Brutal. Absolutely brutal. Greek and Roman history were saturated with violence, blood, and gore. People who naively believe that past times, particularly in antiquity, were simpler or more meaningful would benefit from reading Plutarch’s Lives before making such a statement regarding values.
The Greek author Plutarch was primarily a philosopher concerned with the branch of ethics. This epic anthology of essays reads more like historical biography, though. Each chapter tells the life story of a Greek or Roman general or politician, with the Persian Artaxerxes being the sole exception. These biographies are paired in an unaltered succession of Greeks and then Romans in that respective order throughout the whole collection. At the end of each pairing, a short comparison of the two regarding their strengths and weaknesses provides an evaluation to explicate which of the two proved to be more virtuous. As a work of ethical philosophy, Lives does not stand on its own very well. This is mostly because the evaluations are short and sketchy while rarely every coming to any strong conclusions while the biographical histories are bulky and overloaded with detail. The ethical comparisons are the weakest parts of the book,
So be it. Lives may not be a profound ethical treatise but as a source of history it proves to be a rich and rewarding read. At the beginning we are treated to writings about the early days of Athens and Sparta alongside the foundations of Rome. This includes the classic story of the Rape Of the Sabine Women. The first third of the book mostly details battles, wars, and minor military skirmishes with the central theme being about the generals who led these melees. This first part of the book is exciting at first but quickly becomes redundant in its descriptiveness; there are only so many battles that armies can fight on foot and horseback, using swords, shield, and arrows before they all start sounding the same. Aside from classical warfare strategies, many of which resemble plays in modern team sports, scattered bits of interesting trivia do emerge. For instance, it becomes easy to see why the eagle was adapted as a symbol of Roman military superiority since their warriors would line up with a left wing and a right wing to swoop down on their enemies, just like a bird of prey. Plutarch also heaps praise on the head of one Greek general who invented the iron helmet because wearing such a heavy headpiece would cause a combatant’s sword to break when striking the head of their opponent. This sounds like a good idea on the surface but the modern reader has to consider the wisdom of wearing a twenty pound piece of metal on their head in the sweltering Mediterranean climate. Being smacked with a sword while wearing an iron helmet could not have felt pleasant either. This was centuries before aspirin and acetaminophen were invented too. Warfare in those days could not have been much fun and from the looks of it, that was the primary occupation for men in those days.
Further into the book, the historical themes begin to vary. As the Greek and Roman Empires expand outwards, the lifestyles and personalities of their leaders get described in greater detail. The most familiar names like Cicero, Cato the Younger, Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Antony are the literary high points of the Lives. Alexander of Macedon does more than inherit Greece from his father, Philip, who conquered the territory; he also marches across Persia and India, expanding the eastern border of the Greek Empire. Alexander’s conquest of India is curious. There were a few small battles here and there, some diplomacy and negotiations every now and then, but mostly he rode around with a fleet of boats, entering village after village to declare each one his own territory. You just have to wonder how seriously his new subjects took him after he left and never came back again.
One of the great elements of Plutarch’s writings is the way he points out multiple perspectives on individuals and events. Along the way, he mentions conflicting details as written in different source materials, but this element of shifting perspectives is really driven home in the telling and re-telling of the life of Julius Caesar. The story of his turn from senatorial consul to dictator, along with the transition of Rome from a republic to an empire, is examined from the points of view of Pompey, Cicero, Antony, Brutus, and Cato the Younger, among others, each in their respective biographies. Thereby we see how he could have been taken as a hero of the people or as a power-hungry tyrant depending on who you ask. The idea that news is always biased is not a contemporary notion as Plutarch demonstrated this principle here, possibly also keeping the doors open to moral relativism for future generations since the ethics of Caesar’s assassination are ambiguous from the standpoint of those involved in the plot.
Yet another interesting aspect of Plutarch is his chronological overview of the Greek and Roman Empires. This was not his intention in writing the Lives but the historical patterns emerge nonetheless. If you are inclined to think of the two ancient superpowers in terms of stages succeeding one another, you get a different picture from the way the biographies are paired and contrasted. It would be more accurate to say that Greece and Rome ran along parallel paths until the Greeks were absorbed into Macedonia and then began expanding outwards. As they began to decline, Rome ascended and the two merged into one another. Plutarch himself was a product of this historical process being an Athenian who moved to Rome and based his writings on research he did from books kept in that dominant city of the Italian peninsula. By the end of this book, the Greek and Roman armies are so intertwined, it is difficult to tell them apart. An interesting pattern emerges in Rome too. As the Romans expand westwards into Gaul and Spain, then eastwards across Turkey, called Asia in these histories, and further into Parthia, Armenia, and Syria, the city of Rome begins to implode with lots of civil disturbances, assassinations, and violence between factions competing for power. The idea that Rome fell as a result of barbarian invasions does not stand up so strongly when it becomes obvious that localized, civil strife did a lot to weaken the republic from the inside before the Goths or Vandals showed up on the scene long after Plutarch died.
Despite its relevancy to historical narratives, Plutarch’s Lives, with its glut of information, may not always be an easy read for modern audiences. While he attempts to write biographies of each personage, this writing is not biographical in the way we understand it in today’s world. This was written long before psychology was conceived of as a means of interpretation so what we get are examinations of character traits and behaviors, mostly looked at through a lens of moral judgment. While there are a few comments on subjective motivations here and there, hinting at what we would consider an inner life by today’s standards, the people of this book act as if they are pushed and pulled by instincts and impulses while the finer elements of their psychology are projected outwards into the machinations of the gods, some of which are revealed to them by auguries and divination. As we now know, such fortune telling is far from an exact science. It makes for interesting poetics though. The writing is often long-winded too but this could be a fault of the translator’s.
Plutarch’s Lives is a tough and masculine book, permeated with violence from beginning to end. Every pages details warfare on both land and sea, along with governmental overthrows, torture, punishment, assassinations, and suicides. Most of the descriptions are not quite as graphic as what Homer wrote in The Iliad, but Plutarch does have his vivid moments of sadistic fascination. You can easily get the impression that the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean did little more than fight and kill each other, but it would be unwise to overstate that idea since the Greeks and Romans contributed so much to the evolution modern culture, the humanities, engineering, and politics that we should not forget the enormous debt we owe to them for these advancements, made when people had so much less than what we have now. Overall, Plutarch is not for the general or casual reader, nor for the faint of heart, but his Lives are a real treasure for those with an honest curiosity about the ancient world.
Plutarch. Lives, translated by John Dryden. The Modern Library, New York.
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