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In Our Time: History
Plutarch's Parallel Lives
00:56:33
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the influential Greek biographer and his main work
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- [00:00]
Melvyn Bragg
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Melvyn Bragg
BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts this is.
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Judith Mossman
In our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the program. Hello, the Greek biographer Plutarch's parallel lives have influenced perceptions of the classical world in unparalleled ways. Working around the end of the first century A.D. and into the second, he was writing lives, he said, not histories, revealing the characters of pairs of famous Greeks and Romans, their virtues and vices. And these were just the qualities that would fascinate Shakespeare when mining Plutarch for his Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, for example, and later writers who saw history through the prism of Plutarch's great men. With me to discuss Plutarch's parallel lives are Judith Mossman, Professor Emeritus of Classics at Coventry University, Andrew Erskine, professor of Ancient History at the University of Edinburgh, and Paul Cartledge, AG Le Mantis, Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge. Paul, can you tell us something of the early life of Plutarch himself, where he was born.
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Paul Cartledge
John, I can. Unfortunately, no one wrote anything like a Plutarchan biography of Plutarch. His name is slightly unusual. It means someone who's first or leading in wealth. We know of others before him, but it's not a common name. We know the names of his father, we know the names of his grandfather, we know his wife and he had five kids and things like that. So he was born, we think, somewhere in the 40s AD or CE, and he was born in the reign of the emperor Claudius. And I put it that way, because though he's a Greek, he's born in the province of Achaia, which is one of the provinces of the Roman Empire. So Greece, as we think of it, independent way back when, is now a subject province of the Roman Empire. He was born and brought up in a small town place called Chaeronea, as we pronounce it in English, in modern Greek, and that sort of between Athens and Delphi. And if I put it that way, it's because Athens is the cultural capital of the Greek world. And so Plutarch has to go there and he becomes an Athenian citizen. On the other hand, he is very pious, very religious, and he becomes a priest in Delphi.
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Judith Mossman
How did he suffer being brought up in a Roman world while being so Greek?
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Paul Cartledge
Yes, it's an interesting question, isn't it? He was one of those who made an accommodation. In other words, he wasn't that thrilled by the Roman as such, so he had reservations about their level of what we'd call culture or civilization or taste. Nevertheless, he had some Roman mates, one of whom got him the Roman citizenship, a man called Mestrius Florus, another one of whom he dedicated the parallel lives to. So he was very integrated into the intellectual world of the Greco Roman as it's become culture.
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Judith Mossman
He headed for Athens when he was 20.
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Paul Cartledge
Absolutely right. And his particular contact there was a man called Ammonius, who was Egyptian, Greek, a philosopher. And it's very important to realize that though we think of Plutarch overridingly as a biographer, he was also a philosopher and he wrote huge amounts of straight philosophy.
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Judith Mossman
But before we get to Athens, can you give us a general idea of his travels, Judith?
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Andrew Erskine
Yes, certainly. As Paul has said, he had some very important Roman friends and he was important in his own local community. So he was often sent on embassies and that's a key reason to travel for someone of his period in class. We know that as a young man he was sent on an embassy to the pro consul, who was probably the pro consul of Asia. He also was sent on what was probably an embassy to Alexandria. The Emperor Vespasian was holding court in Alexandria at one point, so he was sent there, of course. I'm sure when he was in Alexandria, he visited the library and no doubt also took in the general intellectual atmosphere of.
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Judith Mossman
The library was the greatest library in the world.
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Andrew Erskine
The library was the greatest library in the known world, Indeed, yes. At that time he also traveled to Rome several times, and it looks as though that this was for embassies as well. But when he was in Rome, he didn't just do his diplomatic business, he also gave lectures and tutorials, as it were, in philosophy. He speaks at one point of having so many pupils in philosophy that he didn't have time to study Latin in depth. So presumably he was teaching everyone in Greek. And there's a great story when he's lecturing in Rome on one occasion, on being a busybody, where he's lecturing. And a man called Aerulanus Rusticus, whom Domitian later killed through envy of his reputation, was among the hearers. A soldier came through the audience and delivered him a letter from the emperor. Well, this could have been Rusticus death warrant. So there's a silence. And Plutarch wrote, I also made a pause so that he could read the letter, but he refused and did not break the seal until I had finished my lecture and the audience had dispersed. And so everyone admired his dignity. That's an interesting thing for Plutarch to have witnessed. It might have made him feel that perhaps living in a small town in Achaea was a lot safer than living in Rome.
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Judith Mossman
He did say at one stage, remember, hanging over your head all the time is the boot of the local Roman governor.
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Andrew Erskine
Yes, exactly. I think Paul's absolutely right that in some respects he's not enchanted by Roman rule. Although, on the other hand, he's very aware of the benefits that it brings in terms of stability, because it has prevented civil wars in Greece from recurring. And previously that was something that seemed impossible to do.
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Judith Mossman
There's a Greek, obviously a Greek Roman tension running through his entire life. And again, there's this quotation. Captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought the arts to rustic Latium, which was where Rome was based. Do you want to develop that, Judith?
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Andrew Erskine
Yes, indeed. That's a quotation from the poet Horace, who's somewhat earlier than Plutarch is, but it reflects a long love affair that the Romans developed with Greek culture. Right from the time that they conquered Greece in 146 BC. Of course, this presents huge opportunities for Greeks and particularly the Greek elite, who must live with the Romans and must nonetheless find an accommodation with them. So leveraging the soft power that their philosophy, that their skill in rhetoric, that their skill in the arts gives them is something that they're very keen on doing at this period. And someone like Plutarch, a member of a local elite in Boeotia, long established family in Kyrenia, very well educated, very clever, very well read, is in pole position to develop that influence. And that's one reason, I think, why he's an obvious choice for these embassies and an obvious choice for friendship for very distinguished Roman men.
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Judith Mossman
Is there ever a cringe factor in, I better watch my step because the Romans are looking at me with the. Or they're standing hanging above me with the boot. Is there ever that in his writing, do you think?
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Andrew Erskine
I don't think so. The passage that you refer to is advice to a young man who's thinking of going into politics in Asia Minor. And they had. I mean, I think it's partly there because there had been a revolt in Asia Minor which. Which had been put down. It's. But it's advice. It's not, the governor is a wicked person. It's just remember where you are. You know, remember the parameters with when within which you're going to be working. I don't think it's a cringe. I think it's a desire for moral education across the cultural divide, insofar as there is a cultural divide at this point.
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Judith Mossman
Andrew. Thank you. Andrew, can we turn to you, can you do a brief scan for the listeners on the lives that Plutarch included in this work and the range of time and places?
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Melvyn Bragg
Yes, I suppose the first thing to be aware of is the unusual character of these lives as biographies, because they are, as you said, parallel, so that they are paired. So we have one Greek paired with a Roman.
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Judith Mossman
How carefully does he put them together? Is it to do with their dates? Is it to do with what their exploits?
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Melvyn Bragg
It's not their dates. There's only one pair which is actually contemporary with each other. He tries to take themes, so something which he sees as a common theme. Ambition, frugality, even control of passions, also shared experiences because he's interested in. And one purpose for the comparison is to see how two different men respond to similar events, make similar kind of decisions, but maybe choose different directions in doing this.
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Judith Mossman
Can you give us a few examples?
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Melvyn Bragg
Take his Delphi that he's very fond of. An example might be the fact that Lysander, who's paired with Sulla. Lysander is a Spartan military commander. He shows respect to Delphi and he gives donations to it. Sulla, on the other hand, steals from Delphi, but they're both sort of important military figures. I mean, he's interested also, I think we need to say, in writing biography, it's not aimed at saying everything about someone's life. It's aimed at exploring these kind of moral issues, exploring the character of someone. So in the case of Sulla, we get quite a complicated person coming out of it. He is someone who is very successful, very militarily, very good, but at the same time he's extremely violent. And that is some which characterizes his actions. And his life ends with someone being brought into him to be strangled. And shortly after that sort of dies. And that's how Plutarch ends the life.
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Judith Mossman
Do we know why he wrote these lives and how they were received?
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Melvyn Bragg
He doesn't tell us sort of why he decided to compare Greeks and Romans, but he does explain, say that he's interested in seeing what's good and bad about people. He's interested in exploring the moral character of the figures that he's writing about. And he wants people to be. To learn from this. He gives an example at one point of saying he's going to write two lives which are people who are more reprehensible. I suppose this is Demetrius the Besieger and Anthony. And he says, I'm writing these lives because it's not just a matter of looking at those people who have been doing good things, but also those who are doing bad. So there's an educational aspect to this. He's trying to educate. Now, who he's trying to educate might be a question. Is it those people that Judith was talking about, elite Romans and Greeks that surround him? But it might also be he's interested in young men, men who might have a future in public affairs, because these lives are only of figures who are important militarily or politically. He doesn't write a life of Plato, for instance, even though it's one of his heroes and he's a philosopher.
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Judith Mossman
Paul, I'd like to go into. Take that a bit further. How he wrote this and why he picked only Greeks and to compare them only with Roman.
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Paul Cartledge
I know what you're saying. He didn't quite only pick Greeks because there is one life of a Persian, but not any old Persian. It was a feed, wasn't it writes the life of Artaxerxes ii, whom the Greeks nicknamed Minimon, he who is mindful. And I think the main reason was that Greeks were Greeks and everybody else was a barbarian until the Romans came along. And because of that quotation from Horace, Greeks thought kindly of Romans and they even allowed some Romans to compete at the Olympic Games, which was supposedly originally Greeks only. So Romans become honorary Greeks, but Persians never do.
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Judith Mossman
Why did they become one? Well, I think quite quickly. But the others didn't, the Carthaginians didn't, and so on.
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Paul Cartledge
That's right. There's another one there now, Aristotle, going back, he was one of Plutarch's main sources in all sorts of ways, both factually and philosophically. Well, Aristotle wrote a Politeia, a Constitution of Carthage, because he thought it was sufficiently similar to a Greek polis city state for the inclusion in his series to be useful. And I think that's the same mentality of comparison. The Greek word suncrysis means a together judgment. So it's not that you're comparing in the sense of like with like, but you're judging which is superior to which and which is like and which is unlike. So it's an exercise both for him. He actually says at one point, I wasn't absolutely sure I'd carry on writing lives, but I'm so enjoying doing it because I'm learning moral stuff. And as Andrew says, he's not interested in the great battles, the great events, what the Greeks called erga, what Herodotus wrote about, Thucydides wrote about for themselves. But if a commander or a king who is also a commander exhibits a certain quality or too much of it or not enough of it, over ambitious, and then he's interested. And I'll give you one example, Battle of Actium. Well, as a historian, what interests me is what impact did that have, the fact that Octavian won and Anthony lost on the future of the Roman world, Roman Empire? No, Plutarch is interested in what effect did it have on Anthony personally. And Anthony is not, in Plutarch's view, a model in any sense or exemplar. But his readers can learn from the way he conducted himself and the way he reacted to his fate. Because Plutarch's very interested in reversals of fortune, what Greeks call peripetia. And so Antony is particularly good. He's King of Egypt, married to Cleopatra, he loses the Battle of Actium. He's nothing. And of course he dies very soon after.
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Andrew Erskine
And in particular, he isolates himself from Cleopatra, he puts his head in his hands, won't talk to her, won't go near her, goes out to somewhere which is referred to afterwards as the Timonaeum, which is a lighthouse on an island, and he sits there in the depths of despair. And Plutarch makes this sort of extra internal little comparison between Anthony in his despair and Timon of Athens, which. Where Shakespeare gets Timon of Athens from someone who was very generous to his friends and whom they then all betray, and he ends up being so miserable that. Well, there are a whole series of sayings of Timon which are basically telling the world to just go away. And this is Anthony. It takes him some time to get over this and get back to Cleopatra, and then they embark on this sort of Liebestod in the life.
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Judith Mossman
Did he structure all these lives in a similar way? And if so, what's that structure?
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Andrew Erskine
Well, I think it's very important, what Andrew said before, that they are structured as pairs. Very often at the beginning of the first life in a pair, you will get this introduction where he will talk about why he's picked those two people. Sometimes he might speak more generally about his methods and then he'll go into the narrative of the first life. Probably worth saying that it's not obvious in ancient biography that you start at the beginning and go on to the end very much as Plutarch does. Suetonius, for example, doesn't really do that. He's got a basic chronology and then he puts things in under headings. I think the other thing to say about the structure is that he will skip over quite big chunks and then he'll really focus in and you'll get a big scene, a big, grand narrative event, which may be about something very small, like the taming of Bucephalus near the beginning of the. Alexander, for example. Wonderful scene. Elaborated in. Elaborated in great detail with Alexander the grumpy teenager, and Philip saying, oh, well, go on, you see if you can do any better then. And then, of course, irritatingly, he can. And he rides the horse back to his father and his father's in tears of pride. The. This is a marvellous way of setting up an awful lot of. What else? Of what happens in the life. He'll get to the end of the first life and then he'll move into the second. And at the end of the two there'll be this. Well, not necessarily always, but some kind of formal comparison which may actually be a bit disappointing compared with the wonderful narrative that we've had in the two lives.
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Paul Cartledge
Paul I just want to add in terms of originality, the notion of a parallelism, whether opposition or likening, does seem to be original to him. So some Romans had written biographies before him, Nepos and Varro, and the genre of biography goes back, can be traced back to encomium in the 4th century BC but he does seem to have really created a new genre. He's one of those few people who invent an entire genre of literature.
- [20:06]
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Judith Mossman
Can we look in more detail Andrew, at say, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar? They stand out. Can you tell us about this pairing.
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Melvyn Bragg
At I mean this pairing. I mean the, the Life of Alexander is one of the longest lives. And he begins it by mentioning the difference between biography and history. It's one of the sort of points where he explains what he, what he's going to be doing. And he says, he says he's not going to be talking about huge battles. Because sometimes you can get more idea of a character of somebody by just a joke or a remark that they make. And an example of this within the life of Alexander would be the battle of Issus, which is a major battle. It's the first time Alexander defeats the Persian king Darius. He covers it in a couple of sentences, but afterwards he then has Alexander arriving in the king's camp, finding the king's bath and saying, I'm going to take a bath in Darius bath. I'll get all the mud off the battle off me. And his companions say, no, it's not Darius bath, it's Alexander's bath. And this is done, I think, to set up what comes next, which is the discovery of the Persian women, the wife of Darius, Darius children in the camp, because implicitly from the bath scene, they are also Alexander's property. So then Alexander meets them and he tells them he will treat them with respect. And that allows Plutarch then to move on to talk about Alexander's self control. These are the most beautiful women in the world and he's leaving them alone, he's treating them with respect. And then we get other aspects of Alexander's self control. So the battle of Issus treated very, very briefly. And then several pages exploring Alexander's self control. Coming from this point, is it possible.
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Judith Mossman
To do something similar with Julius Caesar?
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Melvyn Bragg
At the beginning of the Life of Caesar, there's quite a well known story about how Caesar is captured by pirates, which he does include, but he expands it and he expands it in such a way as to tell us something about Caesar. The story is Caesar is captured by pirates when he's quite a young man. He's taken away and he tells the pirates that he will once the ransom is raised, because that's the idea. Pirates take you, people pay a ransom for you. He is going to come back and he is going to capture them and crucify them.
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Judith Mossman
And they let him sort of go, do they?
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Melvyn Bragg
They do. But the thing is, Plutarch describes how he is when he's with these pir that he engages with them, he plays with them, he reads his poetry to them, and if they don't appreciate it, he tells them they're barbarians, which also shifts him towards that Greek position, and he tells them he will crucify them when he gets back.
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Paul Cartledge
Is it in the Julius Caesar? Sorry, Andrew, but Caesar sees a sculpture of Alexander or another source.
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Andrew Erskine
It's not a sculpture. There's another story about him going through a little Alpine village and saying, I'd rather be first here than second in Rome.
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Melvyn Bragg
I think maybe what you're thinking of is when he's in Spain, he sits there and someone says, why are you looking so gloomy? And he says, I just realized that I'm already at this age. And Alexander had done so many great things, ruled the whole world, and I haven't done anything.
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Paul Cartledge
And he was weeping. So I used to use this in my lectures and say, well, I'm 60, whatever I was. You can imagine how I feel.
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Andrew Erskine
The punchline of Andrew's story gives you another line on Caesar, doesn't it, Andrew? Because the punchline is that when they ransom, he comes back and he makes sure they are all crucified and the joke is on them. And he says it always with a smile, I'll crucify you. I'll crucify you. And then he does it.
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Melvyn Bragg
So we get a sense of Caesar's charm, but also his ruthlessness and his thinking ahead.
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Judith Mossman
Yes, it is a good word here, isn't it? Yeah. Paul, to continue this with you, some of the pairs fit better than others. Can you give us an example of something that doesn't work?
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Paul Cartledge
Yeah, I happen to be working on a biography, if you can call it that. Life and Times of Pericles. And so Plutarch had the same thought, and he paired Pericles with a little thing about Pericles. So the long knife, like the Alexander, Pericles was an Athenian politician, and Plutarch was puzzled as to how come the Pericles he'd read about in Thucydides was so much not the Pericles that is being attacked by his contemporary comic poets on the stage. So he comes up with a schema whereby Pericles, in order to become influential, he acts like every other wretched demagogic politician. Having achieved a position of superiority, preeminence, he then acts the statesman which you find in Thucydides. So that's Plutarch's reconciliation of the two. But looking for a pair for Pericles, he obviously wanted to do Pericles. Who shall I pair him with? Well, he comes up with Quintus Fabius Maximus, who is the famous conctator, the delayer. Well, there's nothing specially delaying about Pericles. Pericles lives in a democracy. Fabius lives in A republic fighting a major enemy who's not Roman. Pericles is fighting Greek enemies. There's very few points of contact, except two. One is that they are both self reliant and self denying, so that they are morally admirable. Secondly, they are sniped at by the masses, the people, and they ride above, they rise above this sort of criticism to do what they want to do. But Fabius, it actually doesn't all go brilliantly at the end. And so he rather sort of declines. And as Judith has said, Plutarch typically writes little synchrosis, a comparison at the end. It's always if it's a Greek, Roman, it's after the Roman. And so the syncrisis comes after Fabius, whereas there's a famous one goes the other way. Coriolanus, Roman, Alcibiades, Greek. And so the comparison comes after Alcibiades. But I think it's a pretty poor choice of comparison. Pericles, Fabius, Judith.
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Judith Mossman
Is it obvious when he's departing from.
- [28:48]
Andrew Erskine
Known history in terms of genre? Biography is a comparatively new genre and he could just have sat down and written what you might call a world history. But I think that he wants to make it very personal. It is true that there are traces of biography in all the great Greek historians. Xenophon has long biographical passages about people, so does Herodotus. Actually, you get the characters coming through. And Thucydides as well. He does it then in the Nicias, say that he doesn't think that he can imitate Thucydides because Thucydides is beyond imitation. But I think he also finds it useful from a moral point of view. And Plutarch is a very moral writer, not moralistic, but truly wanting to use the examples from history to teach virtue, that he finds it easier to do that in the biographical format. He does have Nepos to draw on. And there's also, at this time, although there's not much evidence of contact between the two, there's also Tacitus who writes the biography of his father in law, Agricola. And again, that is very much from a moral standpoint, how to be a good person in bad times. So I think Plutarch is trying very much to emphasize the morality of things and he finds that easier to do in a biography than in what you might call a global history.
- [30:18]
Judith Mossman
Andrew?
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Melvyn Bragg
Yeah, we can look back at Plutarch's sources. We can see some of the sources he used because some of them do survive. We can also see that what he is doing is, I mean People used to think that he simply looks at there were existing biographies that he took and adapted. But it's quite clear now that what he did was he went through a huge amount of material. He was very learned, read an awful lot. And he read histories like Thucydides, Herodotus we mentioned. And what he's doing is he's extracting the material about the characters he's writing about from these. It's possible sometimes, most of a lot of the time we don't have those sources surviving. He uses a lot of sources, a lot. But in some cases like Thucydides or the historian Polybius, a Greek historian writing in the second century B.C.
- [31:07]
Paul Cartledge
Paul, can I just pitch a little bit more on historiography? There's one good reason why he wouldn't want to write like Herodotus, because he wrote possibly when he was younger. We're not absolutely sure of the order of his writings. A work called in Latin on the Malignity, the mean spiritedness of Herodotus. Now when he criticizes Herodotus, he does it for what I take to be rather poor reasons, including nationalism. In other words, Herodotus makes his fellow Plutarch's fellow Boeotians look bad, the Thebans are traitors, that sort of thing. But he shows that he knows what the conventions of writing history as opposed to writing what he wants to write, which is something he's making his own. So he could have done it, if you see what I mean. He very much chose not to.
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Andrew Erskine
And he knows Herodotus inside, backwards and in other places uses him extensively. But I think there's perhaps another point which is that he obviously feels from the beginning of the Alexander that it seems to suggest that he thinks that biography gives him a little bit more latitude than history. And there's one interesting passage in the life of Solon, the 6th century Athenian lawgiver, which I think is worth bringing out here. As for his interview with Croesus, Solon sets up the Athenian laws and then goes on his travels because obviously he's terribly unpopular at that point and he goes to see Croesus, the king of Lydia, as Plutarch wrote, some think to prove by chronology that this meeting is fictitious. But when a story is so famous and so well attested, and what is more to the point, when it comports so well with the character of Solon and is so worthy of his magnanimity and wisdom, I do not propose to reject it out of deference to any chronological canons, so called, which thousands are to this day revising without being able to bring their contradictions into any general agreement. Well, I think that a. That's very interesting because it essentially goes on to retell a story from Herodotus. Not exactly the same, but very closely. But it also suggests that he's playing fair with everybody. He's. He's saying, well, you know, this may not be true, but goodness, doesn't it tell you something interesting and he can just stick it in, which he might not feel able to do in history.
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Judith Mossman
Andrew, to take that on a bit, does he pass judgment on his subjects or does he let us make up our own minds, perhaps foreshadowing some of Shakespeare's?
- [33:44]
Melvyn Bragg
I think he tends to let us make up our own minds. What he does is. Shows us how complex these figures are. So it's not a straightforward kind of thing. And to some extent the pairing paralleling helps with that because he can, in a way, push people towards thinking certain things. I mean, the pairing of Athenian Aristides the giant with Cato the Elder. Now Cato, they're both famous for their kind of frugality, but Aristides comes out as being someone who is not interested in money, whereas Cato comes out as being someone who is maybe just stingy. The lifestyle can be the same, but the motivation can be different. He's not judgmental, but you might see judgments hidden in there. I think. I think it's in this life that he. He says about how Cato would sell off his old slaves because he doesn't need them anymore, they're old.
- [34:40]
Andrew Erskine
And he says, I wouldn't even sell an ox or an ass that had served me properly and well, would let it have a comfortable old age. He's clearly quite cross with Cato about that.
- [34:51]
Melvyn Bragg
You had elements of judgment coming in there.
- [34:53]
Judith Mossman
Yes, I mentioned Shakespeare earlier. There isn't time to go into the full range of that, but it deserves more than a mention. Can you tell us more about Shakespeare's debt to Plutarch? Yes, certainly, Judith.
- [35:06]
Andrew Erskine
I think in many respects it's a very significant debt. The first play in which it's obviously important is Julius Caesar. In 1599, Shakespeare will have accessed Plutarch by the translation of Thomas north, which was published first in 1579. It's described. He describes it, which is a read at school, which. No, I don't think so. Not at school and not in translation. Plutarch's not on the. The curriculum of the King Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford, which is what we. Where we think Shakespeare went. Although the records have been destroyed, but.
- [35:44]
Judith Mossman
So where did he get it from?
- [35:46]
Andrew Erskine
I think he went out and bought. Went into a second edition in 1595, so he could easily have picked it up. He clearly read it very closely. Julius Caesar is based on a combination of the life of Caesar and the life of Brutus. And for example, the scene, the famous scene in. In Julius Caesar where the spirit comes to. To him the night before Philippi, that's a very interesting one because verbally it's exactly the same as north. I am thy evil spirit, Brutus. Why then I shall see the at Philippi. But the actor who plays that part is always the. The actor who play who's played Caesar. So it's sort of Caesar dead, Caesar coming back. Whereas in fact in. In Plutarch and in the. The words of the scene, it's actually a form of bad luck that's visiting Brutus, his own bad luck.
- [36:47]
Paul Cartledge
Well, I've got one particular, if you like, bee in my bonnet, and it is Coriolanus, which Judith mentioned, because I'm almost tempted to say I think he never existed. The evidence for him is exceptionally poor of a historical kind. And he doesn't fit. His name is peculiar because Coriolanus should mean that he'd conquered some place called Corioli. And the story goes that he retreats there and he from there attacks the Romans on till his mother persuades him not to. So he's a traitor. And that's why he's likened to Alcibiades. But history it's not. And he. Therefore, it's one of those cases where. Why did he write a life of Coriolanus? Because he was so interested in all the emotions and the character formation and revelation. And there's a particular dimension which I think is very common to much of Plutarch, which is relations between an elite man and the masses. And Coriolanus is openly contemptuous. And Shakespeare picks this up. It makes it an exceptionally major part of the plot development of the play. Coriolanus is how he is contemptuous, especially of the tribunes of the people, who are the representative of the plebs. And Alcibiades, on the one hand, loves the masses in the sense that he plays them, and he needs their adulation. He's exceptionally narcissistic. But he goes in Thucydides to Sparta where he's a traitor and says, democracy. Well, it's just as we all know, folly, madness. Now, that's what the Spartans want to hear. But if the Athenian masses Hear that, they're not going to be so thrilled. So Alcibiades is a complex character, More complex. Coriolanus is rather two dimensional, to be perfectly honest, but he needed a parallel. What interests me is why he put Coriolanus before Alcibiades. So he so wants to do Alcibiades. Why did he not find a Roman that he could add on to Alcibiades? People have views on that.
- [39:08]
Melvyn Bragg
Perhaps maybe because. Because it helped him set up. Maybe if he's interested in Alcibiades, it helps him set up some of the issues to explore in Alcibiades.
- [39:16]
Paul Cartledge
Because that's the point, isn't it? The first life very often is less developed. There are exceptions. Pericles is one, Alexander's another, or it's as developed. But very often, as you say, the first life sets up the second. And that's, of course, comparison. It's not just parallel, it's head to head.
- [39:35]
Andrew Erskine
That's very explicit in the Demetrius Antony, where you have the Macedonian drama followed by the Roman Paul.
- [39:42]
Judith Mossman
Did Pluto change the way we saw the classical world?
- [39:45]
Paul Cartledge
Well, it's more, I think, people who used Plutarch and then that transformed the way we thought about the ancient world. And we're moving on, aren't we? Shakespeare, possibly move on to the. The Enlightenment, if we have time to consider that. So Voltaire, Rousseau and so on, they were very familiar with Plutarch. And I don't think we've mentioned Sparta yet. So I'm gonna, if I, if I might drag Plutarch's life of Lycurgus. He starts it by saying, there is not one thing asserted of Lycurgus by one source that is not contradicted by another. He cites 50, no fewer than 50 different authorities or sources for this life. So he in effect is saying, you cannot write a biography of this man in terms of. Of truth. So why am I writing it? Because I'm interested in law giving justice, Lycurgus character. And I'm going to compare it with Numa, the great religious legislator of the Romans and so on. And Rousseau in particular was a real fan, both of Lykogus and of Sparta. And he thought that everybody should be like the Spartan, self disciplined. And he said, lycurgus tied the Spartans to their laws, he sort of bound them, and he thought that was great. It's very odd, we think of Rousseau as liberationist in education in other respects, but for some reason he loved Plutarchs, Lycurgus, Judith I think there are other.
- [41:24]
Andrew Erskine
Respects as well, perhaps more frivolous ones. He just tells so many stories that have become, for one reason or another, the lifeblood of what people know about classical antiquity. The Bucephalus story, if there's one thing everybody knows about Alexander, is he has a horse. He had a horse called Bucephalus.
- [41:45]
Paul Cartledge
The sole source for that incident.
- [41:48]
Andrew Erskine
Sole source for that. Then Cleopatra being delivered to Caesar in the carpet. It's mentioned very briefly in Anthony and Cleopatra, but it's elaborated a lot more in the Burton Taylor Cleopatra and indeed in the Carry On Cleo. It's there, it's in everybody's background somewhere. He brings out these very vivid stories so clearly that he's somehow essential really to the way a lot of us see the classical world.
- [42:20]
Judith Mossman
I think coming to you, Andrew, has his influence never lessened? Has he been influential throughout the 2000 years?
- [42:27]
Melvyn Bragg
I think so, yes. I mean, maybe there's a kind of rediscovery of him at the time of sort of Shakespeare, 16th century influence on Machiavelli. And once the English translations, once it becomes available in. Well, I mean, English translation is translated from the French, so he's going around Europe at that time. So maybe there's an increase in influence from then onwards.
- [42:49]
Paul Cartledge
Yeah, Manuscripts we have of the Middle Ages, so before the age of printing, he was very, very popular then. And of course he's translated into Latin and so that's the common language of the Middle Ages.
- [43:03]
Judith Mossman
We're getting to the end now.
- [43:04]
Andrew Erskine
But Judith, it just occurred to me firstly, all these biographies are of men, with the partial exception of the Anthony, which goes on after Anthony's death for nine chapters about Cleopatra. But perhaps a more interesting point is that in the reception of Plutarch, Plutarch had a big, big influence on politics, on political writing, on thought, on drama and on English biography as well. Boswell's very, very keen on Plutarch. But the one idea that Plutarch created and developed, the parallelism, that's nowhere. No one else does that with a pulse until Alan Bullock, or I'm going.
- [43:43]
Paul Cartledge
To say Simon Hitler.
- [43:46]
Andrew Erskine
Hitler and Stalin.
- [43:49]
Paul Cartledge
Our colleague Simon Hornblow has just written Scipio and Hannibal.
- [43:52]
Andrew Erskine
Oh, has he? Excellent.
- [43:54]
Paul Cartledge
Yeah.
- [43:55]
Andrew Erskine
And that's. That's very parallel lines. That's very jolly because in the Renaissance there were people who made up lives of Scipio and Hannibal and also Scipio and I Permanondas, the first pair that Plutarch wrote, but which was lost.
- [44:08]
Judith Mossman
So.
- [44:08]
Andrew Erskine
But it. But that parallelism idea has, except for A very few counterexamples, it's just gone. And all the 18th century books called things like the British Plutarch and the French Revolutionary Plutarch, they're just collections of biographies, more of a moral nature, ordered chronologically. They're not parallel at all.
- [44:29]
Melvyn Bragg
And also you can add that if you want to go into a bookshop and buy the parallel lives. Yes, you can't. No, because they're all sold separately as a volume of Greek lives or a volume of Roman lives.
- [44:40]
Andrew Erskine
And the only exception is the Lerb Classical Library. It's because they tend to be used for ancient history and not read as themselves.
- [44:51]
Paul Cartledge
I'd add, just if I may, that Plutarch is, I think, not an egalitarian. And so he liked the Roman notion of what counts as superiority and inferiority. And he did not like radical democracy personally, of which there were occasional outbursts even under the Roman Empire. And so he was by and large very happy, as Judith said, about peace. Well, the peace went with top down elite rule. And Plutarch was happy with that.
- [45:27]
Judith Mossman
Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Julius Mossman, Paul Cartledge and Andrew Erskine. Next week, bars mania in the 18th century. How new archaeological finds inspired Josiah Wedgwood, John Keats and British consumers. Thank you for listening.
- [45:42]
Andrew Erskine
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [45:49]
Judith Mossman
What would you like to have said that you find you didn't have time to say?
- [45:52]
Paul Cartledge
There is a passage in Work we didn't talk much. His philosophy in detail, I.e. his Platonism, which he liked Aristotelianism, but he didn't like Stoicism and Epicureanism, which is very strange because they were the two dominant philosophies of his era. And there's a work he wrote, how you can't possibly live well according to the tenets of Epicurus. And in it he says, now is this tongue in cheek or is this other straight? Who could possibly prefer having sex with the most beautiful woman? He's very heterosexual. Plutarch. To reading about Pantheia, who is an invented character in Xenophon Saropaidia. She is an exemplar of the good wife. So she is a fictional Thy Moxina, who is Plutarch's real wife. Well, is that jokey? I mean, did he really not enjoy sex or did he so love reading? And I would add that the actual mechanics of reading. I did mention scrolls. It's exceptionally difficult. You unroll the scroll one way and then if you want to read it again, you have to unroll it again and re roll it and start again. So I have an image of Plutarch surrounded by scrolls, whereas we have maybe those of us of my age, books, Xeroxes. Yes, but Plutarch had to rely on his memory. And so one reason why the same anecdote would be told in slightly different wording is not only conscious variation, but simply as you and I, when we write, we don't always tell the anecdote in exactly the same terms or the same event. When we're writing, as I've done about the Battle of Issus, can you give.
- [47:55]
Judith Mossman
Give the listeners some idea of the range of his friendships, which is remarkable for a young man?
- [48:01]
Andrew Erskine
Well, absolutely. I mean, Mestris Florus managed to survive being an adherent of Otho in 69 AD, which is the so called Year of the Four Emperors, where after the fall of Nero, people squabbled about the fate of the Roman Empire and they managed to get through four emperors in one year. And he became someone who was a consul under Trajan and he also knew well Socius Senechio, who seems to have been of Spanish extraction and he was one of the Spaniards who were much favoured by the Emperor Trajan himself from Spain. So these are what you might call the senior ministers of the emperor. These are not second tier figures or provincial figures. And at the same time he's got lots of Greek friends, Greek plutocrats and. And also people that he evidently likes because they're well traveled, well read and entertaining.
- [49:07]
Judith Mossman
So why did he do it in the first place?
- [49:10]
Andrew Erskine
Why did he do it? I think there is an element of trying to get Greece and Rome to speak to each other. I think he doesn't like preferring one civilization over another for obvious reasons. He does see everything through a Greek lens. He is proud Greek, but he does, I think, value Rome as well. The peace and tranquility that it's created, the fairness, the laws, a lot of the things that the Romans admire about themselves. Plutarch admires about them too. So he's got these two great civilizations as he sees it. He does, I think, want to convince the Romans that Greece isn't just museum. The Greeks have been great statesmen, great military men, great conquerors, and they've got lessons to teach the Romans. But he also wants to convince the Greeks that the Romans have been through some of the same things that they've been through themselves. This whole element of civil war. For example, there are passages in the Greek lives for Instance at the end of the Flamininus, where Flamininus conquers the mountain Macedonians and basically, according to Plutarch, secures the freedom of Greece from Macedon. Flamininus is described as a Greek in language, a Greek in this, a Greek in that he's not, he's a Roman, but he's done something that's so magnificently beneficent for Hellas that he has to be seen as a Greek. Then on the other hand, when the Romans are suffering civil war, so in lives like the Brutus and the Pompey, you get Greeks sort of observing what's going wrong in Roman society and saying, oh, don't go there, don't do this, you know. So I think he thinks that both sides have a great deal to learn from one another, and that's why he's gone in for this remarkable structure.
- [51:09]
Judith Mossman
Was this completely original Paul, this work, these parallel lives?
- [51:13]
Paul Cartledge
Well, I think as far as we can tell, there's nothing anything much like it. As I say, there are possible pairings in some earlier writers in of a Roman kind, not a Greek. And the pairing itself is partly cultural, partly moral, partly dynamic comparison, partly for us, the reader to judge. And I'm with those who think that the sort of people who read him, remembering how difficult it is to read the scroll, are the sort of people who were leisured, wealthy, had slaves, possibly who read out to them, or they themselves had libraries. There weren't such things as public libraries. There were some great libraries, but they weren't exactly lending libraries. And that Plutarch was addressing elite people in an elite way. His language is extremely sophisticated and varied and rhetorical. I mean, I'd like to know personally who taught him, because as with, for example, Pericles, we know virtually nothing of the first 20 years of Pericles life. We know only from Plutarch about the first 20 years of Alexander the Great. I mean, ancients weren't that interested in biography, in the way we are, where we go into birth, immediate family circumstances, psychodynamic development. What Plutarch meant by character was what somebody stamped with. Literally, that's what the Greek means. And so events bring out what's already in there. You don't, as it were, develop by reacting to events.
- [53:01]
Andrew Erskine
Yes, although I think that's right. But I think you can also say that by monitoring, as it were, the reactions to events during the course of a life, you can trace a development in the character. So Alexander, at the end of his life, responds to external stimuli quite differently from the way he does a bit earlier in that life. That's partly because of the intervening experiences and the different circumstances. So it. It is. But it is different from modern post Freudian characterization. No doubt about that.
- [53:36]
Judith Mossman
Would you like to.
- [53:37]
Melvyn Bragg
Yeah, I think one maybe could say a little bit more about his attitude to the Romans and Greek culture. Yes, I'm interested because obviously he's taking Roman lives through from sort of the beginning of Rome through to Anthony. And the Romans are gradually becoming more and more familiar with Greek culture during this time. So that when he has the life of Cato, Cato the Elder is really quite hostile to Greek culture. And Plutarch makes a comment that even though he's hostile to. Will actually sort of become part of what it is to be Roman, this Greek culture. And later on, when he gets to the life of Cicero, he has Cicero go to learn rhetoric, learn oratory from a. On the island of Rhodes, and he learns from a man called Apollonius. Now, Apollonius can't speak Latin, so Cicero has to declaim in Greek. And at the end of his declamation, everyone sort of gathers around Cicero and says how wonderful it was, except for Apollonius, who's sitting looking very gloomy. And Cicero goes over to him and is concerned as to what the explanation is, had he really done something really wrong. And Apollonius says, you, Sisera, I admire and praise, but Greece I pity for her sad fortune, since I see that even the only glories that were left to US culture and eloquence now, thanks to you, belong to the Romans. And I think that kind of captures a little bit of what Plutarch himself thinks and a certain sadness that Plutarch has about this change. It's good that the Romans have appreciated this. But there's something missing from the Greeks now.
- [55:22]
Andrew Erskine
I think he thinks Cicero is quite a special Roman, the way he translates. He embarks on making Greek philosophy, putting Greek philosophy into Latin and translating all the Greek philosophical. Philosophical terms. And of course, Cicero himself does complain that Latin isn't really the best language to do philosophy in. So there's a little bit of give and take in all that. But, yes, that's a great story. I think the other person that he really thinks needs a bit of Greek culture is that is Marius, the great Roman general, who's fantastically successful militarily and fantastically successful politically, but he's a terrible thug and he ends up being much too sorry for himself. And Plutarch says at the end of his life, well, if only he'd Listened to Plato. He could have reflected on all the good things that had happened to him and cheered up a bit. So that's a paraphrase. But he's really. He does still think, I think, that the Greeks have got a lot to offer, so he's rolling with the times, I think. Would a bit more about Shakespeare be okay? Just to add that between 1606 and 1608, he wrote three plays which were based very closely on Plutarch Lives. Timon of Athens, based on one chapter of the Anthony. Anthony and Cleopatra based on everything from about chapter 25 onwards. And the Coriolanus, based on the life of Coriolanus. And that particularly in Anthony and Cleopatra, you can see how very closely he is following North. The famous speech about Cleopatra meeting Anthony at the Cydnus, the barge she sat in like a burnish throne, is pretty much a chunk of north turned into very beautiful iambic pentameters. And although Shakespeare does change things sometimes and to very good effect because he's a dramatist. So, for example, Shakespeare makes Cleopatra die on stage, whereas Plutarch conceals her death behind a pair of doors, which then open up and show you this splendidly clad figure already dead. They still both use the last words of Cleopatra's handmaid, Charmian. So in north, north writes, one of the soldiers seeing her angrily said unto her, is that well done, Charmian? Very well said she again. And meet for a princess descended from the race of so many noble kings in Shakespeare, that becomes what work is here, Charmian? Is this well done? It is well done and fitting for a princess descended of so many royal kings. Ah, soldier. You can see the kinship and also the interesting differences that putting it on the stage entails. I also personally think that it's possible that Plutarch's big scenes, which I mentioned earlier, were particularly attractive for someone who's trying to stage history. And for example, in Henry V, which is also 1599, same year as Julius Caesar, there's an extended scene where Fluellen compares the life of Henry V to the life of Alexander and mentions the death of Clitus. One of the great rather awful moments, the murder of Cleitus by Alexander in. In the Life of Alexander. And this comparison is developed entirely to Henry V's advantage. But the death of Cleitus is compared to Henry V sending away Falstaff. In the previous play in the series.
- [59:23]
Judith Mossman
We have Simon Tillotson is waiting to.
- [59:26]
Paul Cartledge
He's had enough.
- [59:28]
Melvyn Bragg
Does anyone want tea or coffee?
- [59:29]
Paul Cartledge
Melvin, do you want tea or coffee?
- [59:30]
Judith Mossman
No, I'll just have some more water, please.
- [59:32]
Paul Cartledge
Thank you very much.
- [59:33]
Melvyn Bragg
I'll have some tea as well, please.
- [59:35]
Andrew Erskine
Not for me. Thank you very much.
- [59:36]
Melvyn Bragg
Thank you very much. Thank you. In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production.
- [59:44]
Andrew Erskine
I'm Nicola Coughlan and for BBC Radio.
- [59:46]
Paul Cartledge
4, this is History's Youngest Heroes.
- [59:50]
Andrew Erskine
Rebellion, risk and the radical power of youth.
- [59:54]
Paul Cartledge
She thought, right, I'll just do it. She thought about others rather than herself.
- [59:59]
Andrew Erskine
Twelve stories of extraordinary young people from across history.
- [60:02]
Paul Cartledge
There's a real sense of urgency in them.
- [60:05]
Andrew Erskine
That resistance has to be mounted and.
- [60:06]
Paul Cartledge
It has to be mounted now.
- [60:08]
Andrew Erskine
Subscribe to History's Youngest Heroes on BBC Sounds.
- [60:14]
Judith Mossman
Simon's disappeared for the moment.
- [60:16]
Paul Cartledge
He's making more tea.
- [60:17]
Judith Mossman
Making more tea.
- [60:21]
Andrew Erskine
This is history's heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry.
- [60:37]
Ryan Seacrest
Sonny, you'll have as good a face.
- [60:38]
Andrew Erskine
As any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Hero. Subscribe to History's Heroes. Wherever you get your podcasts.