[In the following essay, Russell investigates Plutarch's interest in and use of folklore in his writings.]

The late Victorian scholar Frank Byron Jevons was a folklorist of some distinction; he was one of the eight experts chosen to review the second edition of The Golden Bough in Folklore in 1901.¹ In 1892, Jevons published a new edition of Philemon Holland's seventeenth-century translation of Plutarch's Roman Questions. ‘On the whole,’ writes Jevons at the opening of his Introduction, ‘Plutarch's Romane Questions may fairly be said to be the earliest formal treatise written on the subject of folklore. The problems which Plutarch proposes for solution are mainly such as the modern science of folk-lore undertakes to solve; and though Plutarch was not the first to propound them, he was the first to make a collection and selection of them and give them a place of their own in literature.’² This view of the Roman Questions was endorsed in 1898 in that classic of folklore, Tom Tit Tot, by the stormy petrel of the Folklore Society, Edward Clodd.³ In view of all this, I thought it worth while, as the Society celebrates its centenary, to spare a few thoughts for this pioneer, who died more than one and three-quarter millennia before the Society was founded; and I shall begin with some account of Plutarch's life and other works, as the background to his achievement in the field of folklore.

Plutarch was born, somewhere around a.d. 40, into a leading family of the town of Chaeronea, in northern Boeotia, not far from Delphi. In the Roman Empire, it was generally true to say that happy was the writer who had a dull biography. Plutarch, who wrote of so many eventful lives, had an agreeably uneventful one himself. On the whole, he seems to have kept well out of trouble.⁴ He was still a young man when Nero paid his celebrated visit to Greece, in a.d. 66-7.⁵ Apart from extracting large sums of money and priceless works of art from some of them, Nero was on his best behaviour with the Greeks. Plutarch, who was luckily unaffected by these exactions, remembered with pleasure Nero's famous proclamation at Corinth, in November 66, when he solemnly gave the Greeks home rule and freedom from taxes. The Emperor did this to ensure good will for his sporting activities there the next year, when he convened all four national Greek games at the wrong time. He succeeded admirably in this, for he won every single event, including one race in which he fell out of his chariot and never reached the finishing line, and several for which he was not even entered. Luckily he was recalled to Rome by news of revolts before he could erase the good impression he had made; the taxes and provincial government were of course soon restored by the next secure Emperor, Vespasian.

The next bad Emperor, Domitian, was a home-loving tyrant, quite content to torture and murder people in or near the capital. However, there is circumstantial evidence that Plutarch had a narrow squeak in this reign, specifically in a.d. 93.⁶ By that time, he had visited Rome more than once, as well as Asia Minor and Egypt, and made friends with a number of influential people.⁷ In 93, Domitian killed one of Plutarch's friends and banished another, and expelled all philosophers from Italy. It is possible that Plutarch was in Rome at the time and had to get out fast. Still, he certainly survived. During the reigns of the unmurderous Emperors Nerva and Trajan he lived happily in Greece, enjoying a relaxed family life, visiting friends, working in local government, and turning out his huge output of literary works.⁸ At the beginning of Hadrian's reign, another of Plutarch's Roman friends was executed, but this was probably without Hadrian's wish or knowledge—he was not in Rome at the time⁹—and, by the time this Emperor went berserk, Plutarch was safely out of the way, having died at the age of about 80 in around a.d. 120.¹⁰ He enjoyed great fame in his lifetime, and, thanks to this and to his influential friends, he obtained in turn Roman citizenship, the status of a Roman knight, nominal consular rank, and finally the office, probably also nominal, of Imperial procurator of Greece.¹¹ But he himself perhaps valued most of all his appointment, probably held for decades, as one of the two permanent priests of Delphi.¹² His enormous influence on later generations, especially through his Parallel Lives, is a large story, which I shall only touch on incidentally in this paper.¹³

Plutarch took his Delphic priesthood very seriously, and was deeply concerned with religion and morals. With due allowance for all the great differences between pagan and Christian civilisation, I think you get the feel of him if you make a comparison with a gifted and unconventional nineteenth-century English clergyman, that extraordinary body of men that included talents as various as those of Robert Malthus, Charles Dodgson, and Sabine Baring-Gould. It is, of course, irresistible to look for a parallel to the author of the Parallel Lives, and I am impressed by the number of features he had in common with one particular Victorian parson, Charles Kingsley.¹⁴

Plutarch and Kinglsey have some obvious things in common, such as their interest in old myths, or the biographical approach to history evident in the Parallel Lives and in Kingsley's lectures as Professor of Modern History at Oxford. They were both superb narrative writers. Oddly enough, when they retold old myths, Kingsley was by far the better story-teller, as is clear when we compare Plutarch's dry and academic Life of Theseus with the rousing tale in The Heroes. But of course this comparison is unfair to Plutarch, who reserved his wonderful narrative skill for his factual biographies.

But they have far more in common than these traits. Kingsley was appointed tutor to the Prince of Wales; Plutarch was honoured by Emperors, and his nephew tutored the Emperor Marcus Aurelius.¹⁵ To be a Priest at Delphi was perhaps the nearest thing in the Roman Empire to being a Canon of Westminster in Victorian England. Both were devoted family men, and both were active educationalists, and also wrote much about education. Kingsley was a keen feminist, particularly active in promoting the acceptance of women as medical practitioners. Plutarch was most unusual among Greeks in treating his wife at least as a near-equal.¹⁶ He wrote much about the abilities of women, and advocated higher education for them. Kingsley was extremely humane in his outlook as evidenced by his sermons and social novels, his active philanthropy, and his love of animals. Plutarch wrote about the rights of slaves,¹⁷ and even animals—he was the first great advocate of animal welfare. Yet both men had odd outbursts of militarism and insensitivity. Kingsley was a real jingo nationalist at times, and vigorously defended the repressive measures of Governor Eyre of Jamaica. Plutarch wrote a whole treatise to prove that Athenian exploits in war were more glorious than Athenian achievements in literature;¹⁸ and he recalls, without a flicker of disapproval,¹⁹ actually watching the revolting show with which the Spartans entertained foreign tourists, in a theatre built for the purpose, by flogging their own children at the altar of Artemis, awarding a prize to the boy who endured the greatest number of strokes without flinching, crying out, or dying. Then there is another, more attractive, contradiction common to both. They were both models of Victorian propriety, but both had unconventional moments about this. Kingsley openly declared his enthusiasm for Rabelais, whose work greatly influenced The Water-Babies (for instance, the long comic catalogues). In one of Plutarch's dialogues, somebody priggishly complains of the statue of the courtesan and model Phryne, put up at Delphi by her lover, the great sculptor Praxiteles.²⁰ Another character promptly declares she has more right to be there than all the monuments put up to celebrate murders, wars and plunderings.

Finally, both Plutarch and Kingsley tried their best to combat superstition, and were fully abreast of the rational sciences of their times. Their attitude to superstition appears again and again in their works, but most notably in Plutarch's specific treatise on the subject and Kingsley's sermon on science and superstition at the Royal Institution in 1866. They were both particularly indignant at the idea of a literal hell after death.²¹ Kingsley's great involvement in natural science, especially biology, and scientific education is a large subject I cannot discuss now; he was, among other things, one of the leading champions of Darwin and evolution. Plutarch's interest in natural science was equally deep and wide, ranging from astronomy to animal behaviour.

It must be admitted that dislike of superstition and an up-to-date appreciation of science were not quite the same things in the England of Darwin and in the Roman Empire in its middle period; Plutarch stands in fact at the turning-point when rational Greek science (which still included plenty of mistaken ideas) was beginning to give place to the demon-haunted world view of the Neoplatonists. Plutarch reflects this situation, and is full of beliefs considered wildly superstitious by Kingsley's day. Nevertheless, he does know a great deal of the scientific information available in his time, and much of his science is quite sound. His dialogue on the face on the moon is a case in point.²² Here he discusses the markings visible on the moon, and concludes, quite rightly, that they are depressions in a solid, planet-like object. His conclusion is carefully argued, and was far from self-evident in the age before the telescope. The dialogue ends with an explicit myth, or imaginative excursion in the manner of Plato, on the moon as the destination of souls after death. This dialogue has had momentous influence in the history of both science and science fiction. Bernard de Fontenelle, the versatile poet who was Secretary of the Académie des Sciences and a foreign member of the Royal Society,²³ was certainly under Plutarch's influence when he wrote his charming conversation about the possibilities for life on other planets and satellites, published in 1686.²⁴ Earlier in the seventeenth century, the dialogue caught the fascinated attention of Johann Kepler, who had read it before he wrote his famous science-fiction story about the moon. Kepler obviously appreciated both the science and the fantasy in Plutarch's dialogue. Shortly before his death, he made a Latin translation of the work, with a commentary.²⁵

The variety of subjects I have mentioned so far give only a first impression of Plutarch's great versatility. There is a catalogue of his works, compiled probably in the fourth century, with 227 titles.²⁶ Many of these are, unfortunately, lost; as the poet Dryden observed,²⁷ one cannot look upon this catalogue without the same emotions that a merchant might feel in perusing a bill of freight, after he has lost his vessel. But even the surviving works cover a wider field than I have yet indicated. If the ancient Greeks and Romans had had the choice of one author to represent ancient civilisation, in a time capsule or a monastic scriptorium, they could have chosen worse than Plutarch. He gives, of course, no clue to the glories of Latin literature; he read Latin only with difficulty, and only quotes two lines of Latin verse in his entire output.²⁸ But, apart from this gap, no other author tells us more about ancient civilisation. The surviving Parallel Lives give a pretty consecutive account of Greek and Roman history from legendary times to the Battle of Actium in 31 b.c. His Lives of the Caesars would have carried the story well into the first century a.d., but only two survive. The Parallel Lives were my own favourite childhood reading, and I can vouch for the extensive background of ancient history I possessed when I started my formal classical education. In addition, one can learn a great deal from Plutarch about the social and economic life, beliefs and customs, arts and crafts of the ancient Greeks and Romans; and a good general impression of ancient mathematics and science. On top of this, he quotes a considerable amount of Greek literature, including verse. He even goes outside Graeco-Roman civilisation, with a life of one of the Achaemenid Persian kings. Passionately interested in comparative religion, his book on Isis and Osiris is the most complete account surviving in any language of this crucially important myth of ancient Egypt.²⁹

His most famous work is, of course, justly, the Parallel Lives. These biographies are full of the touches that bring history to life. We hear of the great artist Apelles, for instance, literally speechless at the sight of a wonderful painting by Protogenes, and finally recovering his voice to gasp out that it had not quite the beauties that lifted his own paintings out of this world.³⁰ Or there is the moving passage of the birds beginning their dawn chorus as Cato takes his last nap before committing suicide.³¹ The best tribute to their literary quality is the fact that Shakespeare used long passages from North's translation of the Lives in his Roman plays with so little modification.³² But the great importance of the Lives, and their relevance to a discussion of Plutarch as folklorist, lies in his use of the comparative method. Others before him had roughly compared Greek and Roman celebrities,³³ but nobody before him, and nobody after him until William Bolitho in the twentieth century, made detailed comparisons to bring out detailed parallels. It was obvious enough to compare Caesar with Alexander, or Cicero with Demosthenes. Plutarch's genius appears when he makes unexpected, but completely successful matches, like the bon vivants generals Cimon and Lucullus, or the champions of lost causes, Sertorius and Eumenes. We know he often chose one hero, Greek or Roman, and carefully looked around for a matching life.³⁴ Some of his comparative essays survive, and in them he shows a wonderful eye for differences, as well as similarities. Thus Demosthenes was exiled for embezzlement, Cicero for suppressing a dangerous conspiracy, but Demosthenes spent his exile working for his cause, while Cicero dithered about unhappily.³⁵ Thus Plutarch pin-points the difference between the corrupt and single-minded Greek, and the honest Italian who was always looking for a dramatic role, like an actor, and was quite at a loss when he was, so to speak, ‘resting’.

Plutarch's use of comparison has been so little appreciated, even in modern times, that translations of the Greek and Roman lives are sometimes published separately, losing the whole point. For what Plutarch discovered was the extraordinarily repetitive automatism of human behaviour in politics, especially under stress. Political activities are so stereotyped and repetitious that individuals in different periods and societies can have almost identical careers, by a process of extremely detailed convergence, like two animal or plant species occupying closely similar ecological niches. ‘It is no wonder’, he observes,³⁶ ‘as fortune moves hither and thither over unlimited time spans, that automatic behaviour often issues in identical incidents.’ He applies this generalisation, with his tongue in his cheek, to the rather trivial observation that one-eyed men are often clever and tricky generals; he lists Philip II of Macedonia, Antigonus, Hannibal and Sertorius, and we might now add Nelson and Moshe Dayan. But the sentence, in a far more fundamental sense, is really the clue to his major discovery and the significance of the Parallel Lives.

Plutarch's antiquarian and folklore interests appear in many of his works, including some of the Lives, such as Theseus, Romulus and Numa. But his main contribution to folklore, as Jevons and Clodd observed, was his Roman Questions, in which he lists 113 Roman customs or beliefs, and supplies alternative explanations for each. Certainly he includes some bizarre and really old-fashioned explanations, as Jevons notes in a charming passage about Philemon Holland's translation.³⁷ ‘To say in modern English’, writes Jevons, ‘that “five is the odd number most connected with marriage,” is to expose the Pythagorean doctrine of numbers to modern ridicule. But when Philemon says, “now among all odde numbers it seemeth that Cinque is most nuptial,” even the irreverent modern cannot fail to feel that Cinque was an eminently respectable character, whose views were strictly honourable and a bright example to other odde numbers.’ As H. J. Rose points out, in his translation and commentary of 1924, many of Plutarch's explanations are vitiated by the fact that ‘“Roman mythology” is almost altogether Greek, at least in so far as it concerns the gods, and therefore quite worthless for establishing the facts of cult’;³⁸ moreover, many of the explanations are, so to speak, folk folklore—explaining a custom as commemorating a historical event, an explanation so rarely true, or at least wholly true, in fact.³⁹

However, I am not now concerned with the correctness or otherwise of Plutarch's explanations, or with the true explanations of the customs concerned, which are thoroughly discussed in Rose's commentary. We must remember that new knowledge is always accruing, and before we patronise Plutarch we might note that on one question both Jevons in 1892⁴⁰ and Rose in 1924⁴¹ are exactly as ignorant as Plutarch and Rose admits the fact. This is Plutarch's Question 95, ‘Why is it normal for those living in a holy manner to abstain from legumes?’⁴² We now know that many people in the Mediterranean suffer from the genetically determined disease of favism. This is a severe allergy to the broad bean Vicia faba: eating the bean raw or inhaling the pollen produces anaemia, which may be fatal in twenty-four hours. The enzyme deficiency causing favism, however, affords some protection against malaria, since the red blood cells of the sufferer lack a substance essential to the malarial parasite. In malarious regions, there is a balance of advantage, and favism is found in malarious regions all over the world, but notably in the Mediterranean, where malaria was widespread till very recently, and probably still more widespread in ancient times.⁴³ Pythagoras of Samos, the most prominent ancient philosopher to prescribe abstention from beans, probably had favism himself: it is said that he was fleeing from his political opponents when he came to a bean-field, presumably in flower, and sooner than cross it he waited for his enemies to catch up and kill him.⁴⁴ The taboo generated in this way could easily spread to other legumes. Obviously Plutarch could know nothing about all this, and neither could Jevons or Rose.

But what interests me now is the methods used by Plutarch, irrespective of whether they led to the right answers, and it is his methods which, I believe, entitle him to be considered a pioneer of folklore study. To begin with, he gives several alternative answers to every question. This in itself casts scientific doubt on the standard sorts of folk folklore explanation, such as commemorating an event, just as Peter Abelard weakened medieval blind faith in authority by listing contradictory opinions of the early Christian Fathers on many topics.

Next, Plutarch includes many explanations of quite different kinds, and it is in these that he often anticipates modern approaches. He raises the interesting possibility of spread or contagion of a culture pattern. Thus, he asks why Romans do not like to travel on the day after the Kalends, Nones and Ides of the month, gives a possible reason for the case of the Ides, and suggests the taboo was then extended to the other two dates.⁴⁵ Then he is aware of the possibility of a vestigial custom, anticipating Tylor. Thus he suggests ambassadors to Rome register at the treasury as a vestige of more hospitable days when they used to be given gifts and other benefits by the treasurers.⁴⁶

Plutarch often advances explanations we should now call anthropological, sometimes with considerable insight. Thus, after asking why Romans do not marry close kinsfolk, he suggests two reasons perfectly valid and acceptable today—that exogamy multiplies useful social connections, and that marriages of close kin give rise to disputes.⁴⁷ After asking why women kiss their kinsmen on the lips, he first suggests it was a means of detecting women who committed the misdemeanour of drinking wine. But besides this breathalyser test, he also suggests it is a relic of a former wider exogamy than the present one, when even cousins were in a prohibited degree, but were allowed to express their kinship by kissing.⁴⁸

Above all, Plutarch again and again uses the comparative method. Rose notes a good example of this, Plutarch's Question 5,⁴⁹ where a commemorative explanation is ‘rather contemptuously rejected (and rightly so) as “sheer mythologising”, There follows an explanation which (again quite rightly, with genuine feeling for the Comparative Method) puts forward a Greek parallel.’⁵⁰ I have found at least half a dozen cases of this comparative use of Greek customs to illuminate Roman ones. For instance, Question 14 asks why sons cover their heads at the funeral of their parents, while daughters attend with bare heads and unbound hair.⁵¹ One of his suggestions is that this is a reversal of normal procedure, since men normally go out with bare heads and women with their heads covered. For in Greece, he observes, men usually cut their hair and women let it grow, but they do just the reverse when mourning some disaster. In one case, Plutarch even uses a Phoenician parallel, from Tyre.⁵² One of his lost works was called Barbarian Questions, and would no doubt have yielded more examples of the comparative method.

Finally, as Plutarch compared different regions in space, he was also unusually sensitive among ancient writers to change in folk beliefs over time. This appears especially in his dialogue on the decline of oracles.⁵³ Here he considers why there are so few oracular shrines in Greece in his day, whereas there had been many more in the great days of the Persian wars in the fifth century b.c. The main answer given is a very sensible demographic one: there are fewer oracles because there are fewer people. ‘The whole of Greece’, observes one character,⁵⁴ ‘could now scarcely supply the 3,000 heavy infantry supplied by the single city of Megara at the Battle of Plataea’ in 479 b.c. The depopulation of mainland Greece was certainly a fact. The overpopulation crises of archaic and classical times had left the country by the third century b.c. with an impoverished land and exhausted mines, while industry had been exported to the Greek settlements abroad.⁵⁵

But Plutarch is not wholly satisfied with this explanation. He senses that there is also some fundamental change in beliefs taking place. The discussion of this involves the fascinating idea, characteristic of the age, that minor deities have a finite life span. We learn, for instance, from a calculation based on information in Hesiod, that a Naiad normally lives for 9,720 years.⁵⁶ But above all, the dialogue includes perhaps the most dramatic story ever told about change in folk beliefs. The story is fittingly ascribed to the reign of Tiberius, whose acts, of course, included the appointment and recall of Pontius Pilatus as procurator of Judea.⁵⁷ It is vouched for as true by one of the speakers in the dialogue, a historian called Philip,⁵⁸ and several others said to be present, who had all heard it from their teacher, a Greek orator who, like many in his age,⁵⁹ had taken a Roman name, Aemilianus. This teacher had in turn heard the story from his own father, Epitherses. Here, then, is the story.⁶⁰

Some of you have studied under Aemilianus the orator; his father was Epitherses, a fellow-citizen of mine who taught grammar. Epitherses said he was once travelling to Italy, and went on board a ship carrying cargo and a lot of passengers. It was already evening and they were near the Echinades islands, when the wind dropped and the ship drifted near Paxi. Most people on board were still awake, and many were still having an after-dinner drink. All of a sudden, a voice was heard from the island of Paxi, calling loudly for Thamus, so that they were astonished. Thamus was an Egyptian pilot, not known by name even to many people on the ship. Twice he kept silence when he was called, but the third time he acknowledged the call. Then the caller said, more loudly still, “When you are opposite Palodes, announce that great Pan is dead.

When they heard that, said Epitherses, they were all dumbfounded, and considered whether it was better to carry out the instruction or not to meddle and let well alone. Thamus himself finally decided that if there was a breeze he would sail past without speaking, but if there was no wind and a calm sea when they got to the place, he would pass on the message he had heard. So when they came opposite Palodes, without a breath of wind or a ripple on the sea, Thamus looked towards the land from the ship's stern, and repeated what he had heard, that great Pan was dead. He had not finished speaking when there came the sound of many voices groaning in lamentation, mingled with cries of amazement.

Since there were many people present when this happened, the story was soon spread around in Rome, and Thamus was summoned by Tiberius Caesar. The Emperor was so impressed by the story that he had inquiries made about Pan, and the many scholars at his court concluded that he was the child born of Hermes and Penelope.’ And Philip had several witnesses to this story, former pupils of old Aemilianus, among the people present at our dialogue.

With this wonderful story, I may conclude this account of Plutarch as a folklorist. The achievement of every great creative artist or scientist is, after all, unique, whether it be The Water-Babies or The Parallel Lives, so, despite my comparison of Kingsley and Plutarch, I will end by quoting Dryden's version of the verses by the sixth-century poet Agathias, imagined to be written on a statue erected by the Romans:—

Chaeronean Plutarch, to thy deathless praise
Does martial Rome this grateful statue raise,
Because both Greece and she thy fame have
          shared,
(Their heroes written, and their lives
          compared).
But thou thyself couldst never write thy own;
Their lives have parallels, but thine has
          none.(61)

Notes

1. R. M. Dorson, The British Folklorists (London, 1968), 284.

2. F. B. Jevons, ed., Plutarch's Romane Questions. Translated A.D. 1603 by Philemon Holland (London, 1892), V.

3. E. Clodd, Tom Tit Tot (London, 1898), 63.

4. Birth, family, town: C. P. Jones, Plutarch and Rome (Oxford, 1971), 3-14; writers in the Roman Empire: W. M. S. Russell, ‘Sound Drama before Marconi’, Papers of the Radio Literature Conference 1977, ed., P. Lewis (Durham, 1978), 1-26, passim.

5. Jones, 16-19; G. Finlay, Greece under the Romans (Edinburgh and London, 1857), 82-83; A. Garzetti, From Tiberius to the Antonines, tr. J. R. Foster (London, 1976), 183-4.

6. Jones, 23-25.

7. ibid., 15 and Ch. 3.

8. ibid., Chs 4 and 5; D. A. Russell, Plutarch (London, 1972), 5-6.

9. Jones, 53-54, 32; Garzetti, 383.

10. Jones, 137.

11. ibid., 22, 29, 34.

12. ibid., 26.

13. e.g. G. Highet, The Classical Tradition (London, 1957), index, s.v. Plutarch.

14. For the information about Kingsley, see W. M. S. Russell, ‘Biology and Literature in Britain, 1500-1900. II. The Victorians’, Biology and Human Affairs, XLIV (1979), 114-33, and the sources given there.

15. Jones, 11.

16. H. J. Rose, The Roman Questions of Plutarch, a New Translation, with Introductory Essays and a Running Commentary (Oxoford, 1924), 61; D. A. Russell, 6.

17. Rose, 60.

18. Plutarch, Moralia, 345 ff.

19. Plutarch, Lives, Lycurgus, 18.

20. Moralia, 401.

21. D. A. Russell, 78; Rose, 58.

22. Moralia, 920B ff.

23. W. M. S. Russell, ‘Biology and Literature in Britain, 1500-1900. I. From the Renaissance to the Romantics’, Biology and Human Affairs, XLIV (1979), 50-72.

24. A. Calame, ed., Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes (Paris, 1966).

25. H. Cherniss and W. C. Helmbold, ed. and tr., Plutarch's Moralia, Vol. 12 (London, 1957), 21, 104, 138.

26. D. A. Russell, 18-19.

27. J. Langhorne and W. Langhorne, tr., Plutarch's Lives, Vol. 1 (London, 1819), lviii-lix.

28. Rose, 12.

29. A. W. Shorter, An Introduction to Egyptian Religion (London, 1931), 10-11.

30. Lives, Demetrius, 22.

31. Lives, Cato Minor, 70.

32. K. Muir, Shakespeare's Sources. I. Comedies and Tragedies (London, 1957), Ch. 7.

33. Jones, 105-6; D. A. Russell, 106-7.

34. Jones, 104-5; D. A. Russell, 113-4.

35. Lives, Comparison of Cicero and Demosthenes, 4.

36. Lives, Sertorius, 1. All translations in this paper are my own, except two specified later, from Philemon Holland and Dryden, respectively.

37. Jevons, viii.

38. Rose, 68.

39. ibid., 52 ff.

40. Jevons, lxxxvi ff.

41. Rose, 207.

42. Moralia, 286 D,E.

43. W. R. Aykroyd and J. Doughty, Legumes in Human Nutrition (Rome, 1964), 65-66; A. G. Motulsky, ‘Metabolic Polymorphisms and the Role of Infectious Diseases in Human Evolution’, Human Populations, Genetic Variation and Evolution, ed. L. N. Morris (London, 1972), 222-52, esp. 240-6.

44. R. D. Hicks, ed. and tr., Diogenes Laertius, Lives, Books VI-X (London, 1925), 354-7.

45. Moralia, 269 E,F.

46. Moralia, 275 B,C.

47. Moralia, 289 D,E; see C. Russell and W. M. S. Russell, ‘The Social Biology of Totemism’, Biology and Human Affairs, XLI (1976), 53-79, esp. 58-63.

48. Moralia, 265 B-E.

49. Moralia, 264 D-F, 265 A.

50. Rose, 23.

51. Moralia, 267A,B.

52. Moralia, 279A.

53. Moralia, 411 E ff.

54. Moralia, 414 A.

55. Finlay, 63, 97-98; W. M. S. Russell, Man, Nature and History (London, 1967), Chs 8 and 9; C. McEvedy and R. Jones, Atlas of World Population History (Harmondsworth, 1978), 110-12.

56. Moralia, 415 D.

57. Garzetti, 76.

58. Moralia, 418 A.

59. Finlay, 81.

60. Moralia, 419 B-E (my translation).

61. A. H. Clough (revised), Plutarch's Lives: The Dryden Plutarch, Vol. I. (London, 1910), xxv-xxvi.