Life Stories of Men Who Shaped History from Plutarch's Lives [antikvár]

It seems odd that so little is known about the life of Plutarch, the great biographer of antiquity. He was born in A.D. 42 and died in the year 102, or approximately. He lived in a small town, even a mean little town, called Chaeronea in Boeotia. In a discussion regarding the advantages to a writer living in a large city, Plutarch summarized by saying: "As to myself, I live in a little town, and I choose to live there, lest it should become still less." One of his two sons apparently became a philosopher and completed a catalogue of his father's writings, those available and those no longer extant. After a long and strenuous life, during which he produced an unbelievably long list of essays on a wide variety of topics, Plutarch returned to his native town and there completed the Lives, a collection of biographical sketches of somé sixty-five notables of Greece and Romé, fifty of which have survived. Plutarch's Lives are not in a strict sense biographies. Although he seems to have been sensitive to the demands of accuracy, he was not in possession of reliable source material and hence many errors are to be found in his texts. But his endeavor had another purpose: he was essentially a philosopher and morálist, and his primary interest in great persons was to discover their morál qualities. He resorted to a curious method, namely that of selecting one Román character and then a Grecian one to match. Thus, the Greek orator Demosthenes is compared with the Román orator Cicero. Not all of these parallels have survived, but those available indicate clearly that Plutarch's aim was, first, to appraise the morál qualities of his heroes; second, to measure the extent of their influence, and finally to compare such traits as physical strength and beauty, prowess, ability to win battles, and their reflective, or rather, their intellectual capacities. With these ends in view, it is obvious that Plutarch was obliged to resort to subjective methods. Plutarch's attachment to words and their proper use will bring delight to all persons interested in writing, and especially to modern semanticists. "I did not so much gain the knowledge of things by the words," he wrote, "as words by the knowledge I had of things." Here we discover the basic prin-