That happiness is very deep; it is the immemorial dream of all men and women who know the difference between being ruled well and being ruled badly. Such happiness is worth any effort, any sacrifice. If you have any doubt of that whatsoever, read Tacitus. Even if you do not doubt it, read him. The story of that first century of the Roman Empire is one of the best true, instructive stories in the history of the world
PLUTARCH
46?–120
Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans
Plutarch was born in the small Theban city of Chaeronea in Boeotia and spent most of his life there, apart from a few years in Athens as a student and several visits to Rome and to other places in Greece. During the turmoil of the first imperial century—he was born in 46 and died in 120—he was obviously content to remain far from the metropolis and its temptations and perils. His reward was that he seems to have been one of the happiest of the great writers. A number of his letters survive; in one, to his wife, whom he loved, he wrote that he found “scarcely an erasure, as a book well written,” in the happiness and contentment of his long life.
He wrote a great deal, besides occupying many political offices in his little town, directing some kind of school there that was known for miles around, and serving as a priest of Apollo at Delphi (which is not far from Chaeronea). In this last capacity he may have written to the emperor Trajan to try to revive the waning faith in the oracle. This may have led to a meeting with Trajan when Plutarch was in Rome, which may in turn have led to an honorary title of ex-consul. All of this is far from certain. It is certain that the stories of his having been Trajan’s tutor and of his having been named by him governor of Greece are fabrications—although the honor and respect in which this provincial schoolmaster was held both near and far is no fabrication at all. He was one of the best-loved authors in the world for nearly two thousand years, until the French Revolution ushered in an age with a romantic passion for the expression of emotion as contrasted with the classical passion for its control and regulation by morals and law.
Such respect for the laws of god and men imbues Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, biographies of the men of both Greece and Rome who were considered great not only for their achievements but also for the nobility of their characters, particularly in adversity. The Lives were written in pairs, one Greek, one Roman, the pairs being chosen by Plutarch as far as possible on the basis of similarities in his subjects’ lives and careers. Thus two men who betrayed their country, but for noble reasons, are compared in the lives of Alcibiades and Coriolanus; two commanders who lost important campaigns because of their timidity are compared in the lives of Nicias and Crassus; two renowned rebels are compared in Agesilaus and Pompey; two great revolutionary figures in Alexander and Caesar; and two notable patriots in Dion and Marcus Brutus. The comparisons of these bioi paralelloi (“parallel lives”) are sometimes forced, but the lives themselves are always fascinating and what is more, always inspiring. To inspire the men of his day with the ideals of the virtuous men of old was certainly one of Plutarch’s main purposes in writing his book, although he admitted that as he wrote he was deriving profit and stimulation himself from “lodging these men one after the other in (my) house.”
Plutarch’s Lives were based on solid research and they are still an important resource for scholars studying the period with which they mainly deal—from about 300 BCE to about CE 50. But it is not as history that they have been primarily read, and loved, down through the ages. Plutarch himself saw a major difference between history, which he thought of as chronology, and biography, which he thought of as drama. And dramatic his lives certainly are. They are full of anecdotes and stories, of quotations that are more or less verbatim, and of wonderful background notes that tell us what it was like to live in those far-off times. But the high drama—in many cases the high tragedy—of these lives is what in the long run attracts us most. That, together with the nobility that so many of the subjects show in meeting their tragic end: The death scenes in Plutarch’s Lives are beautiful—and unparalleled.
Plutarch’s book has had an enormous influence on other writers, notably Shakespeare, who was not above quoting or at least paraphrasing whole passages from Thomas North’s brilliant translation, which had appeared in Shakespeare’s youth. Plutarch’s prose description of the first meeting of Antony and Cleopatra is only outshone—if indeed it is outshone—by the splendid Shakespearian verse that describes the same meeting, so fraught, as Plutarch and Shakespeare both knew, with the doom of men and empires. But it is ordinary readers like you and me who have loved Plutarch most. Here is the best way to read him.
Wait for a cold night, or one of driving wind and rain. Light a fire in the fireplace (if you don’t have a fireplace, imagine one). Place your chair so you are warmed by the fire and protected from the dark shadows in the rest of the room. Draw the light forward and open the book, to the lives of Romulus and Theseus, respectively the mythical founders of Rome and Athens, or to those of Aristides and Marcus Cato, each of them moralists of the old school, or to Pericles and Fabius, noble losers, or to Demosthenes and Cicero, the eloquence of the one exceeded only by that of the other. Or indeed any other lives; it doesn’t matter which. Start to read.
Soon, very soon, you will have traveled far away from your fireside. The electric bulb will have turned into a candle and the sounds of automobiles will have faded, to be replaced by the sounds of horses’ feet and the creak of harness. Only the passions and the perils, the temptations and the falls from grace, will be familiar. You will not be sorry to take this journey and you may not want to come back when the present calls.
EPICTETUS
fl. lst-2nd century
Discourses
Epictetus was born in the middle of the first century and as a boy was the slave of a follower of the emperor Nero. Epictetus’s owner was sometimes cruel to his slave and once, perhaps playfully, he twisted Epictetus’s leg. The boy smiled. The master twisted the leg harder; he wanted Epictetus to admit that it hurt. But Epictetus only said, “If you do that you will break it.” The master twisted the leg harder and it broke. “I told you so,” said Epictetus. He was lame for the rest of his life.
The story, whether true or not, is utterly typical of the man, who gained his freedom while in his twenties, was exiled from Rome by the tyrant Domitian because he laughed at tyranny, and went to the city of Nicopolis, in northern Greece, where he lived for the rest of his long life and taught his philosophy to men who came from all over the world to learn it from him.
He was poor, possessing only, as he said, earth, sky, and a cloak. He sat on the ground, not writing anything but only talking to his visitors, who considered themselves his disciples. One of them, a certain Flavius Arrian, took notes and published them as the Discourses of Epictetus; he was careful, he said, to copy the exact words and very language of Epictetus and to preserve “the directness of his speech.” Indeed, the Discourses read like a man talking.