SOURCE: Doyle, Brian. “The Soul of Plutarchos.” American Scholar 69, no. 3 (summer 2000): 111-22.

[In the following essay, Doyle provides a character sketch of Plutarch, discusses his portrayal of Mark Antony, and praises him for his ability to render the essential qualities of his subjects.]

As with most of the greatest writers in Western history—Homer, Shakespeare, the gaggle of anonymous geniuses who wrote the Bible—we don't know much about Plutarch of Greece in the usual biographically fussy way. Born in the year 45 a.d. or so, died around the year 120 at perhaps seventy-five years of age, he lived an unimaginably long life at a time when living to fifty was a triumph. He was a student in Athens when the emperor Nero visited there in the year 66; a traveler to Egypt; a visitor for a long period in Rome, apparently on civic business, although he also gave a number of popular lectures as a sort of visiting professor of history and ethics. Back home in Greece and his little native village, Chaeronea, in Boeotia—which he was famously loath “to make less by the withdrawal of even one inhabitant”—for the rest of his many years, he wrote perhaps fifty books while serving as mayor, priest, and inspector of public works (he remarks that his neighbors tease him for “standing by and watching while tiles are measured out and stone and mortar brought up”). There is no firm record of his death, no famous funeral oration by a friend, no deathless stone under which we might find his dignified bones; but if ever a man was surely buried where he was born, it was Plutarch—in his own language, Plutarchos—and Greece's soil is richer for his final return to it.

Thus the skeleton of his life. But let us enflesh him, bring back something of the personality and character of the man, as he saved so many notable men of his time (alas, few women, mostly warrior queens) from desiccated hagiography.

His wife was Timoxena, and they had at least five children, four sons and a daughter. The oldest son died; a second son, “our beautiful Charon,” died; Autobulus and Plutarch the younger lived to manhood; and little Timoxena, “born to your wishes after four sons,” as he wrote to his wife, “and affording me the opportunity of recording your name, and a special object of affection,” died while yet a child and while her father was traveling. His wife sent messengers, and Plutarch was confronted with the awful news as he arrived in the town of Tanagra.

Imagine our man at this juncture, dusty and tired, an old man by the gauge of his day—he's now a grandfather—standing at the gates of the city. He has lived long and hard, studied under the great Egyptian philosopher Ammonius in Athens, traveled to the great capitals of the known world, worked in Rome, the heart of the empire, where he befriended the best and brightest men of his day. Now, retired from imperial fame and happily become a local lion, he's on the road, perhaps on a lecture tour to scrape up some appearance fees or on a trip to Athens on civic business, to haggle over taxes or tiles. And as he walks in the gate, a man rushes up to him and tells him, Plutarch, news from Chaeronea, your little daughter Timoxena is dead.

A taut moment there at the gate, the day sliding into evening, the messenger silent, waiting; and Plutarch's body sagging, dust in his throat, a sudden sharp pain in his belly. After a minute he clears his throat and thanks the messenger, hands him a coin. The man walks off, turning twice to look with rising pity on the famous Plutarch, now bereft of his last-born child and only daughter, the daughter he held alive in his heart only moments before, thinking of her as he walked toward Tanagra, imagining her finishing her bath that afternoon in Chaeronea.

“Plutarch to his wife, greeting,” begins the letter Plutarch wrote from Tanagra, possibly that night. “The messengers you sent to announce our child's death, apparently missed the road to Athens. I was told about my daughter on reaching Tanagra.” He discusses the funeral, and his conviction of their mutual desire that arrangements be made “apart from all excess and superstition, which no one would like less than yourself. Only, my wife, let me hope, that you will maintain both me and yourself within the reasonable limits of grief. What our loss really amounts to, I know and estimate for myself. But should I find your distress excessive, my trouble on your account will be greater than on that of our loss. I am not a stock or stone, as you, my partner in the care of our numerous children, every one of whom we have brought up ourselves at home, can testify.”

The good character and sweet ways of their late daughter make their loss especially painful, he continues, “yet why should we forget the reasonings we have often addressed to others, and regard our present pain as obliterating and effacing our former joys?” And after recalling with admiration the “perfect order and tranquillity” of their home immediately after the deaths of their older boys, Plutarch concludes by repeating his conviction that the human soul is immortal, and that we are sustained in loss by the ancient nurturing rivers of clan and religion.

A most curious and revealing letter, this. Let us imagine Plutarch scratching it out, the scritch of his pen and the quiet snapping of an evening fire the only sounds in the room; below him, in the street in the gathering dark, the small sounds of a town closing down for the night. Plutarch has bathed and eaten lightly after his long journey but refrained from proffered wine, mindful of the solemnity of the moment and the hole in his heart; and now he sits sadly by the fire, collects pen and paper, and—and writes at length about the necessity of a tranquil funeral and the avoidance of excessive lamentation? What kind of cold fish is this?

This kind of fish: character was everything to Plutarch, both in his own life—in which he aspired to unrelenting service and rose as high as governor of all Greece and honorary consul of the Roman Empire (according to the reports of Syncellus and Suda) and priest of Apollo at Delphi—and in his literary work, all of which was made, as he said, to explore the souls of his subjects. “My design is not to write histories, but lives,” he begins his account of Alexander the Great.

And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavor by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated of by others.

But I say that Plutarch did treat of the most weighty matters, those being the hearts and characters of human beings, and that the things he says he will not account—although of course he does account them, in voluminous detail—are of much less weight. It is a matter of historical interest, for example, that Alexander hewed such a vast empire in so few years while so young, and his violent exploit certainly influences and informs modern boundaries and nations in Europe and the Near East; but what do we learn of Alexander by the record of the people he defeated, or by a careful reporting of the military means by which his victories were won? What do we learn of ourselves? That we are capable of ferocious ambition and murder, that we might commit any act for power and glory? This, from experience, we knew.

Plutarch, however, tells us of the desperately thirsty Alexander who refuses water because there is not enough for all his men—the same Alexander who in a drunken rage spears his friend Clitus through the heart for disagreeing with him; of the munificent Alexander who casually gives away a hundred fortunes to his soldiers—and the bloody Alexander who casually has a hundred prisoners killed to mark the festive occasion as he enters Asia; of the Alexander who as a boy was so temperate with bodily pleasures that “he was with much difficulty incited to them”—and the Alexander who as a man, says Plutarch bluntly, is so “addicted to drinking” that he dies of a roaring fever after a long bender; of the Alexander so little concerned with money that he gives away all his wealth—and the Alexander so concerned with fame that when abandoning a battlefield on the Ganges he deliberately leaves larger-than-life weapons and gear to be found and wondered over; of the Alexander so keenly sensitive of his status as future emperor that he will footrace only with kings—and the Alexander who, at the height of his all-conquering fame, tells his friends that if he were not the peripatetic lord of the known world, he would choose to be the penniless and sedentary philosopher Diogenes.

In short, Plutarch gives us the man's tumultuous heart, even as he chronicles the man's relentless march through life. And the richer tale, the one that truly educates, is of Alexander grappling not with the many nations and peoples he attacks, but with his own incendiary ambition, personal demons, and awful success.

In a sense, Plutarch is the first great modern writer. He is absorbed by the stories of great men as clues to character (great Greek and Roman men only, actually, no Africans or Gauls or Teutons or Egyptians or other members of the Roman Empire need apply); but he is more absorbed by their actions as revelation of the personal than as parable for the public, despite his avowals that the whole thesis of the Lives was moral uplift. “Using history as a mirror, I try somehow to improve my own life by modeling it upon the virtues of the men I write about,” he writes. “In the study of and writing of history, we receive in our souls memorials of the best. … This enables us to drive away and put far from us all the base or corrupt or ignoble influences produced by our associations with those with whom circumstances compel us to mingle. Thus we are enabled to discipline our thoughts and to direct them toward the finest examples of conduct.”

I believe him about his motivation; he was a priest, after all, and a man utterly convinced that virtue—personal, civic, and religious—was the keystone of civilization. But I also think that he was too good a literary artist to be satisfied with sermonizing, and that while his overarching theme was the importance of the moral life, the power and allure of his narrative was (and is) his fascination with character, the pressures that formed and revealed it, and the grace with which those pressures were endured.

Homer was after character, too, to a degree—the Odyssey is in part a character study of its hero, and a powerful image of Odysseus (broad sailor-shoulders, salt-cured face, hawk glare, hard head) stays with a reader for a lifetime. But Homer was primarily after the sweep of historical narrative, whereas Plutarch wanted to explore one man at a time. It may well be that Plutarch's great mission was to leave behind a series of moral lessons, a lively catechism—this is a man, after all, who also wrote a collection of homilies called the Morals, as well as three lost books about the soul—but the prime virtue of his Lives is not so much their moral uplift as their uncanny personality.

Plutarch's lost books, I note with heartfelt regret, include not only those three volumes on the soul but four books of commentaries on Homer, which certainly must be accounted among the greatest lost treasures of Western criticism. Our contemplating the whole awful list of his missing books (culled from a list of all Plutarch's works attributed to his son Lamprias) is, as John Dryden noted, something like a merchant perusing a bill of freight after he has lost the ship that carried the goods. Among the literary creations no longer in the world, or else hidden in crevices and cellars not yet unearthed, are Plutarch's eight books on Aristotle; six books of essays; four books on history; three books of fables; three books on sense; three books on justice; three books on cities; two books on politics; two books of proverbs; and lives of Hercules, Pindar, Augustus, Claudius, Nero, and Caligula, among others. The mind reels, partly at lost possibility—Plutarch on Augustus, what a match of fine emperor and fine essayist!—but more at the man's sheer industry, at the eye-popping range of his thought, and at the vagaries of history that cast off six books of Plutarch's essays while preserving the muck that infests much of the modern bookshelf.

My own favorite in the Lives is the story of Antony, in which Plutarch's art rises to its zenith. Here he has a most remarkable man to explore, a peculiar man in whom swirl all sides of the human character, a man brave and craven at once. And all this courage and cowardice and lust and love is set against the most dramatic and colorful background imaginable—a battle between two mighty generals for the whole Roman Empire, a brilliant and power-hungry enchantress (Cleopatra), the betrayal of friends and nation—the whole nine yards of melodrama and B movies, absent only a swelling soundtrack and Technicolor. Plutarch must have rubbed his hands with glee when it came time to tell of Antony.

“A very beautiful youth,” he says of the boy Antony, “but by the worst of misfortunes, he fell into the acquaintance and friendship of Curio, a man abandoned to his pleasures, who plunged him into a life of drinking and dissipation.” Antony, of an “ostentatious, vaunting temper, full of empty flourishes and unsteady efforts for glory,” does what restless and reckless young men have always done as a desperate corrective: he joins the army and pours all his yearning for fame and furious energy into battle.

He leads the Romans against the rebel Aristobulus II and his Jewish army. He conquers Egypt, winning “a great name among the Alexandrians” by preventing a massacre of the losers (that great reputation in Egypt echoing in the ears of a young girl in Alexandria, Cleopatra) and becoming the rising Julius Caesar's right-hand man. By now, grown into his manhood, he has developed a great fame among the common soldiers for dressing, acting, and talking like them and has achieved a reputation as a ladies' man (and “an ill name for familiarity with other people's wives”). His “good humor, generous ways, his open and lavish hand in gifts and favors to his friends and fellow-soldiers, did a great deal for him in his first advance to power, and after he had become great, long maintained his fortunes, when a thousand follies were hastening their overthrow.”

So the pattern of Antony's life is set. He is amazingly brave and crafty in battle (“there was not one of the many engagements that now took place one after another in which he did not signalize himself”) and amazingly lazy and ill-mannered in private life (“his drinking bouts at all hours, his wild expenses, his gross amours, the day spent in sleeping or walking off his debauches, and the night in banquets and at theaters, and in celebrating the nuptials of some comedian or buffoon”). After Caesar is murdered, Antony views for the empire with Caesar's nephew Octavian (later Augustus), is defeated at Modena, and is forced to flee Italy.

But “it was his character in calamities to be better than at any other time,” observes Plutarch:

Antony, in misfortune, was most nearly a virtuous man. It is common enough for people, when they fall into great disasters, to discern what is right, and what they ought to do; but there are but few who in such extremities have the strength to obey their judgment, either in doing what it approves or avoiding what it condemns; and a good many are so weak as to give way to their habits all the more, and are incapable of using their minds. Antony, on this occasion, was a most wonderful example to his soldiers. He, who had just quitted so much luxury and sumptuous living, made no difficulty now of drinking foul water and feeding on wild fruits and roots. Nay, it is related they ate the very bark of trees, and, in passing over the Alps, lived upon creatures that no one before had ever been willing to touch.

Eventually Antony returns in force to Italy and divides the empire with Augustus (who changed his name, speculates the historian Suetonius, to distinguish himself from his two sisters, both named Octavia). His fortunes restored, Antony slides headlong into debauch again, this time while traveling with his army through Asia. “Such being his temper,” writes Plutarch, with a nearly audible sigh of frustration, “the last and crowning mischief that could befall him came in the love of Cleopatra,” which would eventually “stifle and corrupt any elements that yet made resistance in him of goodness and a sound judgment.”

Shakespeare, who leaned heavily on a translation of Plutarch in writing his Antony and Cleopatra in 1606, has this account of Cleopatra sailing into Antony's ken for the first time:

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,
Burned on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars
          were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavilion, cloth-of-gold of tissue,
Over-picturing that Venus where we did see
The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids
With diverse-colored fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool.

(The same passage in Plutarch: “She came sailing up the river … in a barge with gilded stern and outspread sails of purple, while oars of silver beat time to the music of flutes and fifes and harps. She herself lay all alone under a canopy of cloth of gold, dressed as Venus in a picture, and beautiful young boys, like painted Cupids, stood on each side to fan her. Her maids were dressed like sea nymphs and graces, some steering at the rudder, some working at the ropes. The perfumes diffused themselves from the vessel to the shore, which was covered with multitudes running out of the city to see the sight.”)

We know the tale from that point on: their torrid love affair, Antony's waffling between love and glory, his final battle with Augustus for the world title, his ignominious abandoning of the fight at sea to follow like a puppy at Cleopatra's fleeing keel, his suicide and Cleopatra's subsequent close embrace of the deadly asp. Shakespeare uses their melodramatic tale to make a story of tragic and powerful love; Plutarch, treating the love affair like a virus (“the mischief that had long lain still, the passion for Cleopatra, which better thoughts had seemed to have lulled and charmed into oblivion, upon his approach to Syria gathered strength again, and broke out into a flame …”), is, as usual, fascinated by their characters or lack thereof. As clearly as he considers her Antony's bane, he cannot help exploring Cleopatra's charms and delving into what it was that made her so mesmerizing not only to Antony but, before him, to Julius Caesar—two of the greatest men of her day.

For her actual beauty, it is said, was not in itself so remarkable that none could be compared with her, or that no one could see her without being struck by it, but the contact of her presence, if you lived with her, was irresistible; the attraction of her person, joining with the charm of her conversation, and the character that attended all she said or did, was something bewitching. It was a pleasure merely to hear the sound of her voice, with which, like an instrument of many strings, she could pass from one language to another; so that there were few of the barbarian nations that she answered by an interpreter; to most of them she spoke herself, as to the Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes, Parthians, and many others, whose language she had learnt; which was all the more surprising because most of the kings, her predecessors, scarcely gave themselves the trouble to acquire the Egyptian tongue.

Clearly a woman of many parts, who won back the throne of her country from usurping siblings at age seventeen, held it for twenty-two years, and died at thirty-nine by her own hand, bereft of the man she loved and unwilling to be brought as prisoner to Rome, there to be exhibited and chained, in the traditional triumphant march of the conqueror. So passed Cleopatra, queen of the Nile.

Plutarch ends his tale with a dark note; among Antony's descendants was Claudius I, who became emperor, and who adopted Lucius Domitius, “giving him the name Nero Germanicus,” says Plutarch. “He was emperor in our time, and put his mother to death, and with his madness and folly came not far from ruining the Roman empire, being Antony's descendant in the fifth generation.”

Closing Plutarch after a long voyage among his tales, a reader is awash in a sea of images, the riveting human stories of men long dead brought to magical, immortal immediacy by one man with a relentless pen and a sharp ear. Again and again, Plutarch gives us a small gesture or remark or anecdote that refracts the whole tenor of the man:

The great orator and statesman Cicero perceiving that his death was hard upon him with the arrival of Antony's soldiers, and so commanding his servants to set down the litter in which they were trying to carry him to freedom, “and stroking his chin, as he used to do, with his left hand, he looked steadfastly upon his murderers, his person covered with dust, his hair and beard untrimmed, and his face worn with his troubles … and thus was he murdered, stretching forth his neck out of the litter, being now in his sixty-fourth year.”

Sylla, who, “when supreme master of all, was often wont to muster together the most impudent players and stage-followers of the town, and to drink and bandy jests with them without regard to his age or the dignity of his place.”

Pericles, silent, “near his end,” surrounded by his friends and family, who are “speaking of the greatness of his merit, and his power, and reckoning up his famous actions and the number of his victories,” talking among themselves “as though he were unable to understand or mind what they said, but had now lost all his consciousness”—but Pericles suddenly speaks up and “said that he wondered they should commend and take notice of things which were as much owing to fortune as to anything else, and had happened to many other commanders … and not speak or make mention of that which was the most excellent and greatest thing of all: ‘no Athenian, through my means, ever wore mourning.’”

Marcius Coriolanus, flipping off the hood that hides his face as he sits at the hearth of Tullus, his bitterest enemy, and offering Tullus and the Volscians his military skills against his native Rome—a breathtaking act of treason, beginning on a stool by a crackling fire with the stroke of a man's hand against the cloth of his cloak.

Callippus, architect of the murder of Dion, himself eerily later killed by the same Spartan-made sword (“the workmanship of it very curious,” observes Plutarch meticulously).

The Spartan king Agesilaus, who was “said to have been a little man, of a contemptible presence; but the goodness of his humor, and his constant cheerfulness and playfulness of temper, always free from anything of moroseness or haughtiness, made him more attractive, even to his old age, than the most beautiful and youthful men of the nation.”

The Athenians of Demosthenes' time going house to house, searching for stolen treasure, but leaving one house unsearched, that of a newly married couple, “out of respect to the bride who was within.” Demosthenes himself, burning to be a great orator but physically “meagre and sickly,” afflicted with “a perplexed and indistinct utterance and shortness of breath which by breaking and disjointing his sentences much obscured the sense and meaning of what he spoke.” He practiced speeches with pebbles in his mouth, declaimed speeches and verses as he sprinted up hills, and built himself an underground chamber in which to practice for hours every day, “and here he would continue, oftentimes without intermission, for two or three months together, shaving one half of his head, that so for shame he might not go abroad, though he desired it ever so much.” Though he desired it ever so much!—you can almost taste the boy's furious ambition, and see him sweating and shouting up the hills like a high school football player preparing for two-a-day drills.

Tiberius Gracchus, fleeing his assassins “in his undergarment only,” having thrown off his gown, at which his pursuers had clutched as he sprinted through Rome—his death the first sedition to draw blood among the Romans since they had abandoned their kings centuries before.

Artaxerxes of Persia, his right hand much bigger than his left; Aratus, at age seven, wandering the disordered streets of Sicyon as his father's killers search for him; Alexander, from whom “a most agreeable odor exhaled … his breath and body all over so fragrant as to perfume the clothes which he wore next him.”

And Antony, who “went out one day to angle with Cleopatra, and being so unfortunate as to catch nothing in the presence of his mistress, gave secret orders to the fishermen to dive under water, and put fishes that had already been taken upon his hooks.” Sharp-eyed Cleopatra, seeing this dodge, arranging for a dried fish to be put on his hook, to the great laughter of onlookers.

Yet as much as a reader's mind is crammed with the thousand characters who populate Plutarch, and agog at the breadth of his detailed and vibrant natural histories of their feats and failures, it increasingly wishes to know the stage manager himself, who is fully as interesting as any of his subjects. There are so many tantalizing clues to the man—the dozens of lost books; the length and nature of his time in the capital of the empire (five years in Rome? forty? diplomat? scholar? no one knows); the extent of his travels; the fact that he kept with him at all times a commonplace book, in which he was often seen to be hurriedly scribbling anecdotes as they drifted by in conversations (Plutarch, the Greek Boswell); his unusual predilection toward monotheism (“Is not one Excellent Being, imbued with reason and intelligence, such as He whom we acknowledge to be the Father and Lord of all things, sufficient to direct and rule?”); his relations with Christianity (Plutarch “had heard of the Christian religion, and inserted several of its mysteries in his books,” says the historian Theodoret—imagine a Plutarchian Life of Paul, Paul the prickly public relations genius who marketed Christ worldwide, or of Jesus himself—the Gospel according to Plutarch!); his relations with the emperors, especially Trajan, to whom, according to medieval writers, Plutarch sent a legendarily taut, dry-witted recipe for empiring:

Let your government commence in your breast: and lay the foundation of it in the commands of your passions. If you make virtue the rule of your conduct, and the end of your actions, every thing will proceed in harmony and order. I have explained to you the spirit of those laws and constitutions that were established by your predecessors; and you have nothing to do but to carry them into execution. If this should be the case, I shall have the glory of having formed an emperor to virtue; but if otherwise, let this letter remain a testimony with succeeding ages, that you did not ruin the Roman empire under pretense of the counsels or the authority of Plutarch.

But, failing the discovery of his lost books, there is no way now of seeing more of the man, and we are left with his counsels and authority, which have been touchstones of Western literature and culture since he wrote them nineteen centuries ago. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a brilliant aphorist but dull essayist who must have gritted his teeth in envy at Plutarch's vibrant prose, had the character himself to sense that the Greek's work would never disappear (“Plutarch's popularity will return in rapid cycles. … His sterling values will recall the life and thought of the best minds, and his books will be reprinted and read anew by coming generations. And thus Plutarch will be perpetually rediscovered from time to time as long as books last”). But of all the compliments one might collect for Plutarch, I choose, as John Dryden did in an appendix to his translation of the Lives in 1686, one by Theodorus Gaza, “a man learned in the Latin tongue, and a great restorer of the Greek, who lived about two hundred years ago,” as Dryden notes. “'Tis said that, having this extravagant question put to him by a friend, that if learning must suffer a general shipwreck, and he had only his choice left him of preserving one author, who should be the man, he would preserve, he answered, Plutarch; giving this reason, that in saving him he should secure the best collection of them all.”

Theodorus had his hat on straight here, I think; and of all the literary geniuses in the West these last three millennia, the extraordinary men and women who reached into themselves to tell true of us all, the one in whom nearly all stories may be found is Plutarch. We do not know who Homer was—Samuel Butler famously thought Homer a brilliant young woman—and we are not at all sure who Shakespeare was, the glove maker's son and the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford being the current arm wrestlers for the name. But dimly across nineteen centuries we do see Plutarch the human being, and we sense under his voluminous work the voluminous man, as complex and intricately threaded as any of his subjects: a dignified but warm husband and father, stern but affable neighbor, eloquent statesman and scholar, reverent priest, and most of all—best of all—a genius of a storyteller, a spinner of tales unsurpassed in our recorded literature.

For all his diligence as a scholar and historian digging after the details of the lives and characters of his subjects, Plutarch did spin some tales out of nearly whole cloth (Theseus and Romulus, for example), and he danced around the sparseness of fact with his usual graceful humor:

As geographers … crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect, that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, unapproachable bogs, Scythian ice, or a frozen sea, so, in this work of mine … after passing through those periods which probable reasoning can reach to and real history find a footing in, I might very well say of those that are farther off, Beyond this there is nothing but prodigies and fictions. … Let us hope that Fable may, in what shall follow, so submit to the purifying processes of Reason as to take the character of exact history. In any case, however, where it shall be found contumaciously slighting credibility, and refusing to be reduced to anything like probable fact, we shall beg that we may meet with candid readers, and such as will receive with indulgence the stories of antiquity.

So to resurrect this most interesting of our ancient cousins, as he resurrected so many others, we make a prodigy and fiction, and beg indulgence of candid readers, and bring Plutarch closer to the camera that we might see the literature of his face and study a bit of his soul. Choose a happy day for the man, on vacation at the coast—mid-September, perhaps, when the weather has just turned a corner and afternoons are russet at the edges, the days still hot but the nights brisk, the ocean darker by the day. Late in the afternoon, Plutarch is scribbling furiously—it's his Life of Hercules and it's going very well, it's nearly writing itself, everyone has a Hercules story to tell—but his hand is starting to cramp and he pauses, stands, stretches at length like his cat, looks casually out the window toward the sea. Something about the ocean this afternoon makes him lean out his window for a better look—maybe this was how the sea looked, wind-tossed and glittering, to Homer? Or to Odysseus? Now there was a man who must have been able to read the moods and hours of the ocean like a book after twenty years at sea, hmm? How would such water-wisdom form a man? Wouldn't he yearn to read faces that way, too, trying to peer under the surface for the weather to come, for the hidden currents, for the shoals, for the jagged dangers?

His meditation is interrupted by two voices, wind-splintered by the growing breeze: wife Timoxena and daughter Timoxena, the child bounding like a deer into his view and laughing through the window, Father, Father, come out in the light! Come look for whales with me! And he grins, does Plutarch, unable to resist her verve and glee—the sheer energy of that child, she's got more pepper than all the boys combined!—and he steps out on the bright portico and savors the crisp air, the hot hand of the sun. He stands for a moment with his wife, their arms intertwined, clothes fluttering, daughter dancing in a circle and humming, and they talk of writing and dinner and her cousin in Athens and the foreman who probably did steal those tiles, and they talk about her health—she's been coughing so in the mornings, should they make that trip to Delphi now or wait a bit?—and then little Timoxena trips over the edge of the table as she spins, and she cuts her arm, Father! It's bleeding!, and he rocks her in his arms with her head on his chest until suddenly, smiling shyly, she says, Will you walk with me before dark? And he says, Yes of course my tiny flower, and down the beach they go, father and daughter, hand in hand, immortal.