Part 2

That he gave philosophical education, though apparently not of a systematic and pedagogic kind, to persons of both sexes is known from his own references to the practice. Whether he did so for money or not, we cannot tell. The later Platonists by no means felt bound to adopt the attitude of Socrates and Plato towards the taking of fees. The world had changed, and the _res angusta_ was often more powerful than a principle which had ceased to appear entirely rational. But there is every reason to suppose that Plutarch was a man of independent means; we know further that a genial frugality was the rule of his household, and that he entertained a becoming contempt for the obsequious or the advertiser. The day of the endowed professor, whether of philosophy or sophistic, was still to dawn for Greece under Marcus Aurelius, and it never dawned at all for so small a town as Chaeronea. We may take it therefore that, whether with or without fee or present, Plutarch was able to choose his own pupils—in all likelihood the sons and daughters of his friends—and that, in dealing with them or with a wider audience, he maintained the fullest dignity and independence, and practised all the amiable candour which he explicitly recommends.

For any lack of originality, of speculative audacity, of profundity (or the obscurity which is so often mistaken for that virtue), Plutarch fully compensates. To his generation he served as a milch-cow of practical philosophy on its ethical side. He browsed on literature and thought, secreted the most valuable constituents, and yielded the cream to his hearers or readers. So far as he belonged to a philosophic school, it was that of the Old Academy. In other words, he would have labelled himself a Platonist. It is probable that he was as much attracted by the superb literary style of Plato, the nature of the man, and the nobility of his conceptions, as by anything capable of crystallization into a philosophy. These qualities attracted even the dilettante, while in the more specially philosophic world time had done much to refract the real Plato, to extract dogma from him, and to create a large _Aberglaube_ about his writings. Be that as it may, there is much in Plato that Plutarch does not accept, and there is much outside of Plato to which he gives a welcome. Towards Stoics and Epicureans—whose doctrines, like those of the Christians, would logically withhold men from public activity—he is distinctly, though never virulently, hostile, and when his pen ranges itself against particular schools, it is against these.[4] It is easier, in fact, to say to what sect Plutarch did not belong than to associate him definitively with any other. Nevertheless it is as a Platonist that he would have classed himself, and it is especially by the later Neo-Platonists that he was quoted as a divinely gifted writer who lent literary charm and potency to wisdom. So broad, however, was his teaching, and in many respects so adaptable even to Christianity, that early writers of the Church had no scruple in borrowing liberally from him.[5]

Into whatever shape he may have systematized his views, and however popular his treatment of them, Plutarch ranked with the philosophers. If he was opposed to Stoicism and Epicureanism, he was, like other philosophers, no less opposed to sophistic. To him the representatives of that art were apt to seem shallow and showy.[6]

He held, with the Socratics in general, that the basis of right action is knowledge, and he had no belief in empiricism. Not that he rejected either established moral views or established religion. He was no sceptic, still less an atheist. As Friedländer has well argued, there was no ancient cult of atheism. Plutarch, indeed, is remarkably receptive in the matter of deities. The Egyptian worship of Isis and Osiris, which had made great progress throughout the Roman Empire, appeared to him equally tenable with the worship practised by his own ancestors. In the polytheism in which he acquiesced, such divinities were only other forms of those known in Hellas, and he found no difficulty in reconciling and combining the two sets of notions and cults. He was deeply tinged with Orientalism, though his culture and his natural good taste made him despise corybantic demonstrations and what Friedländer has called ‘dirty mortifications’. He held the Eranian belief in daemonic agencies, which acted upon mankind from the one side as the gods did from the other. If he appears to rise to the conception of ‘God’ in the singular, the word is rather to be taken as denoting the sum of divine wisdom and beneficent dispensation. Like all the best minds of his own and many a previous generation, he found moral difficulties in accepting the characters ascribed to the deities in the best literature of earlier Greece, and therefore, while approving of the established education in poetry, he necessarily felt some qualms as to the possible effects. Poetry served in the schools ‘as introduction to philosophy, history, geography, and astronomy’, and it had much to do with the formation of religious and ethical notions. Homer, Pindar, Sophocles, and Menander were ‘learned and wise’, and boys were brought to regard them as inspired. Hence Plutarch’s treatise on _Poets as Moral Teachers of the Young_. The point of view in that essay is not, indeed, entirely rational. It was not so easy for Plutarch as it is for us to realize that moral and religious ideas in Greek literature had passed through an evolution corresponding to the development of intellect and society. Instead of frankly recognizing the limitations of Homer or the inconsistencies of the dramatists in this respect, he puts a highly ingenious constraint upon the connexion between any dubious sentiment and its context. It is only when he fails in such a _tour de force_ that he consents to censure the poet. In this procedure he was by no means the first. The battle of the ‘takers of objection’ (προβληματικοί) and the ‘solvers of difficulties’ (λυτικοί) was centuries old. That Plutarch should range himself as far as possible with the solvers is a circumstance which would naturally follow both from his love of literature and from his constitutionally reverential temperament.

As has been often observed, the purpose running through the _Parallel Lives_ and the _Moral Essays_ is one and the same. The philosophy of Plutarch was ethical. For logic and dialectic he shows no liking. His object was to relate philosophy to life, to bring home a philosophy which could be lived. By philosophy he meant the best conduct of life, based on an understanding of the nature of virtue—τὸ καλόν, the right, the honourable, the becoming. From philosophy we are to learn not only what is due to ourselves, but what is due to the gods, to the laws, to parents, children, friends, enemies, fellow-citizens, and strangers. The _Essays_, like those of Seneca or Bacon, deal with separable components or manifestations of right and wrong character, with duties and circumstances: the _Lives_ meanwhile afford us concrete examples or object lessons from history.[7] Yet life, even that of a philosopher, is not made up entirely of preaching and exhortation, least of all when the philosopher is at the same time a man of the world and a man of letters. Plutarch felt a lively interest in all such posers as were mooted in the talk of the table or of the loungers’ club. He therefore includes among his occasional papers—whether written by request or under the fashionable fiction of a request—a number of treatises on physical, antiquarian, literary, and artistic topics which can hardly be said to bear with any immediateness upon the ethical perfection of the reader. As a change, therefore, from the treatment of _Superstition_ or _Inquisitiveness_ or _The Restraint of Anger_, of _Rules for Married Couples_ and _Rules of Health_ and rules for _The Student at Lecture_, he may in a spare moment discuss such matters as _The Face in the Moon_ or questions in Roman custom.

The majority of the pieces in the present selection speak for themselves. With the one exception to be mentioned immediately, they all bear the impress of the man. There is the same moral broadmindedness and sobriety, the same shrewd sense of _le bonhomme Plutarque_, the same faculty for popularizing[8] without descending to vapidity, the same knack of relieving the sermon by means of anecdote, quotation, or interesting item of information at the point where the discourse threatens to become tedious. It is true that the German critic, in his indefatigable search for the _unecht_, has impugned the authorship of the _Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages_[9] on grounds unintelligible to those who do not expect a dinner-table conversation to be a systematic treatise, and who are satisfied to believe that a mixture of serious talk, banter, and narrative, and a frequent transition of subject, are precisely the things for which one would look on such an occasion. Every feature of the style is Plutarchan, and, if Plutarch did not write the piece, we can only feel unmixed regret that he did not, and unmixed surprise that its real author should sacrifice the credit of his performance. With the article on _The Bringing-up of a Boy_ the case is different. Wyttenbach has sufficiently pointed out its frequent feebleness of argument, its turbid arrangement, the exceeding triteness of its ideas, and its unaccountable omissions. To us moderns it is of great interest for the light which it throws on the education of the period, and for its incidental revelations of the conditions of domestic life and the domestic affections. Otherwise it is a puerile performance and savours of nothing but the student essay. If it be argued that it is one of Plutarch’s juvenile works, the answer is that it is unlike him to be disingenuous; and disingenuous he must be, if in his early youth he pretends to have ‘often impressed upon parents’ this or that. Antiquity produced far too many amateur essays in imitation of great authors—imitations actually ascribed to those authors by a recognized fiction of the schools—for us to do an injustice to Plutarch when an easier solution lies so close to our hands. Perhaps, again, the piece on _Fawner and Friend_[10] suffers from an occasional _longueur_, but there are few writers who do not at some less felicitous moment perpetrate paragraphs less vivacious than their average.

As a stylist Plutarch is apt to be underrated. He is, it is true, no laborious atticist, and makes no point of writing like a purist in the classic manner of a Plato or a Lysias. But this does not mean that he is in the least negligent in either word or sentence. On the contrary, his words are selected with extreme care, and his sentences—where the text is sound, as for the most part it is—are rounded off and interlinked as watchfully as any natural writing need require. It is true that his vocabulary is large and his expression full, but, when his words are properly weighed and their metaphorical and other differentiations duly perceived, no understanding reader will call him verbose.[11] He displays an immense command of language, but no word plays an idle part, and if (like Cicero, whom in many respects he resembles) he is fond of joining what are erroneously called synonyms, it needs but little appreciation of verbal values to realize that the added words invariably carry some amplification, some more precise definition, or some emphasis helpful to a full grasp upon the sense. It is true also that his sentences are apt to appear—like the sentences of Ruskin’s earlier days—somewhat lengthy; nevertheless they commonly atone by lucidity of construction for any demand they may make upon sustained attention.[12] In a modern English dress they must necessarily be broken up, but a practised reader of Plutarch finds no more difficulty with them in the original than he would find with a passage of Demosthenes or Plato. To one who becomes familiar with them they are at least as agreeable as the staccato brevities of Seneca. What chiefly exacts some effort from the reader of Plutarchan Greek is the fact that its words are extraordinarily charged with metaphor and allusion.[13] His choice of one word rather than another is always nicely calculated. This truth once recognized, a reader cannot fail to admire both the consistency with which the writer maintains his similitude while he is upon it, and also the copious resources of vocabulary upon which he draws for the purpose. Meanwhile, despite any length of sentence and fullness of praise, Plutarch neither irritates with tricks and mannerisms nor wearies with pedantry and ponderousness. A pedant he could not be. He is no writer of Johnsonese. To him the best words are those which best suit their context, and he has no objection whatever to a dash of the colloquial or a touch of the homely or naïve. It is one of his characteristic merits that he knows when to take the higher and when the lower road of diction. He also knows when he is in danger of stylistic monotony. Plutarch was a teacher, but, like all truly intelligent members of that profession, he recognized that the most uninspiring attitude to adopt is the severely and unremittingly pedagogic. ‘The knack of style,’ it has been said, ‘is to write like a human being,’ and Plutarch, a professor of humanity without a chair, is always and entirely human. That his pen must have moved with extraordinary facility is evident from the number of his publications. Apart from his _Lives_ (of which not all are extant), his _Moralia_ include over eighty pieces, long or short, and it is certain that many others had disappeared[14] before the present collection became available in its eleventh-century MS.

It is not here implied that he is never culpable, never over-loaded. There are times, though rare ones, at which we feel that his memory or his notebook has been unduly exploited. We feel that he might have spared us an illustration which does not illustrate or a similitude which is deficient in similarity. To a certain extent he is a Euphuist, and though Guevara perhaps owed nothing directly to him (as he did to Seneca[15]), it is manifest that Plutarch sometimes strains a point in order to achieve an over-ingenious comparison. The contagion of the thing, like that of Euphuism in the Elizabethan age, was in the air, and Plutarch assuredly does not err more often or more heinously with one generation than Shakespeare did with another. Wide reading and natural fecundity easily slip into sins which narrow resources and slow invention are impotent to commit.

* * * * *

There are numerous signs that the pendulum of classical interest is swinging in the direction of the literature of the early Empire. The exclusive _toujours perdrix_ of the Attic and Ciceronian periods has apparently begun to jade the palate, and writers like Seneca and Plutarch are coming into their own once more. There was a time when these authors were perhaps better known than any others. That they were worthy of prime consideration is manifest from the immense influence which they exercised upon the ardent and inquiring spirits of the sixteenth and following centuries, in England no less than on the Continent. Authors who could make such an appeal to Montaigne, to the Elizabethan dramatists, to Bacon, or to Jeremy Taylor,[16] are surely not to be despised because they belong stylistically to a ‘silver’ age, or because their strength lies mostly in the fact that they are a mine of ideas, wise saws, and pointed moral instances. Seneca, as being a writer of Latin, was naturally the earlier and more widely read,[17] but from the publication of the _editio princeps_ of Plutarch by Aldus in 1509 our author sprang into peculiar estimation among the recovered spirits of antiquity. It was, however, due to Amyot that both his _Lives_ and his _Essays_ became accessible to those who had little or no Greek. The _Essays_ were rendered into idiomatic French by that admirable translator in the year 1572,[18] and Montaigne was by no means the only reader among _nous autres ignorans_ who made the Plutarch of Amyot his breviary, and who ‘drew his water incessantly’ from him. It was not the literary etiquette of the Elizabethan age to acknowledge all the obligations one might owe even to a contemporary, much less to the ancients, and the stores of Plutarch might be rifled without much fear of detection, and certainly with no fear of reproach. When Lyly, in _Euphues and his Ephoebus_,[19] takes it in hand to bring up a child in the way he should go, he is in a large measure simply translating, expanding, and emphasizing the pseudo-Plutarch on the _Bringing-up of a Boy_ and interspersing the discourse with pickings from other essays, particularly that on _Garrulousness_.[20] Montaigne, of course, with his bland unreserve, credits Plutarch via Amyot with a multitude of observations, while Bacon, when following the new vogue of the essay, sometimes refers us to ‘Plutarke’, and at least on one occasion informs us that ‘Mountaigny saith’ a thing which on reference to the said ‘Mountaigny’ we find to be Plutarchan.

Though it is no part of the present Introduction to examine in detail the influence of the philosopher of Chaeronea upon modern writers, or to make an inventory of his contributions to English literature, it is at least worth asking whether an author whom genius once delighted to exploit, and from whom so many good things have filtered down to us through various channels, may not be well worth reading at first hand. To Professor Mahaffy[21] Plutarch ‘is a pure and elevating writer, full of precious information, and breathing a lofty moral tone’, and to Professor Gilbert Murray[22] he is ‘one of the most tactful and charming of writers, and one of the most lovable characters in antiquity’. Said Emerson[23]: ‘Plutarch will be perpetually rediscovered from time to time as long as books last.’

Footnote 1:

The reproof might ostensibly be general, but its particular application was readily felt. Musonius, we are told by Epictetus, made all his hearers feel ‘as if some one had been talking to him about them’.

Footnote 2:

See _Concerning Busybodies_, 522 E.

Footnote 3:

Over and above his resemblances to Macaulay as a writer of essays and biographical history, there is a distinct similarity between their conversational tastes. We can imagine a Plutarch fully at home with Macaulay at one of those astonishing early Victorian breakfast-parties where a man might be asked if he ‘knew his Popes’, and where he might be endured while he recited them. Plutarch’s _Table-Talk_, like his _Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages_, reveals for contemporary Greek society the same deliberate cult of intellectual conversation sharpened by challenge and debate. In such conversation he must himself have played a conspicuous part. Nevertheless, it may fairly be gathered that the Greek or Graeco-Roman interlocutors in the reign of Trajan were the more ingenuously athirst for reciprocal enlightenment, however dubiously we may regard the value of the information or misinformation actually gained. Nor is it easy to believe that Plutarch would have thought it etiquette to indulge in the protracted monologues to which the more modern society submitted with such grace as it best could.

Footnote 4:

e.g. in his _De repugnantiis Stoicorum_ and his _Non posse suaviter vivi secundum Epicurum_. Yet, as Mahaffy says, ‘it would be hard to say whether the number of Stoic dogmas which he rejects exceeds that which he quotes with approval’ (_The Greek World under Roman Sway_, pp. 300 sqq.).

Footnote 5:

Volkmann names in particular Clement of Alexandria and Basil.

Footnote 6:

This does not mean that he had no friends among the rhetorical teachers (the contrary is shown by his reference to ‘our Niger’ in _praec. san._, § 16), but only that he distrusted the type. He refused to approve of a fluent and polished style as an end in itself. Pliny describes how the amazingly voluble Isaeus would offer his audience a choice of subject and allow it to dictate the side which he should take. He would then rise and demonstrate his extemporizing powers with much show of rhetorical ornament.

Footnote 7:

Volkmann says of the _Lives_, ‘Das Werthvolle an ihnen sind nicht die historischen Details, die er giebt, sondern die eingestreuten Reflexionen, die ethischen Betrachtungen, das Eingehen auf individuelle Stimmungen und Leidenschaften der grossen Männer.’

Footnote 8:

_Aulicis tantum scripsit, non doctis_, says Scaliger.

Footnote 9:

Volkmann guesses that it is _ein Produkt der späteren Sophistik_. If so, we may congratulate the Sophist on his perfect reproduction of Plutarch’s style and of his non-sophistic tone.

Footnote 10:

Bacon’s Essay _Of Followers and Friends_ owes almost nothing to Plutarch beyond the title. We do, however, find him borrowing the words ‘for there is no such Flatterer as a Man’s selfe’.

Footnote 11:

As Volkmann happily puts it, he writes ‘with comfortable breadth’.

Footnote 12:

The sentences would doubtless have been easier still if Plutarch had not felt bound to follow the fashion of the time and elaborately avoid hiatus.

Footnote 13:

Perhaps this is why Plutarch, as seen through Amyot, appeared to Montaigne ‘close and thorny,’ while his sense was nevertheless ‘closely-jointed and pithily-continued’.

Footnote 14:

Stobaeus (sixth century) had access to much of Plutarch that is now lost.

Footnote 15:

See an observation of Professor Summers, _Seneca Select Letters_, Introduction, p. lxxiv.

Footnote 16:

Plutarch ‘is the theme of more than 230 allusions or direct references on the part of Jeremy Taylor’ (Sandys, _A History of Classical Scholarship_, i. 300).

Footnote 17:

He was familiar reading of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and appears in the _Gesta Romanorum_. Later the _Adagia_ of Erasmus draw freely upon him.

Footnote 18:

‘Il a en quelque sorte créé Plutarque,’ says Demogeot.

Footnote 19:

_Euphues_ appeared in 1579. Jusserand (_The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare_, p. 127) remarks that Euphues ‘addresses moral epistles to his fellow men to guide them through life’, but he appears to be unaware that Lyly borrowed this object, as well as so large a quantity of his matter, from Plutarch.

Footnote 20:

We meet, for example, with the story of Zeno, ‘the olde man in Athens that amiddest the pottes could hold his peace.’

Footnote 21:

_History of Greek Classical Literature_, ii. 427.

Footnote 22:

_The Literature of Ancient Greece_, p. 396.

Footnote 23:

Quoted by Sandys (_A History of Classical Scholarship_, i. 300).

CONTENTS

Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages 27

On Old Men in Public Life 65

Advice to Married Couples 96

Concerning Busybodies 113

On Garrulousness 130

On the Student at Lectures 157

On Moral Ignorance in High Places 180

Fawner and Friend 187

On Bringing up a Boy 241

Notes on Persons and Places 267

Appendix: Notes on the Greek Text 295

_In the following imaginary ‘Dinner-Party of the Seven Sages’ the supposed narrator is a certain Diocles of Corinth, a professional diviner and expiator of omens connected with the court of Periander, who was despot of Corinth from 625_ B. C. _to 585_ B. C. _The dramatic date is towards the close of that period. It must not be assumed that Plutarch is pretending to be historical, and anachronisms must be disregarded._