Plutarch: Lives of Aristeides and Cato

247 Pages·1989·3.422 MB·English

by  David Sansone

ARIS & PHILLIPS CLASSICAL TEXTS
PLUTARCH
Lives of Aristeides and Cato
EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION, TRANSLATION & COMMENTARY BY
David Sansone
Arıs AND Philips CLassıcaL TEXTS
PLUTARCH
Lives of Aristeides and Cato
David Sansone
Aris & Phillips is an imprint of Oxbow Books
Published in the United Kingdom in 1989. Reprinted 2015 by
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and in the United States by
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© David Sansone 1989
Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-0-85668-422-7
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Contents
INTRODUCTION 1
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 16
A NOTE ON THE TEXT 18
THE LIFE OF ARISTEIDES Text and Translation 20
LIFE OF CATO Text and Translation 90
COMMENTARY 177
INDEX TO COMMENTARY 241

INTRODUCTION
If the Lives of Plutarch are read at all today, it is because
they represent a valuable ancient source for the more inter-
esting periods of Greek and Roman history. English-speakers
who are unable to read Plutarch’s Greek are likely to encounter
the works of the biographer in the form of the accurate and
readable Penguin translations by Rex Warner and Ian Scott-
Kilvert, conveniently grouped into chronological packages with
titles like “The Age of Alexander” and “Fall of the Roman Re-
public.” For the scholar, Plutarch’s value as a historical source
has been enhanced in recent years by the appearance of a
number of excellent commentaries on individual Lives. Gar-
zetti’s commentary on the Life of Caesar (1954), Calabi Limen-
tani’s on the Life of Aristeides (1964), Hamilton’s on the Life of
Alexander (1969) and Frost’s on the Life of Themistocles
(1980) have done a great service for the historian. But, at the
same time, they have served to reinforce the prevailing per-
ception that Plutarch was himself a historian who chose to pre-
sent his history palatably disguised as biography.
There have been times when this perception did not prevail.
There have also been times when Plutarch’s Lives were regard-
ed with a degree of esteem that would surprise most readers of
those works today. An advertisement, for example, in the first
edition (1762) of Oliver Goldsmith’s Life of Richard Nash in-
cluded the following comments: “What histories can be found
(says the Marquis de Montesquieu) that please and instruct
like the Lives of Plutarch? He paints the Man whose Life he
relates; he makes him known such as he was at the head of the
armies, in the government of the people, in his own family, and
in his pleasures. In short, I am of the same opinion with that
author who said, that if he was constrained to fling all the
books of the ancients into the sea, Plutarch should be the last
drowned.” Similarly, in his Reveries (1782), Rousseau says, “A-
mong the small number of books that I occasionally reread, it is
2
Plutarch who most of all holds my attention and benefits me.
He provided the earliest reading of my childhood; he will be
the last of my old age. He is almost the only author of whom I
can say that I have never read him without some profit.” And
Alfieri records in his autobiography (1806), “But the book of all
others which gave me the most delight and beguiled many of
the tedious hours of winter was Plutarch. I perused five or six
times the lives of Timoleon, Caesar, Brutus, Pelopidas, Cato, and
some others. I wept, raved, and fell into such transports that if
anyone had been in the adjoining chamber they must have
pronounced me out of my senses.” Finally, with more enthusi-
asm than accuracy,! Emerson declared in an address entitled
“Heroism” (1838), “But if we explore the literature of Heroism,
we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who is its Doctor and histori-
an. To him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the Epaminondas,
the Scipio of old, and I must think we are more deeply indebt-
ed to him than to all the ancient writers. Each of his ‘Lives’ is a
refutation to the despondency and cowardice of our religious
and political theorists. A wild courage, a stoicism not of the
schools, but of the blood, shines in every anecdote, and has
given that book its immense fame.” These four men of letters,
from four countries, are not isolated instances; numerous ad-
ditional examples could be cited to illustrate the enormous in-
fluence exercised by Plutarch and his Lives over the past few
centuries.2 Even in our century, we can find occasional evi-
dence of a strong appreciation of Plutarch’s Lives. The fictional
hero of H. G. Wells’ Tono-Bungay (1908), for example, is made
to recollect, “And I found Langhorne’s ‘Plutarch’ too, I remem-
ber, on those shelves. It seems queer to me now to think that I
acquired pride and self-respect, the idea of a state and the
germ of public spirit, in such a furtive fashion; queer, too, that
it should rest with an old Greek, dead these eighteen hundred

1 Plutarch never wrote a Life of Brasidas. His Lives of Epameinondas
and Scipio have been lost since the middle ages.
2 For the history of Plutarch’s influence since antiquity, see espe-
cially R. Hirzel, Plutarch (1912).
3
years, to teach me that.” And a real president of the United
States credited Plutarch as his political preceptor. Harry S.
Truman recalled, “My father used to read me out loud from
[Plutarch’s Lives]. And I’ve read Plutarch through many times
since. I never have figured out how he knew so much. I tell
you. They just don’t come any better than old Plutarch. He
knew more about politics than all the other writers Ive read
put together.”
It will be seen that it is not as a historian, or even as a biog-
rapher in the modern sense of the word, that Plutarch has been
so highly valued. Rather, those who regard Plutarch as among
the greatest of ancient authors appreciate him principally as a
moralist and as a purveyor of political wisdom. Our own age of
which President Truman is clearly not representative, gener-
ally finds such authors not to its liking, unless their moralizing
is decently cloaked in the fashionable garb of irony and satire.
But if we are unable to share the enthusiasm for Plutarch that
Rousseau and Alfieri felt, we must not do him the disservice of
imagining him to have been a writer of a sort different from
what he in fact was. He was not, as he himself tells us,3 a writ-
er of histories. Still less did he profess to be the chronicler of
The Age of Alexander or the Fall of the Roman Republic. He
was a writer of, among other things, biographies. But even rec-
ognizing this is no guarantee against misunderstanding his
works and the intentions that necessarily lay behind them. We
must try to understand what kind of biography Plutarch was
writing (or thought he was writing) and, in order to do that, we
must consider what the art of biography was like in Plutarch’s
lifetime.
Plutarch’s lifetime lay within the century immediately fol-
lowing the death of Christ.4 Plutarch was born some time in

3 See the opening chapter of the Life of Alexander.
4 The best account of the details of Plutarch’s life and society is to be
found in Jones, to which the following is heavily indebted. See also Zie-
gler, “Plutarchos.”
4
the forties AD, during the reign of Claudius, and died during the
reign of Hadrian, in about AD 120. His family belonged to the
local aristocracy of the small Boeotian town of Chaeroneia,
where he made his home throughout his life. He lived, there-
fore, in circumstances that allowed him the opportunity, of
which he gladly took advantage, to pursue an education that
included both philosophical and oratorical training and to trav-
el regularly to the cultural centers of his world, namely Athens
and Rome. In his youth Plutarch studied in Athens with the
Academic philosopher Ammonius, who imparted to him a life-
long devotion to the works and thought of Plato. Later in life
he was made an honorary Athenian citizen, and his circle of ac-
quaintances included a number of men who were prominent in
the political and cultural life of the city. During his frequent
visits to Rome, Plutarch delivered lectures on philosophy and
made the acquaintance of several individuals who were in-
volved at various levels in the administration of the empire.
Plutarch spent much of his time with his friends on both sides
of the Adriatic engaged in discussion of literary and philosophi-
cal matters, of local and imperial politics, of items of cultic and
antiquarian interest. The contents and the civilized tone of
these discussions are reproduced in the large number of works
that Plutarch composed in dialogue form, most notably in the
collection known as Table Talk.
Plutarch will have supported himself with the income from
his estate. But his wealth not only provided him with leisure, it
also imposed on him an obligation to expend some of his time,
energy and resources on political and civic affairs.5 So,
throughout his life Plutarch served his own city and other cities
in a variety of capacities. His standing, his training and his
learning suited him for the various ambassadorial posts, mag-
istracies and priesthoods that he was called on to fill. These in-
cluded service as the chief executive officer of the Amphicty-

5 For the nature of these obligations in Plutarch’s day, see R. Lane
Fox, Pagans and Christians (1986) 52-57.
5
onic council, as supervisor of the quadrennial Pythian Games
and as priest of Apollo at that god’s Delphic shrine. One can
imagine that Plutarch’s performance of these duties was char-
acterized by enthusiasm and conscientiousness, but not ambi-
tion. For Plutarch never rose to the higher levels of adminis-
tration, preferring instead the relative quiet of such remote
towns as Delphi and Chaeroneia and the satisfaction of literary
pursuits. The greater part of Plutarch’s literary output seems
to have been the product of the last quarter-century of his
life,6 during that period which, according to Gibbon, a man
would without hesitation name if asked to fix the period in the
history of the world during which the condition of the human
race was most happy and prosperous.
The document known as the Lamprias catalogue, included in
a number of the mediaeval manuscripts of Plutarch’s works,
gives a list of the large number of writings attributed to Plu-
tarch that were available at some time in late antiquity.” Few-
er than half of those works survive today. Still, the existing
corpus is a large and varied collection, comprising works as
diverse as political biographies, philosophical dialogues in the
manner of Plato and essays on literary, ethical and antiquarian
topics. The collection is nowadays regularly divided, evenly
but rather arbitrarily, into Lives and Moralia, the latter being
the convenient designation for those works that are not bio-
graphical in nature. But, in fact, all of Plutarch’s writings, the
Lives included, could well be described as moral essays.8 For
there is a humane moral purpose that pervades the works, in
whatever genre, not unlike the moral purpose that character-

6 See C. P. Jones, “Towards a Chronology of Plutarch’s Works,” JRS 56
(1966) 61-74.
7 For the Lamprias catalogue, sce Barrow 193-94 and F. H. Sandbach’s
introduction, text and translation in the Loeb cdition of Plutarch’s Mo-
ralia XV (1969) 3-29.
8 See the fine essay on Plutarch by A. W. Gomme in A Historical Com-
mentary on Thucydides I (1945) 54-84.