the good that is in him, and for the signal service which, when reclaimed, he may render to mankind. Then, too, by the delay of visible judgment God gives men in his own example the lesson of long-suffering, and rebukes their promptness in resentment and revenge. Still further, when penalty appears to fall on the posterity or successors of the guilty, and a race, a people, a city, or a family seems punished for the iniquity of its progenitors, Plutarch brings out very fully and clearly the absolutely essential and necessary solidarity of the family or the community, which can hardly fail so to inherit of its ancestors in disposition and character as to invite upon itself, to merit for itself, or at best to need as preventive or cure, the penal consequences of ancestral guilt.

This essay is all the more valuable because not written by a Christian. It shows that the intense stress laid by Christian teaching on a righteous retribution lasting on beyond the death-change is not a mere dogma of the sacred records of our religion, but equally the postulate of the unsophisticated reason and conscience of developed humanity.

* * * * *

My translation is not literal, in the common meaning of that term. If it were so, it would be unintelligible; for Plutarch’s style lacks simplicity, and his sentences, though seldom obscure, are often involved and intricate, sometimes elliptical. I have, however, given a faithful transcript in English of what I understand Plutarch to have written, omitting no thought or shade of thought that I suppose to be his, and inserting none of my own.

* * * * *

I have used Wyttenbach’s edition of the Moralia, departing from his text in but a single instance, and that, one in which he pronounces the reading in the text impossible, and suggests a conjectural reading as necessary to the sense of the passage. I have also made constant reference to the late Professor Hackett’s edition of this treatise, which it is superfluous to commend where he was known; for not only was he confessedly among the foremost scholars of his time, but his exacting conscientiousness would not suffer him to put less than his best and most thorough work into whatever came from his hands.

FOOTNOTES:

[vii:1] A large part of this Introduction is reprinted, by permission of the editors, from an article of mine on “Plutarch and his Times,” in the Andover Review, November, 1884.

[vii:2] Πλούταρχος.

[xx:1] Τὰ ἠθικά.

[xxv:1] Ἀποφθέγματα.

[xxv:2] The genuineness of this series has been called in question; but the internal evidence seems decisive in its favor. It is, throughout, so entirely in Plutarch’s vein, that one is tempted to ask, Who else could have written it?

[xxvi:1] Περὶ τῶν ὑπὸ τοῦ θεῖου βραδέως τιμορουμένων.

PLUTARCH

ON THE DELAY OF THE DIVINE JUSTICE.

1. EPICURUS,[1:1] having said such things, O Cinius,[1:2] before any one could reply, while we were at the farther end of the porch, went hastily away. But we, somewhat amazed at the man’s rudeness, stood still, looking at one another without speaking, and then turned and resumed our walk.

Then PATROCLEAS[2:1] commenced the conversation, saying,—What then? Do you see fit to drop the discussion? or will you answer his argument as if he were present, though he has taken himself away?

TIMON[2:2] then said,—If he threw a javelin[2:3] at us as he went away, it certainly would not be well for us to take no notice of the weapon still sticking in our sides. Brasidas,[2:4] indeed, as we are told, drew out the spear from his own body, and killed with it the man who had hurled it at him. But it is no concern of ours to retaliate on those who fling at us misplaced and false reasoning; it is enough for them if we reject their arguments before they affect our belief.

Then I said,—Which of the arguments that he urged moved you the most? For the man, as if inspired both by wrath and by scorn, brought together against the Divine Providence many things heaped up in confusion, yet no well-ordered reasons, but such miscellaneous cavils as could be gathered here and there.

2. PATROCLEAS then said,—The slowness and procrastination of the Deity in the punishment of the wicked seem to me the most mysterious of all things; and now, under these arguments, I find myself a new and fresh adherent to the doctrine in behalf of which they are urged. Indeed, I used a long time ago to be vexed by that saying of Euripides:—

“He lingers; such the nature of the gods.”[3:1]

While in no respect, least of all toward wicked men, is it fitting that God should be dilatory; for they are in no wise dilatory or slow in ill-doing, but are hurried on to evil by their passions with the utmost impetuosity. Indeed, as Thucydides says,[3:2] punishment close at hand bars the way to those who most hope to gain by guilt. Moreover, no debt overdue, equally with the delay of due punishment, renders the person wronged utterly hopeless and depressed, while it confirms the evil-doer in boldness and audacity. On the other hand, punishments directly inflicted on those who are bold in evil are at once preventive of future crimes, and a source of great consolation to those who have suffered wrong. I am therefore troubled by the saying of Bias,[4:1] which often recurs to me, when he told a man of bad character that he had no fear that he would go unpunished, but feared that he himself might not live to see him punished. What good, indeed, did the punishment of Aristocrates[4:2] do to the Messenians who were slain before it came upon him? He betrayed them in the battle of Taphrus, yet, not being found out for twenty years, he reigned over the Arcadians all that time, till at length his treachery was discovered and met with its due penalty; but the victims of his crime had ceased to be. Again, what comfort did any of the Orchomenians[4:3] who lost children, friends, and kindred by the treachery of Lyciscus derive from the disease that many years afterward seized him and consumed his body, while he, when he dipped and washed his feet in the river, always prayed, with oaths and curses, that his limbs might rot if he had ever been guilty of treason and injustice? Indeed, not even the children’s children of those who were then murdered could have witnessed at Athens the snatching of the contaminated bodies of the murderers from their graves, and their transportation beyond the boundaries of the state.[5:1] Hence, Euripides is absurd, when, to dissuade from crime, he says:—

“No haste has Justice; dread not her approach; She strikes no mortal heart with sudden blow; But noiseless, with slow step, she glides along, To smite the guilty when their hour has come.”[5:2]

It seems to me that it is no other considerations than these that lead bad men to encourage themselves, and to give themselves free scope for guilty enterprise, inasmuch as the fruit of wrong-doing is quickly ripe and in full sight, while punishment is late, and lingers far behind the enjoyment derived from the guilt.

3. When Patrocleas had thus spoken, OLYMPICUS,[6:1] taking up the thread of his discourse, said,—It should also be observed, Patrocleas, how exceedingly great is the mischief resulting from the delay and procrastination of the Deity about these matters, since the tardiness of retribution takes away faith in Providence; and because chastisement for the wicked does not ensue immediately upon the performance of an evil deed, but comes upon them afterward, they place it to the account of misfortune, call it ill-luck and not punishment, and so are in no wise profited by it,—being grieved indeed for what befalls them, but not led to repentance for their ill-doing. For as the punishment of the whip and the spur immediately on a horse’s stumbling or shying corrects him and puts him on right behavior, while beating and twitching of the reins and shouting at him at a later period seem to him for some other purpose than discipline, and thus annoy him without teaching him, so guilt rebuked and checked by punishment after each of its wrong-doings and transgressions might gradually become conscience-stricken, and be brought to the fear of God, as presiding over the affairs and experiences of men with a justice that does not linger; but justice hesitating and slow-paced, as Euripides describes it, and falling upon the wicked as if by chance, being vague, untimely, and out of due order, seems like a merely fortuitous event rather than ordained by Providence. Thus, I do not see what use there is in those mills of the gods said to grind so late[7:1] as to render punishment hard to be recognized, and to make wickedness fearless.

4. These things having been uttered, and I being wrapped in thought, TIMON said,—Shall I now put the climax to this reasoning on the side of scepticism, or shall I rather suffer Plutarch[7:2] to argue against what has already been brought forward?