Plutarch

c. 46 - c. 120 CE · Greek (Chaeronea in Boeotia; Roman citizen) · Moral Philosophy, Platonism, Biography and the Philosophy of History, Religion

For the mind requires not like an earthen vessel to be filled up; convenient fuel and aliment only will inflame it with a desire of knowledge and ardent love of truth.

Plutarch (c. 46 – c. 120) spent his life in Chaeronea, a small town in Boeotia where Philip had beaten the Greeks and Sulla had beaten Mithridates, and said he stayed so that it should not become smaller. He studied Platonic philosophy at Athens, visited Rome and Alexandria, held the local magistracies, served for thirty years as a priest of Apollo at Delphi, and wrote more than anyone of his age: the *Parallel Lives*, in which a Greek and a Roman are set side by side and compared, and the seventy-odd essays, dialogues and treatises gathered as the *Moralia*.

Topics Plutarch addresses

• the Parallel Lives and the comparison
• lives, not histories
• the small sign of character
• Alexander and Caesar
• Lycurgus and Numa
• Pericles and Fabius Maximus
• Cato the Elder and Aristides
• Demosthenes and Cicero
• Antony and Cleopatra
• Brutus and the conspirator's conscience
• the Gracchi, Agis and Cleomenes
• Precepts of Statecraft and the Greek under Rome
• the Roman's shoes over your head
• superstition and atheism
• the daimones and divine providence
• the delays of divine vengeance
• the oracles of Delphi and the E at Delphi
• the obsolescence of oracles
• Isis and Osiris and the allegory of myth
• the creation of the soul in the Timaeus
• the Stoic self-contradictions
• against Colotes and the Epicureans
• the reason of animals and the eating of flesh
• the education of children and the art of listening

Questions to put to Plutarch

Parallel Lives and the Mirror of Character

• You say you write lives, not histories — what's the difference, and why does it matter to you?
• How can a jest or an offhand remark reveal a person's character better than their greatest military victory?
• Why did you choose to pair a Greek with a Roman in each set of lives rather than treating them separately?
• How do you decide which sources to trust when the historians you're drawing on contradict each other?
• You include some figures as warnings rather than models — how do you think a reader should use those lives?

Practical Ethics and the Therapy of the Soul

• What's the difference between governing a passion like anger and simply suppressing it?
• Why do you treat flattery as such a serious danger — isn't it just a social nuisance?
• How does a person actually form good character through habit rather than just knowing what virtue is?
• What's wrong with curiosity about other people's private affairs, given that curiosity can also drive learning?
• How would you advise someone today who wants tranquillity of mind but lives in a noisy, demanding world?

Delphi, Daimones, and the Middle Way in Religion

• What are daimones, and what role do they play between the gods and ordinary human life?
• You argue that superstition is actually worse than atheism — how do you make that case?
• Why do you think the old religious rites are worth keeping even when their literal meaning can't be taken seriously?
• How do you explain the fact that oracles sometimes fail or fall silent?
• What's the argument for thinking that divine punishment is real even when wrongdoers seem to prosper for years?

Platonist Philosophy Against the Stoics and Epicureans

• What do you see as the deepest contradiction in Stoic teaching about virtue and the good life?
• Why do you think Epicurus's advice to live quietly and avoid public life is actually self-defeating?
• How does your view that the soul has a rational and an irrational part differ from the Stoic idea that reason should simply rule everything?
• What's your argument that a good god can exist alongside the real evil and disorder we see in the world?
• How do you read Egyptian myths about Isis and Osiris as a veiled philosophical account of good and evil principles?

Animals, Flesh-Eating, and the Boundaries of Reason

• What's your evidence that animals actually reason rather than just act on instinct?
• How do you argue that eating meat is a cruelty, given that humans have always done it?
• Does the soul's possible passage into animal bodies drive your concern for animals, or would the argument stand without it?
• What's the difference between the kind of reason animals have and the kind humans have?

The Greek Statesman Under Roman Rule

• You say a Greek politician must always remember that Roman power stands over him — how should that shape what he tries to do?
• Why do you think seeking the friendship of powerful Romans is wisdom rather than a betrayal of Greek independence?
• How do you argue that an old man who could retire should stay in public life instead?
• What's the danger you see in stirring a Greek crowd with memories of the battles against Persia?
• Why did you choose to stay in a small town like Chaeronea rather than moving permanently to Rome or Athens?

Converse with Plutarch on Simposeum. Replies are grounded in Plutarch's own writing, cited to the page.