Plutarch . Coming from the now defunct Queronea , in present-day Greece , he was a Greek historian, biographer and essayist who lived between 46 and 120 AD. At the age of twenty he went to Athens to study mathematics and philosophy.
He was a disciple of the philosopher Ammonio Saccas . Although he traveled throughout most of the Empire , most of his life lived in Queronea , where he held numerous public positions. He was linked to the Platonic Academy of Athens , and was priest of Apollo at Delphi .
Summary
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- 1 Origins
- 2 Writer at the service of the Empire
- 3 Parallel Life
- 1 The missing texts
- 4 Other plutarchian works
- 1 The Moralia
- 5 The influence of Plutarch
- 6 Famous Fráses
- 7 Sources
origins
Plutarch was born in the Greek region of Boeotia , probably during the rule of the Roman Emperor Claudius . He made many trips around the Mediterranean world, including one to Egypt and two trips to Rome .
Thanks to the economic capacity of his family, Plutarco received an education of the first order (according to the standards of the time), and had the opportunity to study philosophy, rhetoric and mathematics at the Academy of Athens around the year 67.
Some of his friends were very influential, including Soscio Senecio and Fundano , both important senators and to whom he dedicated some of his last writings.
Most of his life was spent in Queronea , where he was initiated into the mysteries of the Greek god Apollo . However, his duties as the elder of Apollo’s two priests at the Oracle of Delphi (where he was responsible for interpreting the auguries of the Oracle’s fortune tellers) apparently occupied a small part of his time.
He led a very active social and civic life, in addition to producing a large number of writings, some of which still exist.
It owes its fame to Parallel Lives , a series of biographies of illustrious Greek and Roman characters, grouped in pairs in order to establish a comparison between figures from one and another culture. The sobriety of the story and the dramatic sense of the work has been a source of inspiration for great writers, including William Shakespeare .
The rest of his writings, grouped under the title of Moral Works (78 treatises, compilations or biographies dedicated to very diverse subjects, written at different times), collect serious philosophical discussions of Platonic roots and diatribes of a rhetorical nature. More moralist than philosopher and historian, he was one of the last great representatives of Hellenism when it came to an end.
Writer in the service of the Empire
In addition to his duties as a priest of the temple at Delphi , Plutarch was also a magistrate at Queronea , and represented his people on various missions to foreign countries during his early years in public life.
His friend Lucio Mestrio Floro , Roman consul, sponsored Plutarch to achieve Roman citizenship, and according to the 10th century historian George Sincellus , Emperor Hadrian appointed him, already in the writer’s old age, procurator of Aquea (the Greek province from Rome south of the Peloponnese peninsula ). This position allowed him to wear the vestments and ornaments of a consul.
His priestly duties and his government activity in the Empire did not prevent him from exercising his most enduring vocation: literature.
Parallel Life
Parallel Lives is his best known work, in it Plutarco portrays with incisive clairvoyance 2 worlds, the Greek and the Roman, and approaches it masterfully through clear prose, and the chosen narration of the most significant vital passages of each protagonist . It is worth remembering Plutarco’s own words, when he describes his work as follows:
“Sometimes a joke, an anecdote, an insignificant moment, they paint us an illustrious man better than the greatest feats or the bloodiest battles.”
Parallel Lives, as they have come down to us, contain twenty-three pairs of biographies, each pair containing a Greek life and a Roman life, as well as four mismatched lives. As he himself explains in the first paragraph of his Life of Alexander , Plutarch did not aim so much to write stories as to explore the influence of character (good or bad) on the lives and destinies of famous men.
Some of the most interesting lives, such as, for example, the one that talks about Heracles and Philip II of [[Macedonia], no longer exist, and of many of the rest the entire text is not available, so that there are important gaps, detours and interpolations of later writers.
His Life of Alexander is one of the five surviving Tertiary sources on the Macedonian conqueror, and includes anecdotes and descriptions of incidents that do not appear in other sources. Likewise, his portrait of Numa Pompilius , one of the 7 Roman kings and true architect of their religion, also contains unique information about the early Roman calendar.
The lost texts
Thanks to quotations or annotations in other texts or sources, we can affirm that the biographical accounts referring to Hercules , Scipio the African , Epaminondas , Augustus , Claudius or Nero have been lost .
Other Plutarchian works
The surviving remains of his work are collected under the title of Moralia (translated as Morales and Customs Works). The title was not given by Plutarch himself, but by the Byzantine monk Máximo Planudes , who collected in the 13th century various scattered works by the author, and even others considered spurious today, under this label.
The Moralia
This is an eclectic collection of seventy-eight booklets on ethics, politics, philosophy and science, theology, history, and miscellaneous topics.
The influence of Plutarch
The scope of his writings is enormous, and his Parallel Lives has been for centuries a bedside book and source for countless famous people. Shakespeare was an avid reader of them, to the point that several of his works take it as a historical source, such as his tragedy Coriolano .
Famous fráses
- Moderate work fortifies the spirit; and it weakens it when it is excessive: just as moderate water nourishes plants and suffocates them too much.
- An army of deer led by a lion is far more fearsome than an army of lions led by a deer.
- There are husbands so unjust that they demand fidelity from their wives that they themselves violate, they resemble generals who cowardly flee from the enemy, who nevertheless want their soldiers to hold their position with courage.
- I don’t need friends who change when I change and agree when I agree. My shadow does it so much better.
- The brain is not a glass to fill, but a lamp to light.
