Plutarch

Plutarch (in ancient Greek: Πλούταρχος, Plútarjos, in Latin: Plutarchus), also known as Plutarch of Chaeronea or, after being granted Roman citizenship, as Lucius Mestrio Plutarchus (Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, Greek: Λούκιος Μέστριος Πλούταρχος) (Chaeronea, c. 46 o 50-Delphi, c.120), was a Greek historian, biographer and moralist philosopher.

Plutarch was born in Chaeronea (Boeotia), during the rule of the Roman Emperor Claudius. He made many trips throughout the Mediterranean world, including one to Egypt and several to Rome. Thanks to the economic capacity of his parents, Plutarch studied philosophy, rhetoric and mathematics at the Academy of Athens around the year 67. One of his teachers, often cited in his works, was Ammonius.

Some of his friends were very influential, such as Quinto Sosio Seneción and Minicio Fundano, both important senators and to whom he dedicated some of his last writings. Most of his life was spent in Chaeronea, where he was initiated into the mysteries of the Greek god Apollo. However, his duties as the elder of the two priests of Apollo at the Delphi Oracle (where he was responsible for interpreting the omens of the oracle's pythonesses) apparently occupied a small part of his time. He led a very active social and civic life, as well as producing a great deal of writing, some of which is still extant.

More moralist than philosopher and historian, he was one of the last great representatives of Hellenism during the Second Sophistry, when it was coming to an end, and one of the greats of Hellenic literature of all time.

Biography

Childhood and youth

Plutarch was born a little before the year 50 in Chaeronea, a Boeotian city with an illustrious past in Greek history, but at that time it was only a small town. He belonged to a wealthy family in the area and we know the name of his great-grandfather, Nicarco, because he cites him in one of his works lamenting the evils that the war brought to the area at the time of the battle of Accio (Antonio, 58). They also appear as characters from his dialogues his grandfather, Lamprias, who he presents as a cultured man in the table talks and who should still be alive well into his youth, his father Autobulus, fond of hunting and horses, as well as two brothers: Timon and Lamprias, the latter a priest at Lebadea. Lamprias was also an Aristotelian, while Plutarch was a Platonic. During his studies in Athens, directed by Ammonius, who was a professor at the Academy, he directed him to mathematics, although he preferred ethics; the title of a lost work by Plutarch seems to indicate this: Ammonius, or voluntary non-coexistence with evil. After completing his studies, he returned to Chaeronea, but the city required his services to deal with matters administrative with the Roman proconsul in Corinth.

Around 67 he began a study tour that took him to Alexandria and Asia Minor, where he probably visited Smyrna, then an important philosophical center of the movement known as the Second Sophistry.

He probably participated in the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Magistrate and ambassador

In addition to his duties as priest of the Delphic temple, Plutarch was also a magistrate in Chaeronea and represented his people on various missions to foreign countries during his early years in public life. His friend Lucius Mestrio Florus (from whom he took his Roman name: Lucius Mestrio Plutarco), a Roman consul, sponsored Plutarch to gain Roman citizenship and, according to the 19th-century historian VIII Jorge Sincelo, Emperor Trajan appointed him, already in the writer's old age, procurator of the province of Achaia. This position allowed him to wear the clothing and ornaments of a consul.

He traveled to Rome at least three times (at least once is known to have been shortly before Vespasian's death in AD 79; a second time around AD 88, and another time during the reign of Domitian, before the year 94). There he made friends in high sociopolitical spheres, such as Senator Gaius Julius Antiochus Epiphanes Filopapo (grandson of the last King of Commagene), the aforementioned senator Lucio Mestrio Floro and Quinto Sosio Seneción, the latter also a friend of Pliny the Younger and twice consul. under the rule of Trajan. Sosio Seneción was also a guest of Plutarch in Greece and the writer dedicated many of his works to him: the booklet On the progress of virtue, a part of Parallel Lives and the nine books of the Symposiaka or Desktop Talks, the latter put into writing at the request of Sosio Seneción himself. Despite these political contacts in the Roman Empire, Plutarch always decided living in the small town of Chaeronea like all his ancestors. Perhaps that is why no contemporary Greek writer mentions him. He traveled, yes, occasionally through Greece: the abundant autobiographical material contained in the Symposiaka indicates that he was once again in Athens, where he was adopted as an honorary citizen; in Patras, where he was received in turn by Socio Senecion; in Eleusis, in Corinth, in the baths of Oedepsus of Euboea, hosted by the sophist Callistratus, and in those of Thermopylae, where he related to the academic Favorino de Arles; The news of the death of one of his daughters reached him in Tanagra, from where he wrote a Consolation to his wife. In his native city he was telearch and eponymous archon, perhaps beotarch, but mostly he was at Delphi as a priest of Apollo from about AD 95. C. To his oracle he dedicated works such as Of the syllable «e» in the temple of Delphi , Of the oracles in verse and Of the cessation of the oracles . Since Greek was enough for him in Rome, where the upper class was bilingual, he did not feel the need to learn Latin well until he was quite old, when he needed documentation for his historical works, "late and very advanced in age", as he wrote. And he did not learn it well: he cites few Latin works, and frequently does not understand them well; among the poets, he quotes only Horace, and rarely, and he seems to have completely ignored Virgil and Ovid. Happily married to Timoxena, he had four children by her, of whom only one survived, Autobulus. His nephew Sextus would become tutor to Emperor Marcus Aurelius. The Suda encyclopedia says that Emperor Hadrian's predecessor Trajan made Plutarch procurator of Illyria, although many historians consider this unlikely, as Illyria was not a procuratorial province., and Plutarch surely didn't speak the language either. According to the Chronicle of Eusebius of Caesarea, revised by Saint Jerome, he was still living in 120 AD. C; Artemidoro, in his Oneirocriticism , forty years later, writes that shortly before he died he dreamed that he ascended to heaven led by Hermes.

He wrote a lot. In the so-called "Lamprias catalogue" (apparently prepared by one of his sons) 227 titles are listed, of which approximately half have come down to us, divided into two groups: a miscellaneous one with a predominantly moral content, the Moralia , and another biographical one, the Parallel Lives.

Parallel Lives

Edition of the Parallel lives de Plutarco de Ulrich Han, 1470.

His best-known work is Parallel Lives, a series of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, drawn up in pairs in order to compare their common moral virtues and flaws. Probably the model for him was the De viris illustribus of the Roman Cornelius Nepote. The surviving Lives contain twenty-three pairs of biographies, each pair comprising one Greek life and one Roman life, as well as four mismatched lives. As he himself explains in the first paragraph of his Life of Alexander, Plutarch's aim was not so much to write stories as to explore the influence of character (whether good or bad) on the lives and destinies of famous men.

We do not write stories, but lives; it is not in the most noisy actions where virtue or vice are manifested, but many times a passing situation, a saying or a nanny serve more to declare a character that battles in which thousands of men die, numerous armies and places of cities. Therefore, in the way that the painters take to portray the similarities of the face and that expression of eyes in which the character and character are most manifested, taking care of little of everything else, so it must be granted to us that we tend more to the signs of the spirit and that therefore we draw the life of each one leaving others the facts of great appearance and the battles... (“Vida de Alejandro”, I).

Thus, their Lives are developed narratively with the purpose of explaining the ethos, the human character. Plutarch's hero is flesh and blood and sustains within himself the struggle between virtue and fortune, or, as Leopold von Ranke puts it, "the conflict between the general and the personal". to a work like this to geniuses like Montaigne, Shakespeare, Quevedo or Rousseau. But some of the most interesting lives, such as the one that talks about Heracles and Philip II of Macedonia, no longer exist, and the entire text is not available for many of the rest, so there are important gaps, distortions and interpolations of later writers.

Undoubtedly, Plutarch is a great storyteller; he dominates the sense of mystery and the dramatic, and his great virtue is to make us sharers in his passionate and inexhaustible curiosity, alive thanks to the fact that while remaining a scholar he reduces all pedantry to a minimum. Carles Riba writes thus:

No reader of the Parallel lives He will never forget the escape and murder of Pompeyo, the steps of Caesar from the last night until his death at the foot of the statue of the rival magno, the farewell of Casio and Bruto, the watch of this before Philippi, the show of Antonio, defeated and wounded, lynched to the inaccessible tower of Cleopatra, who awaits him to die, the encounter of the horrific Alejandro domando a Bucéfalo, Arístides enrolling his own name in the shell of the rustic who wants to condemn him, Sertorio giving a lesson of concord with the experiment of the two ponies, Agesilao mounted on a cane to have fun for his children, Cesar with his friends in the miserable Alpine village, where he also affirms his ambition...

From a purely historical point of view, Plutarch's Parallel Lives are an important source to learn some details about Sparta. His Life of Alexander is one of five surviving tertiary sources on the Macedonian conqueror, and includes anecdotes and descriptions of incidents not found in other sources; but it is not complete because of a gap at the end that has also erased the beginning of Julius Caesar's. The portrait of him by Numa Pompilius, one of the Roman kings, also contains unique information about the early Roman calendar and the life of Pyrrhus is crucial because no other historian conveys information about some of the events in which he was involved. As for his sources, he cites a hundred, but probably used summaries and repertories; it seems that he directly read Ctesias, Dinon, Heraclides of Cime, Timagenes of Alexandria, Theophanes of Mytilene and Asinius Pollio; he often quotes from memory, which is why it is sometimes inaccurate or incorrect, apart from his poor and late command of Latin for sources in that language. In addition, as was the custom in ancient times, he inadvertently assumed much indirect information from third parties as true, although he was able to treat his sources critically especially when it came to legendary personalities such as the Greek hero Theseus, the mythical founder of Rome Romulus. or the legendary Spartan legislator Lycurgus. And so at the beginning of the "Life of Theseus" he points out:

When with the writing of the Parallel lives I came to the limit of time accessible to the truthful and transient account for the story that comes to the facts, on the purpose of the oldest it was correct to say: "The thing beyond, fantastic and pathetic, is inhabited by poets and mythographers, and no longer offers assurance or evidence." (“Teseus”, 1, 1-3)

Other works

The Moralias

Moralia1531.

The surviving remains of his work are collected under the title Moralia (translated as Obras morales y de costumbres). The title was not given to him by Plutarch himself, but by the Byzantine monk Maximus Planudes, who collected various scattered works in the XIII century. of the author, and even others considered spurious today, under this label. This is an eclectic collection of seventy-eight tracts on ethics (De virtue morali, De virtue et vitio, De laude ipsius, De garrulitate, De vitando aere alieno, De adulatore et amico, De amicorum multitudine, the fragmentary Epistle on the friendship, Amatorius, Praecepta coniugalia, Consolatio ad uxorem, De fraterno amore); considered realistically and in which the intellectual superiority of the Greeks and the political superiority of the Romans are contrasted (Praecepta gerendae rei publicae, Ad principem indoctum, An seni res publica gerenda sit); on philosophy and science (Platonicae quaestiones, De anima; on Aristotelian scholarship — De facie in orbe lunae, De primo frigid—, rejecting extreme Stoicism —De Stoicorum repugnantibus, De communibus notitiis aversus Stoicos— and Epicureanism —Non posse suaviter vivi secundum Epicurum, From latent living—); on theology (De E apud delphos, De Pythiae oraculis, De defectu oraculorum, De sera numinis vindicta, De Iside et Osiride, De Daedalis Plataeensibus, preserved in fragments); on zoology (Bruta animalia ratione uti, De sollertia animalium De esu carnium I-II); on pedagogy (Plutarch maintains that the foundation of education is reading and writing and understanding the world of children (De audiendis poetis, De audiendo); on criticism and erudition (Commentarii in Hesiodum, Quaestiones in Arati signis, preserved in fragments, De comparatione Aristophanis et Menandri epitome, De Herodoti malignitate, De mulierum virtue, collection of historical anecdotes, Aetia Romana, Aetia Graeca); declamatory type (An virtus doceri possit, De fortuna); on history (De Alexandri Magni fortuna aut virtue, De fortuna Romanorum, De gloria Atheniensium) and miscellaneous themes (Quaestiones conviviales, in nine books, the most extensive Plutarchean work, conceived as a banquet on the most diverse subjects; Septem sapientium convivium, an imaginary banquet of gnomic tradition between the ancient Seven Sages who discuss and enunciate their famous maxims).

The form of these booklets is also variable and vacillates between dialogue, stoic-cynical diatribe, treatise or epidictic discourse, what we would call essay in modern times. One of the most important is On Isis and Osiris , since it is the main extensive document on the cult of Osiris and Isis and it is also possibly the last work of Plutarch, for which reason it somehow synthesizes the thought of the. Under the name Pythian Dialogues three of these booklets are grouped: The E of Delphi, The Oracles of the Pythia and The Disappearance of the oracles were surely composed while he was in the service of the temple of Apollo at Delphi. The theme of these dialogues is related to this magical and dark world: the evolution of oracular responses, rituals and monumental ornamentation, and the decline of oracular venues. On Fortune or the Virtues of Alexander the Great is an important source on the life of the great conqueror. On Herodotus's Malice could constitute, like the sentences on Alexander's deeds, a rhetorical exercise and criticizes what he sees as the systematic deviation in Herodotus' work. There are also more philosophical treatises such as the aforementioned On the Decline of Oracles, On the delay of divine revenge or On peace of mind. In addition, his legacy includes lighter works such as Odysseus and Grilo, a humorous dialogue between Homer's Odysseus and one of Circe's enchanted pigs. The Moralia were composed first, while the writing of the Lives occupied most of the last two decades of Plutarch's life.

Some editions of the Moralia include many works that today are recognized as apocryphal. Among these are Lives of the Ten Orators (biographies of the ten greatest orators of ancient Athens, based on Caecilius of Caleacte), The Doctrines of the Philosophers and About the music. These works are attributed to a "pseudo-Plutarch", although the actual authorship is, of course, unknown. Although the opinions and thought recorded in these works do not seem to belong to Plutarch and may come from a later time, they are also texts of classical origin with historical value.

Issues

There are a couple of minor works compiled into the Questions, one on obscure details of Roman customs and worship, Roman Questions (Αίτια Ρωμαϊκά), and another on the same theme in Greece, Greek Questions (Αίτια Ελληνικά).

Influence of Plutarch

Hispanic Literature

Philosopher statue, perhaps Plutarco. Archaeological Museum of Delfos, Greece.

The first translation into a European vernacular language of Plutarch's work is due to the Grand Master of the Order of San Juan de Jerusalén Juan Fernández de Heredia (ca. 1310-1396) who ordered the translation into the Aragonese language in 1389 great majority of the Lives from an intermediate version that Demetrius Talodique made to the Byzantine Greek; this version was soon rendered into Italian and circulated among avid Italic humanists of the 15th century. Later Alfonso de Palencia translated all the Parallel Lives in 1491 into Spanish from a Latin version, including some composed by Italian humanists to fill in the gaps (those of Hannibal, Scipio, Plato and Aristotle, plus that of Pomponio Attic which is by the Roman Cornelius Nepote and that of Evágoras which is by Isocrates). The Spanish Protestant humanist Francisco de Encinas or Enzinas translated part of them and dedicated them to Carlos V in 1551. Diego Gracián de Alderete translated the two that were missing a Enzinas and also the Moralia, a work that appeared in print in 1533, 1548 and 1571. Before that, Fray Antonio de Guevara had translated the works of the Queronense and other diverse translators (Diego de Astudillo, Pedro Simón Abril, Juan Páez de Castro, Gaspar Hernández) poured loose works.

Quevedo made a glossed translation of the «Life of Marco Bruto», which is one of his best works and a monument of conceptualist prose. In the XIX century, the translation of the Lives of Antonio Ranz Romanillos became famous, which was has been reprinted to the present day. He followed the Greek text of Bryan's English edition (1729), which is excellent, but was unaware of Reiske's important critical edition published in Leipzig (1774-1782). Ranz was helped in addition to the Latin translation of Cruserius and the French of Dacier. In Catalan there is one prepared by Carles Riba (1893-1909).

French Literature

The French translation of Parallel Lives by Jacques Amyot (1559) was of capital importance for European humanism, giving the Chaeronense an extraordinary popularity, so much so that it can be said that without it Montaigne would not have been able to write his Essais. Already in the 18th century they were translated again by André Dacier, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau studied as a child not only the Lives, which he learned by heart, but the Moral Treatises, and he took notes and extracts from them. He especially admired the description of the laws and virtues of Sparta and longed for a political reform that began with a moral reform according to the old Spartan civic values; during the years of the French Revolution no author was more popular than Plutarch, and tragedies inspired by his heroes were written.

Anglo-Saxon Literature

Plutarch's writings had an enormous influence on English literature. As early as around 1535 Thomas Elyot translated The Education or Bringing up of Children. Shakespeare paraphrases in many of his plays parts of Thomas North's translation of Parallel Lives since Amyot's famous 1579 French translation, and Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra and Timon of Athens corroborate it. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists were heavily influenced by the Moralia (Emerson wrote a very brilliant introduction to the fifth volume in his 19th century edition XIX of the Moralia). Boswell quotes comments on the writing of Plutarch's Lives in the introduction to his own Life of Samuel Johnson. His admirers list includes Ben Jonson, John Dryden, Alexander Hamilton, John Milton and Sir Francis Bacon, as well as such disparate figures as Cotton Mather and Robert Browning.

Eponymy

• The Plutarch lunar crater (according to its English graph) carries this name in its memory.
• The asteroid (6615) Plutarchos also commemorates his name.