[In the following essay, Tyrrell explores the qualities of the Lives that make it a literary classic.]

‘And would they take the poor boy's life for the like o' that?’ ‘Bedad they would, if he had as many lives as Plutarch.’ This little dialogue was overheard not long ago in an Irish county. It may, perhaps, fitly introduce the present paper, as showing what a world-wide fame has been won by Plutarch's Lives. It will be observed that the phrase Plutarch's Lives, coming down to the peasantry from a distant and obscure tradition of the Hedge-Schoolmaster, had lost its meaning for them, and Plutarch had become not the author but the possessor of many lives. Mr. Strachan Davidson in his ‘Cicero’ couples the Lives with the philosophical works of Cicero, as having exercised the greatest and most constant influence on subsequent literature; and when we remember Shakespeare's large indebtedness to North's Plutarch, we must admit that the Dean of Balliol has not accorded to the Lives an unduly high place among epoch-making works.

But though Plutarch has exercised so great an influence on literature, we know very little about his life, and that little chiefly gleaned from his own writings. The chief of biographers has had no biographer. The legends which have gathered round him, such as the tradition that he was made consul by Trajan, have no historical basis. He was born a Boeotian, in that crass atmosphere of which Juvenal speaks as the very home and centre of dulness, though it produced Pindar, perhaps the most truly ‘inspired’ of all poets ancient or modern. His native place was Chaeronea, the town which commanded the Boeotian plain, and which so often provided a field for contending hosts to meet and put the destinies of Hellas to ‘battle's brute arbitrament. As Belgium in modern history has earned the name of ‘the cockpit’ of Europe, so Chaeronea (as Plutarch tells us) was called more pleasantly by Epaminodas ‘Mars' ballroom,’ so often did it invite the states of Greece to the carnival of war. His birth may be placed about 50 a.d. He studied at Athens, visited Alexandria, and must have spent some time in Asia Minor. Rome, ‘beautiful Rome,’ as he calls it, was visited by him at least twice, probably oftener. He delivered lectures there in the Greek tongue, and many of his treatises, as they have come down to us, seem to have been little more than expanded notes of these lectures. He could not have lectured in Latin,—a language of which he had very little knowledge, only enabling him to take in the general meaning of a sentence which he could not have construed word by word. His knowledge of Latin literature is very small, extending only to histories and memoirs essential for his Lives. To Virgil he never refers, nor to Ovid, whose ‘Fasti’ would have been so useful to him for his Roman Questions. His only reference to Latin poetry is one to Horace. It is in his life of Lucullus, where he tells the story to which Horace refers in his ‘Epistles.’¹ According to Horace, Lucullus, being asked if he could supply a hundred purple cloaks for a certain scenic representation, said that he thought he had some, and would see. After a while he sent back a message that he found he had some five thousand, of which the ‘entrepreneur’ might have as many as he wanted. Horace adds the reflection, ‘it is a poor establishment in which there is not much gear of which the owner knows nothing and in which the thief finds his account.’ Plutarch seems to have read the passage. The way in which he tells the anecdote is this: ‘When the “entrepreneur” said he wanted a hundred, Lucullus told him to take twice as many; on which the poet Flaccus made the comment that a man is not really rich unless he has more property that is overlooked and unsuspected than that which is seen and recognized.’ The comment, however, is more like that of a man who had been told that Horace had used the incident to point a moral than of one who had read the actual words of the poet. However, the passage is interesting as showing that the great Gibbon nodded when he said that between Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Libanius,—between the century before Christ and the fourth century after,—there is not in the whole of Greek literature a single allusion to Horace or Virgil. Plutarch was equally ignorant of the prose literature of Rome, including the philosophical works of Cicero which, as we have seen, contest with the Lives the dominion of the intellect of posterity. The two passages in Plutarch's life of Cicero which seem to show some knowledge of Cicero's philosophical works, are more likely to have come from Tiro's ‘Life of Cicero.’ When asked which of the speeches of Demosthenes he admired the most, Cicero replied, the longest.² Again, Plutarch quotes the remark of Cicero when Caesar ordered the restoration of the statues of Pompey which had been thrown down, ‘he is erecting the statues of Pompey, but he is planting his own.’

It is an interesting observation of the late Dr. Richard Chenevix Trench, Archbishop of Dublin, in his admirable lectures on Plutarch,³ delivered in Dublin thirty-six years ago, that Plutarch never broke a lance against the truth which was higher than any which he had ever heard, the truth which in two centuries was to dominate the world. He knew nothing of Christianity. Even such passing notices as we have in Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius, and Epictetus are sought in vain in Plutarch. If we are right, and we cannot be far wrong, in placing his birth about 50 a.d., long before he began to write, St. Peter and St. Paul had fulfilled their mission. All around him there were flourishing Christian churches, but he knew nothing of them. If he had ever heard of the perverse superstition, as Pliny calls it, he confounded it with Judaism, of which he knew little and only the least attractive side. ‘He can tell us how the Jewish high priest was clothed,’ writes Dr. Mahaffy in his excellent study of Plutarch in ‘The Greek World under Roman Sway’ (p. 321), ‘but as to Jewish dogmas he manifests the grossest ignorance.’ When, however, he warns the wife not to allow religious cults foreign to her husband to creep into the house, he is, in the opinion of Dr. Mahaffy, pointing ‘at Christianity, as well as at those Oriental cults which we know to have done domestic mischief in those days.’⁴

The later years of a tranquil and happy life he spent in his native town of Chaeronea, a small and insignificant place of which he says in his life of Demosthenes,—in one of those few and precious ‘asides’ which throw a rare and fitful ray of light on his private life,—that it was so small that he did not like to make it smaller by leaving it. Have we here a passage read and remembered by Juvenal⁵ when he speaks of a man repairing to Cumae as about to present the Sibyl with one additional citizen, an appreciable addition to a population so limited? But while he made Chaeronea his headquarters he took excursions into various parts of Greece, and felt a pride in making himself acquainted with her historical and antiquarian monuments. It is in his Symposiaca or Table Talk that we see most of the man himself and the society of his time. One of his chief friends was Mestrius Florus, a man of consular rank and an ardent antiquarian. With him Plutarch visited the battlefield of Bebriacum where the army of Otho was overthrown. He records an occasion on which the Emperor Vespasian ‘scored off’ the man of learning in a manner characteristic in all ages of the personage when brought to book by a scholar. Mestrius Florus had corrected the emperor for his mispronunciation of the word for a wagon. He had called it plostra not plaustra. The emperor accepted the correction, but next day greeted the scholar as Flaurus not Florus. Now Flaurus in Greek means ‘worthless’ (ϕλαυ̑ροs). Human nature is ever the same. The boor in high place loves to have a jest at the expense of the poor scholar, and the world laughs at the triumph of material success over mental endowments. The questions raised at these symposiaca were often small and trivial, as, for instance, why is A the first letter of the alphabet, whether the hen or the egg came first, which hand of Venus Diomede wounded. Here, again, is it not possible that we have evidence of some knowledge of Plutarch on the part of Juvenal? One recalls the passage⁶ where Juvenal laughs at the minute and trivial inquiries which engaged the cognoscenti of his day: who was the nurse of Aeneas, the step-mother of Anchemolus, what age did Acestes attain and how many flasks of Sicilian wine he gave to his Phrygian guests. The symposiaca are a wonderful source of information about the social life of the first century of the Christian era, and they have not been drawn upon as much as they deserve. Further, they show the character of Plutarch in a very amiable light, which will be further illustrated when we come to consider his nature and gifts from other points of view.

We have seen,—and shall see even more clearly when we come to estimate Shakespeare's debt to Pluturch,—that the Parallel Lives have on them the seal of immortality. Before dwelling on their greatness it may be well to dispose of what is much the most trifling part of the inquiry, namely, the respects in which they fall short of perfection. First of all, Plutarch was a Greek. He was enamoured of Hellas, as Pericles said that every Athenian ought to be of Athens; and he loved his birthplace. He hated those who belittled,—even those who did not love and worship,—Greece, nay even Chaeronea. In a strange passage in the De sera Numinis Vindicta (The Deferred Retribution of Heaven), perhaps the most interesting of his moral essays, he depicts Nero as suffering the tortures of Hell, his soul being studded with red-hot nails. But he adds that this torment is presently to be remitted, and that Nero (in recognition of his musical tastes) is to be transformed into a marsh frog to make, we suppose, ‘the punishment fit the crime.’ This mitigation of sentence is represented as being due to his treatment of Greece: ‘Some recognition from Heaven was due to the fact that he emancipated Greece, the best and most pious of the peoples subject to Rome.’ His extraordinary treatise, On the Malignity of Herodotus (if really authentic), probably had its rise from the fact that Herodotus has recorded some ignoble facts in Theban history. Yet what single writer has done more than Herodotus to paint in unfading colours the grand tableau of the struggle of the West against the East? Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis live in his pages; but so does the Theban Medism, and Plutarch cannot bear to be reminded of the blot on the Boeotian escutcheon. Yet surely it was erased by Epaminondas, and Pindar could contemplate it without a blush. But Plutarch lived in a time when Greece was politically a nullity, though she was still able to give laws in literature, rhetoric, and art. We have seen that he despised, or at least neglected, the great literature which Rome had borrowed from her vassal; he also was somewhat blind to the solid qualities of Roman worthies, their steadfastness, their devotion to their country, their abnegation of self,—qualities conspicuously absent in the far more brilliant Greek men of affairs, such as Themistocles, Alcibiades, and (as some would say) Demosthenes. It is interesting to observe that when he has to seek a Roman parallel for a person so characteristically Greek as Alcibiades, he is obliged to have recourse to the semi-mythical Coriolanus, and the parallel hardly extends beyond the fact that each bore arms against his country. It is said that he is disposed to favour the Greek against the Latin hero. On this subject we would ask leave to quote an eloquent passage (abridged) from Dean Merivale's History of the Romans under the Empire:—

Plutarch's Parallel Lives are eminently philosophy teaching by example. There is no work, perhaps, of antiquity that Christian parents can put so securely into the hands of their children. The author's object was to draw a fair and friendly comparison between the Greeks and the Romans, between the conquered and the conquerors, the spoiled and the spoilers, the slaves and the masters, between men whom other censors would have delighted to contrast as the spiritual Hellene and the brutal Italian, or, again, as the cringing Graeculus and the lofty Romulides. Yet throughout this long series of lives, this glittering array of virtues and vices, there is no word, I think, of subservience or flattery, of humiliation or triumph, to mark the position of the writer in the face of his Roman rulers. Whether we consider the book as addressed to the Greeks or the Romans, the absence of any such indications of feeling is undoubtedly remarkable. To me it seems most honourable both to the one people and to the other.⁷

The question is certainly one on which there is no room for a charge of undue bias. But, be it observed, even if the charge of favouring the Greeks were true it would reflect great credit on Plutarch that in an age of assentation and servility he chose the nobler part and refused to avail himself of an obvious means of recommending himself to the emperors and the great families of Rome. It is true, indeed, that Plutarch was a born biographer, and as such he was no historian. His lives, for instance, of the Gracchi present them to us as living beings, but the times in which they lived must be reconstructed by us from other sources. The revolution which marked that epoch had for him no existence. A crucial instance of his lack of political insight is to be found in the rapture with which he records the proclamation of the liberty of Greece at the Isthmian games by Flamininus. He seems to believe that ‘liberty,’ given as that was, is really liberty and not the most degrading form of servitude, chains the more humiliating because they are gilded, and because they bind their wearers under the semblance of ornaments. But though the political outlook of the Lives is but limited, their ethical aspect is invaluable. His own account of his aim may well be quoted from his ‘Paulus Aemilius,’ in the words of Sir Thomas North's translation, which must ever have such a deep interest for every English-speaking race, as being the material out of which Shakespeare wrought his magnificent panorama of the Roman republic:—

When I first began to write these Lives my intent was to profit others; but since continuing and going on I have much profited myself by looking into these histories as if I looked into a glass to frame and fashion my life to the mould and pattern of these virtuous noblemen. For, running over their manners in this sort and seeking also to describe their lives, methinks I am still conversant and familiar with them, and do, as it were, lodge them with me, one after another. I do teach and prepare myself to shake off and banish from me all lewd and dishonest conditions, if by chance the company and conversation of them whose company I keep,—and must of necessity haunt,—do acquaint me with some unhappy or ungracious touch.

What is the great secret of the popularity of the Lives, which has made them, in the words of Madame Roland, ‘the pasture of great souls,’ which has led Montaigne to call them a breviary, and which has recommended the sage of Chaeronea to minds so diverse as those of Jeremy Taylor, Bayle, Dryden, Bossuet, Molière, and Montaigne? A very noble tribute, too, is paid to them by Amyot, the author of the sixteenth century French translation of the Lives, whose version North Englished, and who, therefore, at second hand has fed the lamp of our great poet's inspiration:—

‘The dullest man in the world on reading or hearing read such a master must bend his head in humility and do obeisance to Truth herself, who can make herself so well heard in the mouth of a poor pagan.’⁸ It is his clear appreciation of the difference between history and biography, his vivid psychological portraiture, which gives to every anecdote, however apparently trivial, a deep significance. Every anecdote illustrates some characteristic trait, or puts in a strong light some striking fact. Witness the anecdote of the girl who, during a gladiator's show, plucked off a thread from the toga of Sulla that she might get a bit of his luck; the mother who, learning from her husband that he had betrothed their daughter, said angrily, ‘you have been very hasty unless, of course, it is to Tiberius Gracchus’; the refusal of Cato, aged five, to acknowledge the right of the Italians to the franchise, though in the grasp of a big Marsian who held him out of the window by the neck and threatened to drop him if he did not give in. Beside many pithy sentences which have made their way into all the histories, there is still a rich harvest to be gleaned. What could be better than the reply of Sulla to the application for a military command made by Crassus whose family had suffered in the Marian massacre, ‘I will give the command, but I can give you as support only the ghosts of your father and your brother’; or than Caesar's summing up of his military position at a critical moment in the words, ‘first I must deal with the army that has no general, then with the general who has no army.’ Plutarch is keenly conscious of the psychological value of the anecdote and sometimes expressly claims it. In his life of Alexander he tells us that he omits many things of the greatest importance because ‘the noblest deeds do not always show virtues and vices; but oftentimes a light occasion, a word, or some sport, make men's natural dispositions and manners appear more plain than famous battles won, wherein are slain ten thousand men.’ Plutarch's object is ‘to decipher the man and his nature,’ as he says in the beginning of his ‘Nicias,’ when he confesses that he has lightly passed over many things that Thucydides has told. He certainly neglects the background, giving the life without the times, even to the detriment of the decipherment of nature (as sometimes we cannot help feeling); but when he has succeeded so wonderfully, who shall dare to speak of a flaw in his method? Who will lift up his voice against a plan which has given us such a number of delightful anecdotes, some of which are often attributed to authors much posterior to Plutarch? It is to him we owe the phrase ‘to call a spade a spade’; he it is who has told us that when the Olynthian politicians complained to Philip that they were called traitors in Macedon because they had betrayed their city, the king replied, ‘We Macedonians are a rude folk; we call a spade a spade.’ The same king on another occasion was silenced by a retort also recorded by Plutarch. He was arguing without any special knowledge with a musician on a question touching the musical art, when the latter closed the discussion with the words, ‘God forbid your Majesty should know as much about these things as a mere artist like myself.’ An answer recorded by him as given by Alexander the Great is interesting because Seneca⁹ calls it utterly foolish though he admits that it sounds spirited and princely. Spirited and princely it certainly sounds to us. A humble friend asked him for some help towards a dowry for his daughter. Alexander gave him fifty talents. This seemed to the applicant to be far too much, and he desired that the gift should be greatly reduced. ‘But,’ said the king ‘though such a sum might be enough for you to receive, it would not be enough for me to give.’ One is reminded of the indignation of another kingly-minded man, Julius Caesar, when the pirates demanded twenty talents for his ransom. ‘Make it fifty,’ said Caesar, ‘you do not know my value, such a small ransom would be an insult.’ This story, illustrating so well the soaring spirit of the great Roman, we owe to Plutarch, as well as Alexander's neat remark about his vicegerent, Antipater. A friend called attention to the plain apparel of Antipater, and commended his modesty and humility. ‘Yes,’ said Alexander, ‘his outer man is plain, but his spirit is always “en grande tenue.”’¹⁰ Very subtle, too, is the ‘mot’ ascribed by him to the wise man, Chilon, who, when some one boasted to him that he had not an enemy, put to him the significant question, ‘Have you a friend?’ Some of his happy anecdotes, happy as apt illustrations of character, have already been quoted. Others would be well worthy of record if space permitted. So would some of his grand tableaux, such as those in which he depicts the defeat and death of Crassus, who went deliberately to meet his doom because ‘it will be better to have it said that a Roman general was deceived by the enemy than abandoned by his own men.’ Very impressive and picturesque is his description of the last hours of Cato in Utica, that great soul to whom Mommsen refers as the fool who spoke the epilogue in the drama of the fall of the Roman republic. If Cato was a fool in any sense, it was not in the vein of Touchstone and Parolles, caustic but genial critics of life. It was in the way of Don Quixote—a noble way, which Mommsen was unable to understand. Yet he was no Don Quixote either. It was not against windmills that he tilted, though it was against objects equally impervious to his lance. The death of Pompey was called by Chateaubriand ‘le plus beau morceau du Plutarque,’ and has been reproduced by every historian of Rome.

We would here put before our readers a scene or two in which Plutarch's treatment of the theme may be compared with that of a brother artist, and it will be seen that Plutarch does not suffer by the comparison. The suicide of Otho is described both by Tacitus¹¹ and by Plutarch,¹² and the two have evidently used the same authorities. Here is the Tacitean account taken from Church and Brodribb:—

Towards evening he quenched his thirst with a draught. Two daggers were brought to him. He tried the edge of both, and then put one under his head. After satisfying himself that his friends had set out, he passed a tranquil night, and it is even said that he slept. At dawn he fell with his breast upon the steel. Hearing a groan from the dying man his freedmen and slaves came in. They found but one wound. His funeral was hastily performed. He had made this the subject of earnest entreaties, anxious that his head might not be cut off and subjected to indignities. The Boeotian cohorts carried his body with praises and tears, covering his wound and his hands with kisses. Some of the soldiers killed themselves near the funeral pile, not moved by remorse or fear, but by the desire to emulate his glory and by affection for their prince.

Plutarch's account of the same scene has all the dignity of Tacitus, and has preserved besides, in the dying emperor's concern for his friends and his freedmen, some pathetic touches which the Tacitean narrative lacks:—

‘Towards evening he was athirst and drank a little water. Then he carefully examined the edge of two daggers which were beside him, and laid aside one, placing the other under his arm. … He spent the rest of the night in repose so unbroken that his chamberlains were astonished at the soundness of his sleep. In the morning he summoned a freedman who had assisted him in the division of his property among his friends, and, learning from him that each of them had received what he desired, said, “go, then, and show yourself to the troops, if you do not want to meet a violent death at their hands as having helped to cause my death.” When the man left, he held the dagger, point upwards, in both hands and threw himself down on it. The pain wrung from him only one groan, which was the first notice the household had of his tragic end. When the slaves lifted up the dead body and exposed it to the public view, the whole camp and city were filled with lamentations. The soldiers burst noisily into the house, and in the excess of their grief cursed their negligence in not keeping a close watch on their emperor and thus baffling his noble self-immolation in their behalf. Though the enemy were hard by, not one of the soldiers would leave the corse. Without even removing their armour, they made a pyre, and carried the dead emperor out. Those who succeeded in outstripping the others in the race for the honour of bearing the bier were proud men. The less fortunate contented themselves with throwing themselves on the corse and kissing the wound. Others clasped the dead hands, and others, who could not get near, prostrated themselves in adoration. Some, after applying the torch to the pyre, slew themselves, not, so far as is known, through gratitude for benefits received, or through fear of the vengeance of the conqueror. No, never was king or tyrant animated by a love of power so prodigious or so passionate as was their craving to be servants to Otho and to do his bidding. Even after his death regret for his loss never left them, but endured in undying hatred of Vitellius.’

It is hard to account for this extraordinary enthusiasm for the effeminate Otho, who, according to Juvenal, plastered his face with bread poultices and carried his mirror with him to the battlefield.¹³ He must have had some trait which appealed strongly to the soldiery. One recalls a somewhat similar case during the Boer war.

It is no small triumph to come with advantage out of a comparison with Tacitus. We have not space here to set beside each other the Plutarchean and Thucydidean narratives of the last days of Nicias, but a reader of Thucydides¹⁴ and of Plutarch¹⁵ will find, we think, in the former, fine as it is, nothing so touching as the last words of Plutarch's twenty-sixth chapter:—

While all were weeping and wailing in their terror and agony of mind, Nicias, sick though he was, seldom broke down. When he did, it was plain that he was not thinking of himself, but of the ignominious issue of the expedition and the collapse of the soaring ambition of Athens. What struck people most was the injustice of his fate,—a feeling that was aggravated when they remembered how he had argued and pleaded against the disastrous invasion of Sicily. Indeed, in some their trust in Providence experienced a severe shock, when they saw a man of such eminence, of such unimpeachable life and exemplary piety, involved in the same ruin with the most degraded and abandoned of the rank and file.

But let us no more compare Plutarch with the artists of the ancient world. Let us hasten to his crowning triumph, to the fact that the Master Mind of all time, the Artist of Artists, not only drew from him the materials for his amazing pictures of the ancient world, but sometimes transferred to his plays whole scenes from the Lives with scarcely a phrase or a word altered or modified. Had Plutarch never written his Lives, or had they not been translated by some sympathetic mind like Sir Thomas North's, it is very unlikely that the world would ever have had Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, or Antony and Cleopatra. The whole play of Julius Caesar is to be found in Plutarch, and often the very wording of North's version is adopted unaltered; oftener, however, a happy touch is dwelt on and developed,—the lines deepened or the colour heightened. A good example of the latter mode of dealing with the materials is afforded by Antony's speech in Julius Caesar, perhaps the finest specimen in literature of the orator's art and its influence on an urban multitude. Here is the fine passage¹⁶ in Plutarch which Shakespeare's art has immortalized:—

To conclude his oration he unfolded before the whole assembly the bloody garments of the dead, thrust through in many places with their swords, and called the malefactors cruel and cursed murtherers.

We all know the grand passage in ‘Julius Caesar’:—

‘If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.
You all do know this mantle: I remember
The first time Caesar ever put it on;
'T was on a summer's evening in his tent:
That day he overcame the Nervii.
Look, in this place ran Cassius' dagger through:
See what a rent the envious Casca made:
Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabb'd,
And, as he pluck'd his cursed steel away,
Mark how the blood of Caesar followed it,
As rushing out of doors to be resolved
If Brutus so unkindly knock'd or no.
For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar's angel.’(17)

The final words in the passage of Plutarch about ‘calling them murtherers’ find their poetic consecration in

‘O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth,
That I am meek and gentle with these butchers.’

Here we have the original Greek passage treated with great freedom and, perhaps, in one place a little spoiled by one of those conceits which were so dear to the Elizabethan age, and which even Shakespeare could not resist. Throughout the play of ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ the correspondence with Plutarch is modified by the fact that Antony, as he was and as Plutarch portrayed him, would not have made a hero of tragedy. The coarse ruffian and debauchee is refined by Shakespeare into the victim of the spells of an eastern enchantress, a Ulysses in the toils of Circe or Calypso, but one who is sober and wise enough to recognize that he has lost the world for a woman, even though he count it well lost, one who is able to sum up his ruined career in the pathetic words, ‘I have lost my way in the world.’

But in this play there is one perfect example of the confidence with which the ‘myriad-minded’ Englishman was content to put himself into the hands of the simple Boeotian, borrowing from him every artistic touch, and adding only the dramatic framework. Greece took captive her proud Roman conqueror, but never had she a greater triumph over posterity than when a Greek wrote a scene on which not even a Shakespeare could make an improvement.

The final scene of Cleopatra's life is thus told by Plutarch (North's version):—

‘Her death was very sudden, for those whom Caesar sent to her ran hither in all haste possible, and found the soldiers standing at the gate, mistrusting nothing, nor understanding of her death. But when they had opened the doors, they found Cleopatra stark dead, laid upon a bed of gold, attired and arrayed in her royal robes, and one of her two women which was called Iras dead at her feet, and her other woman (called Charmian) half dead and trembling, trimming the diadem which Cleopatra wore upon her head. One of the soldiers, seeing her, angrily said unto her “Is that well done, Charmian?” “Very well,” said she again, “and meet for a princess descended from the race of so many noble Kings.” She said no more, but fell down dead hard by the bed.’

Here is Shakespeare's version accepting every artistic touch and adding practically nothing except the dramatic form and metrical garb.

                                                  ‘Enter the Guard rushing in.
FIRST Guard.
Where is the Queen?
CHAR.
                                                                      Speak softly, wake her not.
FIRST Guard.
Caesar hath sent—
CHAR.
                                                                                Too slow a messenger.
                                                                                                    [Applies an asp.]
O, come apace, despatch! I partly feel thee.
FIRST Guard.
Approach, ho! All's not well: Caesar's beguil'd.
SEC. Guard.
There's Dolabella sent from Caesar: call him.
FIRST Guard.
What work is here? Charmian, is this well
                                                            done?
CHAR.
It is well done, and fitting for a princess
Descended of so many royal kings.
Ah, soldier.                                                                                [Dies.]
                                                                                          Reënter Dolabella.
DOL.
How goes it here?
SEC. Guard.
                                                                                All dead.
DOL.
                                                                                                                                  Caesar, thy thoughts
Touch their effects in this: thyself art coming
To see perform'd the dreaded act which thou
So sought'st to hinder.
                                        [Within.] A way there, a way for Caesar!
                    Reënter Caesar and all his train marching.
DOL.
O, Sir, you are too sure an augurer,
That you did fear is done.
CAES.
                                                                                                                        Bravest at the last,
She levell'd at our purposes, and, being royal,
Took her own way. The manner of their deaths?
I do not see them bleed.
DOL.
                                                                                          Who was last with them?
FIRST Guard.
A simple countryman that brought her figs:
This was his basket.
CAES.
                                                                                Poison'd, then.
FIRST Guard.
                                                                                                                                                      O, Caesar,
This Charmian lived but now; she stood and spake:
I found her trimming up the diadem
On her dead mistress; tremblingly she stood
And on the sudden dropp'd.’(18)

Such is the tale as told by Plutarch, and such is the scene as dramatized by Shakespeare. Even the soldier's indignant question,—probably resting upon some basis of tradition, for who would have imagined such words from a soldier?—and Charmian's splendid reply are hardly modified. Shakespeare takes here and there words, phrases, even speeches, as by royal right from various writers. But we do not elsewhere find so large and beautiful a picture transferred with every detail to his enduring canvas. In this proud boast Plutarch has no rivals.

Shakespeare is seen at his worst when he puts Holinshed into blank verse, but he rises to his noblest heights in some of his adaptations of Plutarch. It was in his power of realizing a character or scene already sketched in outline, that his consummate genius lay.

The Coriolanus not only adopts whole speeches from North's Plutarch, but is penetrated throughout with the diction and thought of that work. The first sentence of the Life is reproduced almost verbally in Coriolanus, ii. 3, 244 f. ‘Coriolanus,’ iii. 1, 69 f.,

‘In soothing them we nourish 'gainst our senate
The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition’

has its origin in North's ‘They nourished against themselves the naughty seed and cockle of insolence and sedition.’ Sometimes Shakespeare apologizes for an extravagance of fancy or diction in North, as, for instance, where North has ‘And so the belly, all this notwithstanding, laughed at their folly and said.’ Shakespeare makes Menenius justify the figure:—

                                                                                          ‘With a kind of smile
Which ne'er came from the lungs, but even thus—
For, look you, I may make the belly smile
As well as speak—it tauntingly replied.’

We add two passages showing how closely Shakespeare adhered to the text of North. Here is the passage on which he built the speech of Coriolanus at the house of Tullus Aufidius, the general of the Volscians:—

‘I am Caius Marcius, who hath done to thyself particularly and to all the Volsces generally great hurt and mischief, which I cannot deny for my surname of Coriolanus that I bear. For I never had any other benefit or recompense of the true and painful service I have done and the extreme dangers I have been in but this only surname; a good memory and witness of the malice and displeasure thou shouldest bear me. Indeed, the name only remaineth with me; for the rest the envy and cruelty of the people of Rome have taken from me by the sufferance of the dastardly nobility and magistrates who have forsaken me and let me be banished by the people. This extremity hath now driven me to come as a poor suitor, to take thy chimney-hearth, not of any hope I have to save my life thereby: for if I had feared death I would not have come hither to put myself in hazard: but pricked forward with desire to be revenged of them that have thus banished me; which now I do begin in putting my person into the hands of their enemies. Wherefore, if thou hast any heart to be wreaked of the injuries thy enemies have done thee, speed thee now, and let my misery serve thy turn, and so use it as my services may be a benefit to the Volsces: promising thee that I will fight with better good will for all you than I did when I was against you, knowing that they fight more valiantly who know the force of the enemy than such as have never proved it. And if it be so that thou dare not, and that thou art weary to prove fortune any more, then am I also weary to live any longer. And it were no wisdom in thee to save the life of him who hath been heretofore thy mortal enemy, and whose service now can nothing help nor pleasure thee.’¹⁹

Compare the following passage from North's Plutarch with Shakespeare's Coriolanus, v. 3, 94 f.

If we held our peace, my son, and determined not to speak, the state of our poor bodies and present sight of our raiment would easily bewray to thee what life we have led at home since thy exile and abode abroad; but think now with thyself how much more unfortunate than all the women living we are come hither, considering that the sight which should be most pleasant to all other to behold, spiteful fortune had made most fearful to us, making myself to see my son, and my daughter here her husband, besieging the walls of his native country: so as that which is the only comfort to all other in their adversity and misery, to pray unto the gods and to call to them for aid, is the only thing which plungeth us into most deep perplexity. For we cannot, alas! both together pray for victory to our country and for safety of thy life also; but a world of grievous curses, yea more than any mortal enemy can heap upon us, are forcibly wrapt up in our prayers. … Moreover, my son, thou hast sorely taken of thy country, exacting grievous payments upon them in revenge of the injuries offered thee; besides, thou hast not hitherto showed thy poor mother any courtesy. And, therefore, it is not only honest, but due unto me, that without compulsion I should obtain my so just and reasonable request of thee.

The scene in Coriolanus, v. 3, where Volumnia employs the child Marcius to work upon his father has a pathetic touch not in Plutarch:—

                                                                                          ‘Speak thou, boy,
Perhaps thy childishness will move him more
Than can our reasons.’

Minor loans from North's Plutarch will be recognized in Timon of Athens compared with Plutarch's Antonius, 38, and Alcibiades, 4; and in Midsummer Night's Dream, ii. 1, 75-80, where Shakespeare takes the name Perigenia from Plutarch's Theseus, 1, Ariadne from ib. 3, Aegle from ib. 4, and Antiopa and Hippolyta from ib. 8. Indeed, almost all the foreign names in Shakespeare come from Plutarch. The strange name Caphis in Timon is found in Plutarch's Sulla. Hannibal, in Measure for Measure, ii. 1, no doubt comes from Plutarch, and so does the story of Alexander and Clitus, alluded to in Henry V. iv. 7, 41. In Julius Caesar, iv. 3, 178, ‘Cicero being one,’ looks very like a reminiscence of Plutarch, Brutus, 20, ‘and among that number Cicero was one.’ ‘Et tu Brute’ appears in Julius Caesar, iii. 1, 77, but not in Plutarch.

As a psychologist Plutarch might be compared advantageously with Seneca, but the latter is theoretical while the former is practical. Plutarch thoroughly understands human character, observes it with great intelligence, and describes it luminously; but he observes as a man, not as a metaphysician, to borrow a shrewd observation from Emerson. He sounds the depths and scales the heights of the great problems of existence, but, like Tennyson's shepherd, he loves not the heights,

                                                                                ‘Nor cares to walk
With Death and morning on the silver horns.’

Like Love, Plutarch is ‘of the valley’ and ‘by the happy threshold.’ ‘He has a taste,’ writes Emerson, ‘for common life. He knows the farm, the forge, the kitchen, and every kitchen utensil.’ He revels in ‘the little murmur of the burg’ of Chaeronea, but he is far from mistaking it for ‘the great wave that rolls around the world.’ It would be pleasant to follow Plutarch into his private life, to sketch the Greek village of the first century after Christ, to examine his views on love, and on marriage, which he makes a very prosaic relation, enlivened only by the excursions and alarums of the mother-in-law, who even at that early period of the world's history had begun to make herself felt. But all this would afford material enough for another essay. We will now make a few observations on a couple of the best and most suggestive of his moral treatises, that on Superstition, called by Wyttenback ‘liber vere Plutarcheus,’ and that on the ‘Delays in Divine Justice,’ concluding with some general remarks on Plutarch's method and style.

The moralists of the ancient world, Seneca, Persius, Juvenal, Lucian, have been bitter satirists. Even Persius, when he describes himself (far from accurately) as a laugher (cachinno) adds ‘with an angry spleen.’ But Plutarch is never bitter, never applies even the light lash of Horace, under which Persius says his victims smiled. He pities the sufferers from the plague of superstition, and tries to alleviate their miseries and excuse their weakness. Superstition is not so great an error as atheism, but it entails more suffering. He compares the atheist to the man who is colour blind. The atheist lacks a great source of happiness, but he never had it and does not know what it is. The man who is stone deaf does not suffer like him whose want of ear turns harmonies into discords. The superstitious man sees in every little ‘contretemps’ of every-day life a clear sign of the anger of Heaven and its determination to punish him. Even sleep is turned into a source of terror. ‘Reversing the pleasing remark of Pythagoras that we are made better by coming into the presence of the gods, he feels as if the temples which he enters were full of serpents.’ He puts God in a worse light than the atheist. ‘For my part,’ says Plutarch, ‘I would rather have a man say of me “there is no such person as Plutarch” than “Plutarch is unreasonable, passionate, vindictive, a man who, if you left him out of a supper party through inadvertence, or had not time to pay him a visit, would slander you and even ruin you.”’ In fine, while the atheist says ‘there is no God,’ the superstitious man says ‘I would there were not.’ The wise man he describes as standing ‘on sound solid ground between the bogs of superstition and the quagmires of atheism.’

The treatise on the Delays of Divine Justice is full of profound remarks, among which one finds a complete recognition of heredity, and the devolution on the children of the sins of the father. The remark of Cotton is anticipated, which we cannot accurately quote in English, but of which we happen to recollect the late Benjamin Hall Kennedy's happy rendering in an elegiac couplet:—

‘Justitia gaudere Deum sic collige: poenas
                    Qui meruere timent, qui timuere luunt.’

The treatise is an attempt to lead an age, prone to deny God, or disfigure Him, back to the god of Plato. Plutarch has no doubt of the immortality of the soul. ‘Miserable man,’ he exclaims, ‘is he who shuts the gates of another life. He is like a man who, overtaken by a storm at sea, would say to his fellow voyagers “we have no pilot to steer or star to guide us. But what matter? We shall soon be dashed against the rocks or engulfed in the abyss.”’ But a complete treatment of this delightful treatise would lead us into a discussion about the religion of the first century of the Christian era.

Niebuhr, to the great injury of his reputation for literary or psychological insight, called the Lives a collection of silly anecdotes, and others have accused Plutarch of not duly weighing his authorities. But the charge cannot be sustained. For instance, he warns his readers of the chronological difficulties which beset the story of the interview between Solon and Croesus; but that does not seem to him a sufficient reason for suppressing a tale so instructive and so natural. Besides, we find him expressly weighing rival authorities, as in the forty-sixth chapter of his Alexander, where he recites the evidence for and against Alexander's relations with the Amazonian queen, and decides against the story. In a similar spirit, in ‘Lysander,’ he rejects the tale of a characteristic correspondence between Lysander and the Ephors, who, receiving from him the despatch, ‘Athens is taken,’ said, ‘taken would have been quite sufficient.’ Plutarch's comment is, in effect, that the anecdote is ben trovato, but that there is no positive evidence for its truth. It is suspiciously like other tales illustrating the Spartan love of laconic speech. In like manner in Themistocles, 25, he rejects a statement of Stesimbrotus, quoting against him Theophrastus and Thucydides; and in many other places we find him exercising the same caution.

The style of Plutarch has been almost universally admired, but there have been dissentients. Johnson found it cramped, and Boissonade described it as a mosaic, apparently because he makes his style fit his theme, and according to its requirements employs the language of the historian, the poet, the naturalist, and the metaphysician. Chateaubriand said he was ‘un agréable imposteur en tours naïfs,’ and another French critic has said that he owes to his French translator, Amyot, any charm that he possesses. But M. Gréard, in his excellent work on Plutarch's Morals, puts the case in its true light. Plutarch had a real candour and geniality of spirit. His cultivation of rhetoric modified these qualities, but was very far from eradicating them. ‘How is it,’ remarked a French statesman, ‘that French boys of ten are so charmingly clever, and French youths of twenty-four so intolerably stupid? It is the effect of education, I suppose.’ But education did not debauch the style of Plutarch. It left it as simple as his life. Of course we do not find in him the naïveté of primitive literature, but still less are we met by the artificial simplicity of periods of literary decadence. The ‘tours naïfs’ of Plutarch are leaps of a mind which lets itself out, not the taught somersaults of the gymnasium. He does not seek for his effects, they drop from him, as the jewels dropped from the lips of the good princess in the fairy tale. Plutarch was an enormously wide reader, but it cannot be said of him, as it can be said of many learned men, that he put out the fire by heaping on the coals. He obeys the Horatian precept:—

                                                  ‘Si vis me flere, dolendum est
Primum ipsi tibi,’

and when he is warmed by his theme he never allows his readers to be cold.

Notes

1. i. 6, 40-46.

2. Cic. xxiv.

3. ‘Plutarch,’ four lectures, 1873.

4. Ib. 328.

5. Juv. iii. 3, Unum civem donare Sibyllae.

6. vii. 234-236.

7. Ch. lxvi.

8. ‘Le plus sourd du monde lisant ou oyant un tel maistre est constraint de baisser le front et donner gloire à la Vérité se faisant si bien ouyr en la bouche d'un pauvre payen.’

9. Animosa vox videtur et regia cum sit stultissima, ‘De Beneficiis,’ ii. 16.

10. Τὰ δe ἣνδον ὁλοπόρϕυροs.

11. ‘Hist.’ ii. 49.

12. ‘Otho,’ xvii.

13. Speculum civilis sarcina belli, ‘Sat.’ ii. 103.

14. vii. 86.

15. ‘Nicias,’ xxvi.-xxviii.

16. ‘Ant.’ 14.

17. iii. 2, 174-185.

18. ‘Ant. and Cleop.’ v. 2, 323-347.

19. ‘Cor.’ iv. 5, 65 f.