SOURCE: Russell, D. A. “Language, Style and Form.” In Plutarch, pp. 18-41. London: Duckworth, 1973.

[In the following essay, Russell examines characteristic traits of Plutarch's literary style.]

There are extant forty-eight Lives by Plutarch, all but four of which belong to the series of Greek and Roman ‘parallels’. There are also over seventy short works of miscellaneous content. These are commonly called Moralia, a translation of the Greek ēthika, a title used in the Middle Ages for one considerable group of them concerned with topics in practical ethics. The corpus as we have it is in fact the result of various mediaeval Byzantine efforts at collecting books by Plutarch, culminating in the magnificent manuscripts written under the direction of Maximus Planudes at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century.¹ It contains a number of works which are certainly spurious, though some of them are historically of great value and interest; The Education of Children, Fate, Doctrines of the Philosophers, Lives of the Ten Orators, On Music, are all books which we are fortunate to possess. For our knowledge of what was not harvested in the mediaeval collections we depend largely on quotations in later writers like the fourth-century Christian compiler Eusebius and the fifth-century anthologist Stobaeus. There is however another source of information on the titles of lost works, a catalogue supposed to have been compiled by a son of Plutarch called Lamprias.² There is no other evidence that there ever was any such person, and the list apparently dates from late antiquity, perhaps the fourth century, when Plutarch was much read. It comprises 227 titles, including a number of Lives now lost, and some 130 other lost works. Its arrangement seems haphazard: the Lives come first, then the longer works, then those in single books, but with very little principle of grouping. It omits some genuine books that survive; on the other hand it includes some extant spuria, so that we must conclude that some of the unknowns may be spurious also. It includes in fact (no. 56) Aristotle's Topics, which no one in his right mind can have thought Plutarch's.

Now the attribution of books in antiquity was a chancy business. Galen³ gives a curious account of the fortunes of his own works. He would sometimes give copies to friends, with no name on the title, without intending them to go into circulation. When the owners died, the books fell into the hands of the heirs and came to be regarded as the owners' own compositions. The true authorship being discovered, the copies would come back to Galen for correction. Thus in the conditions of book circulation that prevailed in Plutarch's time and later, it could easily have happened that the contents of a collection of books that had belonged to him or was in the family could be thought to be all his work.

But however much we pare down the list, it remains formidable: some two hundred and fifty biblia. Many later Greeks however, especially philosophers, wrote on this scale; what is unusual with Plutarch is the survival of such a high proportion. The causes of this invite conjecture; the popularity of Plutarch in the Christian Greek world from the fourth century onwards must have been an important factor.

Galen observes in the same context that anyone who was properly trained not only in medicine and philosophy but in grammatikē would know within a few lines if a book was not by him. The trouble was that many would-be philosophers were unable to read properly and had never had a real grammatical training. This is testimony that, even at this late period, individual tricks of Greek style were recognisable by the expert. If we could resurrect a suitably educated second-century Greek, we should no doubt find the same with Plutarch. Indeed, we should not be too diffident about our own senses in this department; disputes about the authorship of works in the corpus do exist, and rightly so, but the obvious homogeneity of Plutarch's characteristic style and presentation have made them few and not too serious. It is no accident that the most doubtful points concern the collections of apophthegmata, which have not been ‘worked up’ stylistically.

The style indeed is very much ‘the man himself’. Plutarch forged and thoroughly controlled a remarkably facile and rich linguistic instrument. Learned and allusive, imaginative and metaphorical, exuberant and abundant, his writing also has qualities which are the reverse of its virtues: it is unequal, uneconomical, a good deal removed from the simplicity we associate—though not always justly—with classical Attic. But it is a mode of expression exactly tuned to his attitudes to the world; in its way, it is a great achievement, and it had very wide and persistent influence on later writers, Christian as well as pagan, modern as well as ancient.

Plutarch and his contemporaries faced a language problem. It is a feature of Greek, as of much Latin, literature that its language diverges widely from that of the author's daily speech. Greek poetry, from its earliest phases, was a linguistic evocation of the archaic or the exotic. By Hellenistic times, poetry could only be written in studied reproductions of archaic dialects. To a less extent, the same is true of prose. Here, the classical age, the fourth century b.c., did indeed develop an Attic style which, mainly because of the importance of forensic oratory, was essentially the vernacular. The history of prose is thereafter one of successive reforms and revivals, aimed generally at maintaining this fourth-century Attic. The greater and more rapid the changes in living speech, the more radical the periodical reform had to be. One such reform, an important one, took place two generations before Plutarch, and is documented in the theory and practice of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who lived for many years at Rome under Augustus. Dionysius rejected all post-Attic prose as bizarre, eccentric or disorganised; his remedy was a better use of the resources of the Attic classics, and especially the orators. This was archaism, but a positive and constructive archaism, which sought to enrich rather than restrict by prescribing models to imitate. It is quite distinct from the later archaism of the second-century Atticists, who compiled lists of words authorised by classical usage, and tried to confine themselves within these limits. Dionysius' work on word-arrangement (sunthesis onomatōn) makes it particularly clear what his essential aims were: he wanted to exploit the versatility and vigour he found in the classics, so as to accommodate the intellectual excitement of pathos and rhetoric, which sophisticated readers now needed, in a disciplined but varied prose.

Plutarch inherited a situation in which this classicising revolution was an important factor. Not that he thought much of Dionysius himself. When he comes to use him as a historical source, in the lives of the early Roman heroes and especially in Coriolanus, he imitates him little and improves on him a good deal.⁴ Dionysius' friend Caecilius of Caleacte, the opponent answered by the author of On the Sublime, is also no favourite of Plutarch's, who thinks of him as pedantic and pretentious—‘a dolphin on dry land’ for trying to judge Cicero's style.⁵ Plutarch is of course by profession a philosopher, and it is therefore traditional for him to make fun of the rhetoricians and their juggling with words.⁶

But he is himself a conscious artist in an elaborate manner, meticulous in his periodic structures, his studied word-patterns, his avoidance of hiatus, his carefully chosen vocabulary, and so on. This should not seem a paradox, either in Plutarch or, for example, in Seneca. Both worked in a tradition which demanded an extraordinarily high level of verbal expertise and sophistication; all they are saying, when they speak as philosophers, is that they claim to put sense first. Again, despite his coolness and silence about it, Plutarch is demonstrably, if unconsciously, a beneficiary of the changes instituted by the Greek Augustans: witness his varied syntax and sophisticated word-order. He writes what we may call a reformed Hellenistic Greek, with very few non-classical features of syntax⁷ or morphology, enormously enriched by his vast reading. Dionysius himself had not restricted his vocabulary to words found in the Attic classics, but Plutarch is freer and more catholic altogether in his exploitation of the enrichments of style which come in after the close of the classical age. His vocabulary is three times that of Demosthenes, and much of it is poetical or post-Attic. He makes great use of the compound verbs in which Hellenistic Greek found both elegance and clumsiness. He fully shares the Hellenistic penchant for abstracts, even as subjects—in general an unclassical feature. An English schoolboy, asked to translate into Greek the sentence ‘Kindness covers a wider area than justice’ would probably be advised to try a paraphrase in more concrete terms: something like ‘we treat more things kindly than we do justly’. By the usage of classical authors, this is fairly good advice. But the sentence as it stands is a literal translation of Plutarch (Cato 5) and typical enough of him. Sometimes the use of abstracts produces a concise effectiveness of which the language of earlier prose is hardly capable. ‘Meanness tugs at the glutton's finger in the fish-market [i.e. stops him putting his finger up to indicate a bid]; avarice deflects lechery from an expensive whore’ (706b).

The continuance of such features of Hellenistic writing marks Plutarch off from many of his contemporaries and most of his immediate successors, who went much further in their mimēsis of a narrow range of classics, and tended to reject whenever possible words which they could not find in the old writers. Plutarch is firmly enough set in the continuous tradition of Greek writing not to feel the need for this more radical classicism. His linguistic position indeed reflects his thought: the Greek past was alive for him, and its language a living instrument, through every phrase of which the past might be evoked and seen to be continuous with the present. If we think of a writer's language as the roof to shelter his thoughts, Plutarch's was not a museum but an old and much-used house, still eminently fit to be lived in.

Much of the flavour of course evaporates in translation. Plutarch's classic sixteenth-century translators,⁸ Amyot and his disciples North and Holland, still best convey the richness and elaboration; but they do so at the cost of the control and elevation of tone which prevent the real Plutarch, however long-winded he is, from being garrulous. The weakness and strength of Amyot were correctly judged by Octave Gréard, in one of the most perceptive books on Plutarch ever written.⁹ Plutarch's style, he says, ‘ne revêt que par instants les formes de la naïveté, mais il en a l'âme. C'est cette âme dont Amyot s'est inspiré dans sa traduction.’ More modern translations generally lose much of the brightness and vigour of the original. The translations in this book can be no exception. Modern English hardly seems to possess the stops that are necessary. The flavour of the loaded and allusive language, the rounded form of the periods, are discernible only in Greek; but the main rhetorical features of presentation, the exempla and imagery, the variety and abundance will perhaps shine dimly through.

Here to begin with is a typical passage of moral advice.

Such¹⁰ is the contentment and change of heart that reasoning engenders in every life. When Alexander heard Anaxarchus discourse on the infinite number of worlds, he wept. When his friends asked what was wrong, he replied, ‘Ought one not to weep, if there are infinite worlds and one is not yet master even of one?’ But Crates, with his wallet and his cloak, spent his days in play and laughter as if life were one long holiday.

Agamemnon found it painful to have many subjects:

You will know the son of Atreus, Agamemnon,
whom Zeus thrusts always into trouble, above all other men.(11)

But Diogenes, when he was put up for sale, made fun of the auctioneer by lying down, and refused to get up when ordered, saying with a laugh, ‘Suppose you were selling a fish … ?’

Socrates had a philosophical conversation with his friends in prison. But Phaethon, when he went up to heaven, cried because no one would give him his father's horses and chariot.

So, as the shoe is shaped to the foot and not vice versa, attitudes assimilate lives to themselves. It is not true, as has been said, that habit makes the best life pleasant to those who choose it; in fact, wisdom makes one and the same life both best and pleasantest. Let us therefore purify the spring of contentment that is within us, so that external circumstances may for their part too deal with us as friends and familiars in return for our fair dealing:

With circumstances one must not be angry;
they cannot care. But if the encounterer
handles them right, things will go well with him.(12)

For Plato compared life to a game of dice, in which one has to make the proper throw and use the throw advantageously. Now the throw itself is not in our control; but the appropriate acceptance of events from fortune and the allocation of them to areas in which what is welcome will do most good and what is unwanted least harm to those involved—all this is our concern, if we are wise. People who are unskilled and foolish about life are like invalids who cannot endure heat or cold. They are excited by good fortune, daunted by bad, and disturbed by both—or rather by themselves in both sets of circumstances, and not less in those that are supposed to be good. Theodorus the ‘atheist’ used to say that he offered his arguments with his right hand, but his audience took them with their left. Similarly, the untrained often take Fortune with the left hand, when she offers herself on the right, and so they make fools of themselves. The wise, on the other hand, often acquire something of service and value to themselves out of the most disagreeable events, just as bees derive honey from thyme, which is the driest and sharpest of herbs.

(466d-467c)

This is a central passage in Plutarch's Quiet of Mind, ‘a treatise,’ as Philemon Holland says, ‘where a man may see the excellent discourses and most sound arguments of moral philosophy’.¹³ The subject—euthumia, animi tranquillitas—was one that had been much treated from the time of Democritus. The Stoic Panaetius made a particularly significant contribution to the tradition. Plutarch's book in fact is original only in selection and presentation. The passage we are considering makes a single, simple point: that a wise attitude to life produces contentment, whatever our circumstances. Everything else is supporting amplification: a text-book illustration of principles laid down by generations of rhetoricians for the use of examples (paradeigmata) and general thoughts (enthumēmata, gnōmai) to support a proposition.¹⁴ First comes a series of paradeigmata in pairs: Alexander contrasted with Crates, Agamemnon with Diogenes, Socrates with Phaethon. In each pair, the difference between the contented and the discontented depends on the presence of reason; in each pair, the philosopher is seen to be the happier. The pairing could be Plutarch's own, except that Socrates and Phaethon appear again as a symbol of wisdom and folly in Exile (607f), and this suggests that this contrast at least is an inherited commonplace.

Two of the exempla, the stories of Anaxarchus and Diogenes, are in the form of anecdotes. In the terminology of the rhetores, they are chreiai. They relate wise and useful remarks by famous characters whose name guarantees the goodness of the lesson. Such anecdotes were gathered in collections even in classical times. Plutarch both used the collections of others and doubtless made his own—whether or not the extant sets of Spartan and other apophthegmata (‘sayings’) are his. The wording of such an anecdote was the free choice of the writer who wished to use it, provided of course that the main point was recognisable. Of these two stories, the one about Anaxarchus is in Valerius Maximus' huge collection, under the heading ‘desire for glory’. His version concludes with an additional point: Alexander, though a man, was not satisfied with the dwelling that suffices for the gods.¹⁵ The Diogenes story too occurs elsewhere. It is part of a cycle connected with Diogenes' sale into slavery. In our other source, Diogenes Laertius, it is somewhat different:

Not being allowed to sit down, he said: ‘It doesn't matter; fish are sold in any position.’¹⁶

This makes explicit the point which Plutarch's elegant aposiopesis leaves us to see for ourselves.

A second form of authoritative support is the poetical quotation. This device is as old as prose literature, or at least as old as Plato. Collections of suitable passages were made at an early period. In Menander's Shield (407 ff.), it is a comic detail for the clever slave to repeat to himself poetical saws (gnōmai) like

No man is happy in all things he does,

or

'Tis fortune makes man's world, and not good counsel.

These sayings often recur.¹⁷ Besides the dramatists—inevitable in Menander, favourites also with the philosophers—Homer and Theognis are common sources. By Plutarch's time, collections and anthologies were legion. Plutarch will have both used and made such things, as he did with anecdotes; from this source, and also from his own reading, he held ready an enormous store of apt quotations, which do much to enhance the colour and variety of his writing, even if sometimes one can hardly restrain a smile at the appearance of an old favourite. For example, we shall probably never know what tragic poet wrote the line:

Plucking at heart-strings never plucked before.¹⁸

Nor can we know its original context: ‘strings’ (chordai) are mentioned once only in extant tragedy, and of a lyre. Our poet doubtless compared the heart to a stringed instrument; the image is banal in English. The line would be a godsend to a philosopher discussing the nature of the soul. Let us suppose that it is through some such intermediary that Plutarch knows it. He uses it in five places: once of anger (456e), once comprehensively of anger, superstition, family quarrels and sex (43e), once of fever (501a) and once of drunkenness (657d); all these seem fairly natural applications of the idea. The fifth occurrence is more curious:

The portico at Olympia is called the Portico of Seven Voices because it produces many echoes from a single cry: and if the slightest word touches Garrulity, she immediately returns an echo,

Plucking at heart-strings never plucked before.

(502d)

Here the quotation seems simply an intensifier, and perhaps gives a balance with the image that precedes. It is as though Plutarch this time could not think of anything more apt to fill out his sentence.

The lines from Euripides' Bellerophon in our passage from Quiet of Mind are not quite so familiar, but they are also an anthology piece. They recur in the great compilation of Stobaeus,¹⁹ which gives us so much of the conventional lore of late antiquity, and Marcus Aurelius (7.38) thought it worth while copying part of the passage into the book of reflections he made for his own use and comfort.

It is not only as direct support that quotations and anecdotes are drawn in. When Plutarch writes in this passage

It is not true, as has been said, that habit makes the best life pleasant …

he is playing a trick which is of great importance in the texture of his writing. He has in mind a Pythagorean saying which he elsewhere approves:²⁰ the good life seems harsh at first, but habit makes even asceticism agreeable. To correct this forms a novel point; reflection on the original saying has stimulated a truer formulation. At the same time, it amounts to a device for introducing the quotation into an argument where it scarcely belongs. This is analogous to Plutarch's frequent use of an image not to point a similarity but to indicate a contrast; in a sense, this helps to make the picture more precise, but it easily turns into a device to cram something else into an already packed passage.

One final point. Allusions apart, the passage, like most of Plutarch, contains a great deal of imagery. Much of this is conventional. The shoe,²¹ the springs of contentment,²² the throw of the dice,²³ the delicate invalid, the bees on the thyme,²⁴ are all symbols with a history of their own. It is typical of Plutarch that they should all be gathered together in such a short space; lavishness with imagery in any reflective or discursive context is one of the most distinctive characteristics of his prose. He seems always to be seeking implied or explicit comparisons between the subject in hand and something else. It all amounts, in a manner of speaking, to innumerable arguments from analogy. Like the authorities and the exempla, the imagery has a rhetorical function in support of the point being made. But it is far too rich and ubiquitous to have no other end. We should I think credit Plutarch with letting his imagery fulfil also a sort of poetic purpose. The neat comparison passes easily into a suggestive symbol, the arresting switch of theme into an imaginative vision.

Indeed, all the methods of support and amplification which this passage illustrates—anecdote, quotation, simile—have a depth and interest in Plutarch which is not easily explained in simple rhetorical terms. He is not really using this apparatus to convince so much as in a sort of imaginative play. He wants to remind the reader all the time of vast areas of philosophical and literary tradition, to provide a great deal of thematic variety, and to give the pleasure of surprise by the ingenuity with which familiar thoughts are turned in unfamiliar ways.

Quiet of Mind is a calm book, in form a letter. It is presented (464e) as a compilation of ‘notes’ (hupomnēmata) sent in response to a request. In it, the strident Cynic preaching is muted into grave reading-matter for the reflective Paccius. This quiet mode is not universal in Plutarch's moralising, though it is very common. We can detect other sorts of occasion and their corresponding styles, in which the same mechanism of allusion and imagery is used to achieve an overall effect of a distinctly different kind.

Sometimes, the tradition of the real sermon, which scholars call the diatr˘ibē,²⁵ is nearer the surface. Do Not Borrow! is a case in point. It is a chaotic but vigorous address, presumably a public lecture. It has an unusual theme, and this has led to the conjecture that there was a topical point to it. ‘Une plaie véritable, l'usure, dévorait Chéronée.’²⁶ Perhaps; but there can be no proof. The speech attracted attention among Plutarch's Christian imitators: St. Basil drew largely on it in his Homily on the Fourteenth Psalm. Packed with imagery, often obscure and confused in its transitions, it is one of those pieces that lend colour to the notion that Plutarch was at one time an over-ambitious and therefore unsuccessful speaker. There is naturally no proof that this little homily is early. What seems iuvenilis ardor may be just genre-colour. But it is a plausible guess.

This is how the piece ends (831b ff.):

Now I must turn to the richer and more delicate, the people who say ‘Shall I then have no slaves, no hearth or home?’ A man sick of the dropsy and swollen might as well say to his doctor ‘Shall I then become thin and empty?’ Why not, if it makes you healthy? It's the same with you. Have no slaves, so as to be no slave yourself. Have no property, so as not to be the property of another.

Listen to the fable about the vultures. One vulture was sick and said he was bringing up guts. ‘What's wrong with that?’ said the other vulture; ‘they're not your guts, they're the corpse's we were tearing up just now.’

Debtors don't sell their own farms and houses, but farms and houses belonging to the creditors they have made their masters according to the law.

‘Yes, but my father left me this farm.’ He also left you your freedom and your status, and you ought to think more about these. Your father made your foot and your hand for you, but if they rot, you pay the man who cuts them off.

Calypso dressed Odysseus ‘in clothing sweetly-scented’,²⁷ breathing flesh divine, a gift in memory of her love: but when he capsized and sank and surfaced with difficulty, the clothes were sodden and heavy, and he stripped and threw them off, and tied a scarf under his naked breast and ‘swam along looking to landward’.²⁸ Once saved, he lacked neither for clothing nor for food. Well? Don't debtors face a storm, when the creditor at last appears and cries ‘Hand over’?

‘So speaking he gathered the clouds and ruffled the sea;
east wind and south and violent west fell on together’,(29)

as debt rolls on top of debt. Swamped, the victim clings to the load that weighs him down, unable to swim to safety; down he goes, pushed to the bottom, sunk without trace, he and the friends who guaranteed him.

Crates the Theban, with no demand or debt upon him, disgusted with management and cares and distractions, abandoned a property worth eight talents, took his cloak and wallet, and fled for refuge to philosophy by way of poverty. Anaxagoras left his land to be grazed by sheep. But this is nothing to Philoxenus the lyricist, who had an allotment of land in a Sicilian colony, a good living and a household of considerable substance, but saw that luxury, soft living and tastelessness were abroad in the land. ‘These blessings,’ he said, ‘shan't ruin me—by God, I'll ruin them!’—and he left his allotment to others and sailed off. Debtors endure demands, taxation, slavery, forced sales—they persevere too, feeding winged Harpies just as Phineus did, that steal and ravage their substance. These buy their corn before it is harvested and market the oil before the olives are picked. ‘I take the wine too,’ he says, ‘at so much’—and he gives an advance on the price, while the bunch hangs on the vine and grows as it waits for Arcturus and the vintage.

Much of this recalls Quiet of Mind: the medical imagery, the Crates anecdote. Much however has a livelier tone. The tradition of popular preaching reveals itself in the range of rhetorical devices. Imagined interruptions, rhetorical questions, direct addresses to the audience, striking word-arrangements (asyndeta for instance) are characteristic. So is a certain vulgar vigour in the imagery: the fable of the vomiting vultures, the parable of paying a man to cut off your hand if it has gone rotten.³⁰ The moralised Homer too falls into the tradition, with its appeal to the one book the half-educated will know. The rapid transitions and vivid word-pictures recall Roman satire, which itself owes much to the traditions of Hellenistic preaching. Horace or Juvenal would not have been ashamed of the ending.

There were also occasions that demanded a grander manner. We possess a group of speeches which are very typically Plutarchan but exhibit yet a third mode: the grandeur of the ceremonial sophistic display. In one of these, The Glory of Athens, he argues a case which is of particular interest in view of some of his general ideas and attitudes. The position to be maintained is that Athenian achievements in practical affairs are greater than in literature. This chimes with a theme which is prominent in the Parallel Lives—the theme that Greece too had a political greatness and could share dominion with Rome as a useful partner. Thoroughly implausible as this thesis is, it had some point in the age of the first Eastern consuls.³¹ Delivered at Athens in the late first century a.d., the speech would not be so absurd: less absurd anyway than those conventional praises of Marathon which Sulla told the Athenian orators to take home with them.³²

The speech is very formal. The poets and generals of Athens come forward in turn. Finally comes the turn of the orators.

Poetry, you may say, is only a game. But a comparison between orators and generals has a certain plausibility. Does not Aeschines humorously represent Demosthenes as saying that he would take out an action on behalf of the Front Bench against the Headquarters? Well: is it right to prefer Hyperides' speech on Plataea to Aristides' proclamation? Or Lysias' speech against the Thirty to the tyrannicide of Thrasybulus and Archinus? Or Aeschines' prosecution of Timarchus for male prostitution to Phocion's expedition in aid of Byzantium, by which he saved allies' sons from becoming victims of the drunken wantonness of the Macedonians? Shall we set Demosthenes' speech on the Crown against the crowns that Conon won for liberating Greece? The finest and most eloquent thing the great orator did in that speech was the oath by those of our ancestors who risked their lives at Marathon. He didn't swear by those who taught lessons to boys in school! These were therefore the people—not an Isocrates or an Antiphon or an Isaeus—whom the city buried at public cost, welcoming home their bodily remains; these were the people whom the orator in this oath treated as gods, whom he swore by—but did not follow! Isocrates said that the men who risked their lives at Marathon fought ‘as though their lives were not their own’,³³ and praised their daring and contempt for life in lyrical terms. But what of himself? When he was an old man, so the story goes, someone asked him how he passed the time. ‘Like a man over ninety,’ he said, ‘who thinks death the greatest of evils.’ For he grew old not putting an edge on his sword or sharpening his lance, not polishing a helmet, not soldiering or rowing in the galleys, but sticking together antitheses, parisoses and homoeoptota, smoothing and shaping his periods, as it were, with plane and chisel. How could the man who was afraid to make vowel collide with vowel or utter an isocolon one syllable short fail to be frightened of the noise of arms and the clash of battalions? Miltiades set off for Marathon; next day he fought the battle and returned victorious to the city with his army. Pericles reduced Samos in nine months, and thought himself a finer fellow than Agamemnon who took Troy in the tenth year of siege. And Isocrates took nearly three Olympiads to write the Panegyric! In all that time he fought no campaign, went on no embassy, founded no city, never sailed in command of a fleet. Yet the age produced innumerable wars … and all the time Isocrates was sitting at home, fashioning and refashioning the phrases of a book, for as long as it took Pericles to build the Propylaea and the Parthenon. Yet Cratinus³⁴ ridicules Pericles for being so slow with his works; he says about the middle wall:

                                                                                                                                                      Pericles
advances it with speeches, but the work does not progress.

Just think of the sophistic pedantry that can spend the ninth part of a lifetime on a single speech!

(350b-351a)

Paradoxical of course that an orator should so denigrate his own profession; but to make a case is not to commit oneself to it, and we need not take this aspect of the speech too seriously. What is characteristically Plutarchan is once again the range and aptness of the examples. Here, his immense reading subserves purely rhetorical purposes. The apt quotation from Aeschines makes an ingenious amplification of the imaginary objection with which the piece begins. The four parallel achievements of orators and generals are neat and artful. No boredom is allowed here: after Hyperides and Lysias comes the longer and more piquant matter of male seduction, and finally the allusion to On the Crown which leads by association to a further point. This is something very traditional: a comment on the famous oath of which we possess Longinus' model analysis.³⁵ Plutarch draws two little lessons: (i) that Demosthenes chose soldiers, not rhetors, to personify the greatness of his country;³⁶ (ii) that he himself did not practise what he preached. The episode leads, through a parallel reference to Marathon, to a much easier target: Isocrates. Plutarch has again a tradition to draw on in the amusing passage that follows:³⁷ Isocrates is the typical study-orator, who took absurdly long periods of time furbishing and re-furbishing his work. The final touch is ingenious and appropriate. The Panegyricus took as long as the Parthenon, and even Pericles (though not in this connection!) was blamed for being slow. Plutarch recalls a piece of antiquarian learning associated with a passage of Old Comedy.³⁸

These three passages show a difference of mode, but a basic similarity of material. The mass of learning, the rich vocabulary, the constant search for analogies and images, the anxiety for frequent thematic change, characterise a manner which genre-differences affect only to a very limited extent. But there are genre-differences. Besides the kinds of speeches and treatises we have illustrated, there are, for example, the books of problēmata on antiquarian and scientific subjects, and the more technical philosophical treatises. In all these, there is less scope for brilliant play of exempla or quotations: the richness and the metaphorical style remain pervasive. The Lives, again, have many of the features of history: yet again and again a twist of argument or a series of anecdotes reveals the same techniques of allusion and illusion. Plutarch, it is true, has l'âme de la naïveté; but in style, he has a sophistication and cunning which make interpretation a continuously exacting task.

The most complex genre he attempted was the dialogue. Here lay his highest literary ambitions.

Philosophical dialogue is one of the great inventions of Greek literature, a proper expression and symbol of free inquiry. It took many forms. Some dialogues, like many of Plato's, consist of a rapid interchange of question and answer. Others are made up of a series of developed speeches giving various answers to the questions proposed; the less plausible answers usually come first, and are refuted in the course of the later speeches. Plutarch's dialogues are of the second kind; he rarely attempts the other. The tradition of this kind of dialogue also did in fact begin with Plato: impressive speeches occur in Ion, Phaedo, Gorgias, Republic, for example; Symposium, Phaedrus, Timaeus and Laws, with their solemnity and pomp, had very great influence on later practitioners. Aristotle, Theophrastus and their Hellenistic successors wrote many elaborate and famous dialogues; what they were like can be glimpsed, if at all, through the extant masters, Cicero and Plutarch.³⁹

Plato's Symposium, an acknowledged masterpiece, has four features which were of special importance for the development of the genre. One is its dinner-setting, an ideally closed and conventional occasion, based on a social event which seems to have changed very little in character, in the circles that matter, between classical Athens and imperial Rome. A second is the device of using reported conversation to distance the event in time, lend credibility to the report, and incidentally involve more persons in the compliment of being included. A third, more conspicuous here than in any other Platonic dialogue, is the accommodation of style to profession and character, as in the speeches of Eryximachus, Aristophanes and Agathon. Finally, Alcibiades' drunken entry adds the interest of event to that of conversation. All these features recur in Plutarch. His ‘Seven Sages’ meet at dinner. In Table Talk the dinner-table is the venue of a whole series of small dialogues. Elaborate play with reported conversation is a puzzling feature of The Face in the Moon. Plutarch has not much stylistic versatility; but he makes the Pythagorean Theanor in Socrates' Sign speak in an appropriately grand manner, and he characterises Pisias and Anthemion in A Book of Love by their words as much as by anything he says about them. In the use of incident, on the other hand, he goes much further than Plato. This was indeed not an innovation: Varro's informative dialogue on farming startles us with the unexpected episode of the sacristan's murder.⁴⁰ But Socrates' Sign and A Book of Love are particularly striking, with their exciting novel-like settings and interludes. Indeed, the likeness between A Book of Love, where a narrated love-affair forms the background to a philosophical discussion, and, say, the first book of the novelist Achilles Tatius, where the love-affair in the story occasions general discourses by the characters, is remarkably close. In this kind of thing, the dialogue made a contribution to the development of the novel.

Certain of Plutarch's dialogues have historical, not contemporary, settings. The Banquet of the Seven Sages (146b ff.) is set in the Greece of the tyrants. Some have thought it too trivial for Plutarch's hand. One gets the impression of an educational work, addressed to a very young audience, full of instructive and amusing stories. The themes are in fact typically Plutarchan ones: the contribution of Delphi to Greek civilisation, the virtues of the simple life, prophecy, the value of a plain diet. As a myth, it has Herodotus' story of Arion and the dolphin, introduced as a piece of news brought by Periander's brother Gorgos and beautifully told. We know (14e) that Plutarch admired certain Hellenistic dialogues as introductory works for the young; he is here, it would seem, writing one on his own account.

Socrates' Sign (575a) is a more serious affair, though not dissimilar in its variety, and again involving, though on a deeper level, the themes of simplicity of life and the power of divination. This time Plutarch chose a more precise and factual historical setting, the liberation of Thebes from the Spartan occupation in 379 b.c. It was a famous tale of adventure, of which many accounts existed. Plutarch needed it also in Pelopidas, where he tells it more briefly. In the dialogue, there is much more detail, most of it no doubt traditional; he also takes the kind of liberty a Greek dramatist might take, compressing the whole crisis into the events of a single day and night. The dialogue (like the Banquet) is a narrated one: the Theban Caphisias relates it to an Athenian sympathiser at Athens. The principal scene of his story is in the house of Simmias, the disciple known from Plato's Phaedo, now a bedridden elder. Friends are in the habit of assembling here, during the occupation, for philosophical and conspiratorial talk. It is the wintry day when the exiles are to slip into the town from the mountains, and the coup against the occupation forces is to be mounted. Coincidence—an implausibility on which the unity of the dialogue is based—has brought to Thebes at this very time a mysterious stranger, who is reported to have camped near the tomb of the Pythagorean Lysis. The two sets of events thus set in train, one public, the other private and philosophical, are linked by the person of the young Epaminondas, the boy who was to be the greatest of Theban heroes. He plays no active part in the conspiracy, though he knows about it; his inaction needs an apologia. In his relation with the mysterious stranger, who turns out to be a Pythagorean ‘holy man’, a colourful and somewhat pompous figure, he gives proof both of his steadfast integrity and of supernatural guidance, which the wise man recognises. Developments in these two plots punctuate the discussions which occupy the main part of the dialogue; it is the theory contained in these discussions which is obviously the most important part of the whole. The news of the stranger's ritual acts prompts the rationally-inclined Galaxidorus to deliver an attack on superstition. Socrates, he suggests, appealing to Simmias, championed a simple, down-to-earth philosophy.

But what about the ‘divine sign’, so celebrated in Socratic literature? The ensuing conversation consists of the discussion of a series of explanations of this, interrupted from time to time by news of what is going on outside. Was it a sneeze? A voice? The voiceless language of a daimon? This last is Simmias' explanation; it is a theme which Plutarch takes up in a number of other dialogues written about this time. As a Delphic priest and a man of learning, the theology of prophecy was central to his interests. Simmias is made to crown his explanation, in the Platonic manner, by a myth: the story of Timarchus of Chaeronea, who descended into the cave of the near-by oracle of Trophonius and had a vision of heaven and of the destiny and nature of the soul. This splendid story concluded, the Pythagorean adds his ex cathedra word; and the moment for action has come.

So varied a subject naturally requires many variations of style. The myth and Theanor's closing speech have distinct and fascinating forms of grandeur. The narrative too is among the best in Plutarch. It shows qualities not revealed in the arabesques of allusion and analogy: a clear eye for action, a powerful technique of suspense, the natural skill of the born story-teller.

It was late. The wind had risen, and the cold was sharper. Most people had hurried home. We met Damoclidas, Pelopidas and Theopompus [exiles] and took them with us. Others brought in others. They had become separated crossing Cithaeron. The weather enabled them to wrap up and conceal their faces so as to cross the city without apprehension. As some of them passed through the gate, there was lightning on their right, but no thunder. It seemed a good omen of security and glory, signifying a brilliant but safe action.

All forty-eight of us were already indoors, and Theocritus was sacrificing privately in a separate room, when there was a violent beating on the door. Presently someone came to say that two of Archias' servants were knocking at the outer door. They had been sent in haste to Charon, demanded entry, and were angry at the delay in answering. Charon was dumbfounded. He gave orders to open up at once, and himself went to meet these servants with his garland on, as though he had sacrificed and was drinking, and asked them what they wanted. ‘Archias and Philip,’ said one of them, ‘sent us to ask you to come and see them as quickly as possible.’ Charon asked what the urgency was in a summons at such an hour. Was there any new development? ‘We know nothing more,’ said the man; ‘what are we to tell them?’ ‘That I'm coming,’ said Charon, ‘as soon as I've taken off my garland and put on my cloak. If I come with you at this hour, I shall cause a disturbance with some people, because they will think I am being arrested.’ ‘Very well,’ said the man, ‘you do that. We've orders from the governors to the guard in the lower town.’

They thereupon departed, and Charon came back to us and told us. Universal dismay; we thought we must have been betrayed.

However, all agreed that Charon should go and obey the governors' summons.

(594d-595a)

And so Charon goes, leaving his fifteen-year-old son as a pledge of his loyalty. The conspirators get more and more anxious, and decide to go out and fight, rather than be scraped out like a wasps' nest.

While we were arming and getting ready, Charon returned. Cheerful and smiling, he gave us a look, and told us not to worry. There was no crisis, everything was going according to plan. He told his story.

‘By the time I had answered their call, Archias and Philip were exceedingly drunk. Neither their minds nor their bodies were capable of much. They managed with difficulty to get up and come out to the door. “It's the exiles,” said Archias; “we hear they've got into the town and are in hiding.” “Where?” said I, thoroughly confused, “and who are they supposed to be?” “We don't know,” said Archias; “that's why we've sent for you, in case you've heard anything more definite.”

‘I began to recover from the shock. I reckoned their information could only be a vague rumour … If anyone with knowledge had given information, they could hardly have failed to know the house … So I replied, “I know there were a lot of idle reports around that caused us trouble while Androclides was alive. But I've not heard anything at the moment, Archias. However, I'll look into it, if you like, and if I hear anything worth thinking about, it shan't escape you.”’

(595f-596b)

Reassured, the conspirators sally forth in two parties.

It was the time people are generally at dinner. The wind had got up stronger, and was blowing snow with it mixed with fine rain. The streets were empty as we passed through them … But our bad luck, that was always evening out the odds between the enemy's ignorance and cowardice and our courage and care, complicating our action from the very beginning with episodes of danger like a play—our bad luck joined us again right at the climax and gave us a sharp and fearsome bout and an unexpected turn.

While Charon, having calmed Archias and Philip, had returned home and was organizing us for the action, a letter arrived from Athens, from the hierophant Archias to our Archias, his friend. This letter, it appears, announced the return and conspiracy of the exiles, the house where they had assembled, and the names of their confederates. But by this time Archias was thoroughly under the effects of his drink, and also excited by the prospect of the women.⁴¹ He took the letter, but when the courier said it was about a serious matter, he replied ‘Serious matters to-morrow’, put the letter under his cushion, asked for another cup, and kept sending Phyllidas to the door to see if the ladies were coming.

These prospects kept the party going. Meanwhile, we had arrived and pushed our way past the servants to the dining-room. We stood at the door for a time, taking in the guests. The sight of our garlands and dresses gave the necessary false impression of our visit, and produced silence. Melon was the first to spring forward, hand on sword-hilt. Cabirichus, the archon-by-lot, gripped his arm as he passed and called out, ‘Phyllidas, isn't this Melon?’ Melon shook him off and pulled out his sword. Archias struggled to his feet, but Melon was on top of him and didn't stop striking till he had killed him. Philip was wounded in the neck by Charon, but tried to defend himself with the drinking-cups on the table, until Lysitheus pushed him off the couch on to the ground and killed him … A few of the servants tried to resist, but we killed them. Those who made no fuss we locked up in the dining-room, not wanting them to get out and spread the word of what had happened until we knew whether our comrades had been successful.

(596c-597d)

The other party, headed by Pelopidas, are at the house of Leontiades.

They told the servant … they had come from Athens with a letter … He gave the message and was told to open up. When he took the bar out and opened the door a little, they all tumbled in, threw the man down and rushed through the courtyard into the bedroom. Leontiades guessed the truth, drew his dagger and prepared to resist. Wicked tyrant that he was, he was a courageous man and strong in the arm. However, he did not think of overturning the lamp and confronting his enemies in the darkness. In the light he could be seen. The moment the door opened, he struck Cephisodorus in the side, and then fell on Pelopidas and shouted for the servants. Samidas and his companions however prevented them from doing anything; they had no stomach for joining issue with distinguished citizens of such superior fighting power. Pelopidas however had a real sword-fight with Leontiades in the narrow doorway of the bedroom. Cephisodorus had fallen in the way and was dying, so that the others could not get in to help. In the end, though, our man, who was wounded in the head, though not seriously, and had given as much as he had received, threw Leontiades and killed him over the still warm body of Cephisodorus, who saw his enemy fall and gave Pelopidas his hand and saluted the others before dying, a happy man.

(597d-f)

This is not the end; but the remaining episodes, the murder of Hypatas on the roof and the release of political prisoners from the gaol, add little to the essentials.

These scenes of indoor violence owe much to the Odyssey, on which Plutarch's readers will have been brought up. Much of the detail is of course traditional, and perhaps very little is complete invention. But the choice and arrangement are special to the occasion. Pelopidas (10-11) shows some interesting differences, some of which follow naturally from the difference between Caphisias' narrative and the omniscient historian's. When Charon returns from his alarming interview, he tells only Pelopidas, or Pelopidas and his immediate group, the truth, but makes up another tale for the rest. This would not do for Caphisias: how could he have known? The version in the Life also emphasises Pelopidas' importance, as does its account of the death of Leontiades, which is represented as much the harder prong of the operation. Cephisodorus' dying words are not allowed either; he is quite dead, and Pelopidas fights on his own.

The differences are small but significant. The episode makes a good test for reflection on Plutarch's skills. Its vividness is not commonplace in ancient literature; it reminds us that Plutarch could write, better than most Greeks of his age, with his eye on the object, as well as out of the ready resources of a well-stocked literary memory.

Notes

1. See below, p. 147 [in D. A. Russell, Plutarch].

2. Conveniently edited and translated by F. H. Sandbach, Loeb Moralia, vol. xv.

3. On His Own Books, xix, 8 Kühn.

4. I have discussed this relationship in JRS 53 (1963) 1 ff.

5. Demosthenes 3.

6. See below, pp. 31 ff.

7. Obvious non-classical traits include mē for ou as the negative in most kinds of subordinate clause and participial phrase, and the very restricted, but in some ways unclassical, use of the optative.

8. See below, pp. 150 ff.

9. La Morale de Plutarque, 391.

10. i.e. as sudden and complete as the change of attitude to food that comes with the passing of disease and the restoration of health.

11. Iliad 10.85.

12. Euripides fr. 287 (from Bellerophon).

13. Holland is in fact translating the sommaire added in many later editions of Amyot.

14. The essentials of the rhetorical doctrine are in Aristotle, Rhetoric 2.20-1.

15. Val. Max. 8.14 ext. 2: compare 3.3 ext. 4. Valerius Maximus is one of the Latin authors whom Plutarch knew, though there is no likelihood of his having used him here.

16. Diogenes Laertius 6.27.

17. The second one is in fact the ‘text’ of Plutarch's ‘sermon’ on fortune (97c).

18. Tragica adespota 361 Nauck.

19. iv. 350 and v. 968 Hense.

20. See 123c, 602b.

21. cf. Horace Epist. 1.7.98, 10.42; Aristippus fr. 67 Mannebach.

22. cf. M. Aurelius 7.59.

23. Plutarch wrote a book (Cat. Lampr. 105) on ‘the likeness of life to a game of dice’: cf. also Plato, Republic 604c; Sophocles fr. 947; [Plu.] Consolation to Apollonius 112e.

24. e.g. 32a, 41f.

25. A useful term much used, since the publication of Usener's Epicurea (1887), to describe a lecture or discourse on a moral theme, marked by a combination of seriousness with humour and a certain vividness and immediacy in language. Typical examples in the remains of Teles (ed. O. Hense, 1909). The word is often used in discussions both of Roman Satire (N. Rudd, The Satires of Horace, ch. 1) and of moralists like Plutarch and Epictetus. Definition is difficult; but there is a distinct tradition which needs a name. The connotations of English diatribe confuse the issue. In Greek, diatribe is strictly ‘way of passing time’.

26. O. Gréard, op. cit., 190.

27. Odyssey 5.264.

28. ibid. 5.439.

29. ibid. 5.291, 295.

30. cf. Matthew 5.29-30; not the only coincidence between this piece and the Gospels: 830b recalls Matthew 6.26.

31. cf. above, p. 9.

32. Sulla 13.4.

33. Isocrates, Panegyricus 86.

34. A poet of Old Comedy: fr. 300k.

35. Demosthenes 18.208; ‘Longinus’ 16.

36. The point is underlined by the untranslatable conceit of PROkinduneusantas (‘risked their lives’) and PROdidaskontas (‘taught lessons’), the pro- in the second verb being trivial or meaningless.

37. cf. Dionysius, On the Forcefulness of Demosthenes 4.

38. cf. Pericles 13.5, and indeed the whole marvellous passage, 12-13.

39. No general history of the dialogue has yet replaced R. Hirzel, Der Dialog (1895). It is vital to remember that Aristotle (Poetics 1447b) was prepared to subsume the Socratic dialogue under poetry.

40. Varro, De Re Rustica, 1.59.2.

41. Women had been promised; they were in fact the conspirators in disguise.

General Bibliography

Actes du VIII^e Congrès de l'Association Guillaume Budé, Paris, 1969, 481-594 (includes report on recent work, by R. Flacelière).

R. Aulotte, Amyot et Plutarque, Geneva 1965. [Very valuable and important.]

D. Babut, Plutarque et le stoïcisme, Paris 1969. [Detailed, and wider in range than the title suggests.]

N. I. Barbu, Les Procédés de la peinture des caractères et la vérité historique dans les biographies de Plutarque, Paris 1934. [Not satisfactory, but still the only long treatment of the subject.]

R. H. Barrow, Plutarch and His Times, London 1967.

A. Dihle, Studien zur griechischen Biographie, Gottingen 1956.

O. Gréard, De la morale de Plutarque, Paris 1866. [Stimulating and wise in its approach.]

J. J. Hartman, De Avondzon des Heidendoms, Leiden³, 1924. [A highly personal book by a lifelong enthusiast.]

W. C. Helmbold & E. N. O'Neil, Plutarch's Quotations, American Philological Association, 1959.

R. Hirzel, Der Dialog, Leipzig 1895, ii 124-237. [Useful on Moralia.]

———. Plutarchos, Leipzig 1912. [Particularly valuable for Plutarch's influence.]

F. Leo, Die griechisch-römische Biographie, Leipzig 1901, 145-92.

C. P. Jones, Plutarch and Rome, Oxford 1971. [The fullest and most recent treatment of Plutarch's life etc.]

R. M. Jones, The Platonism of Plutarch, Menasha, Wisconsin, 1916. [Systematic and valuable.]

J. Oakesmith, The Religion of Plutarch, London 1902. [By an official of the G.P.O.; an amateur work in a good sense.]

H. Peter, Die Quellen Plutarchs in den Biographieen der Römer, Halle 1865.

G. Soury, La Démonologie de Plutarque, Paris 1942.

R. Volkmann, Leben, Schriften und Philosophie des Plutarch von Chaironeia, Berlin 1869. [Still valuable.]

K. Ziegler, ‘Plutarchos’, in Pauly-Wissowa, Realenzyklopädie … 1951 (separately published 1949; revised 1964). [The standard, essential work of reference.]