PLUTARCH

A.D. 46-119

HIS LIFE, HIS LIVES AND HIS MORALS

RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH

 

As, in the progress of life, we first pass through scenes of innocence, peace, and fancy, and afterwards encounter the disorders of society, so we shall here amuse ourselves awhile in the peaceful solitude of the philosopher, before we proceed to those more animated, but less pleasing objects he describes. Nor will the view of a philosopher's life be less instructive than his labors. If the latter teach us how great vices, accompanied with great abilities, may tend to the ruin of a state; if they inform us how Ambition attended with magnanimity, how Avarice directed by political sagacity, how Envy and Revenge armed with personal valor and popular support, will destroy the most sacred establishments,, and break through every barrier of human repose and safety ; the former will convince us that equanimity is more desirable than the highest privileges of mind, and that the most distinguished situations in life are less to be envied than those quiet allotments, where Science is the support of Virtue. Pindar and Epaminondas had, long before Plutarch's time, redeemed, in some measure, the credit of Boeotia, and rescued the inhabitants of that country from the proverbial imputation of stupidity. When Plutarch appeared, he confirmed the reputation it had recovered. He showed that genius is not the growth of any particular soil ; and that its cultivation requires no peculiar qualities of climate.

All which we know with any certainty about Plutarch must be gathered from scattered notices in his own writings; his contemporaries being absolutely silent about him, and some later legends, as that he was named Consul by Trajan, having no historic worth whatever. The greatest biographer of antiquity, he who wrote the Lives of so many others, found none to write his own, and did not himself care to write it. The author of a recent article on Plutarch is mistaken when he ascribes an autobiography to him. All which the writer says, on whose authority he relies for this statement, is that it would not be difficult to construct his biography by piecing together the various notices of him which lie scattered through his own writings. And no doubt there is in him not a garrulity, but a pleasant and unaffected willingness to speak of himself and of those belonging to him, which yields us, when these notices are all collected, a considerable amount of information about him. Let us put these together as we best may, indicating at the same time the points in which these notices fail us altogether.

Chaeronea, a small town in Boeotia, but one by no means without a name in ancient story, it commanded the entrance of that Boeotian plain, which Epaminondas was wont to call ‘the dancing-plot of Mars’  the lists, that is, in which the War-god held his games, fitted as that plain was to draw, and actually drawing so often, contending hosts to itself, there to clash together in arms. When he so named it, two out of the three great battles which should best justify the title, and which should all be called after this city, were as yet unfought—one of these, and the most famous of the three, being that battle ‘fatal to liberty’ in which Greece played against the Macedonian her last stake for freedom, and lost it.

Chaeronea, a town in Boeotia, between Phocis and Attica, had the honor to give him birth. This place was remarkable for nothing but the tameness and servility of its inhabitants, whom Athony's soldiers made beasts of burthen, and obliged to carry their corn upon their shoulders to the coast. As it lay between two seas, and was partly shut up by mountains, the air, of course, was heavy, and truly Boeotian. But situations as little favored by nature as Chaeronea have given birth to the greatest men; of which the celebrated Locke and many others are instances.

Plutarch himself acknowledges the stupidity of the Boeotians in general; but he imputes it rather to their diet than to their air; for, in his Treatise on Animal Food, he intimates, that a gross indulgence in that crticle, which was usual with his countrymen, contributes greatly to obscure the intellectual faculties..

It is not possible to fix with absolute certainty the year of Plutarch’s birth, and as little that of his death. Ruauld places it about the middle of the reign of Claudius; others, towards the end of it. The following circumstance is the only foundation they have for their conjectures.

I shall not trouble you with the various hints which, put together and combined, lead to the conclusion that the first may be safely placed about the year 50 of our era. As a young man he pursued his studies under Ammonius at Athens—a gentleman therefore, and of fairly independent means, for the academical course at Athens was scarcely within the reach of any other. He will have been engaged in these studies, and, if our calculations are right, will have reached about his seventeenth year, at the time when Nero made his memorable art-progress through Greece, A.D. 67. The matricide, however, did not venture to enter the city, more than any other the sacred haunt of the Furies. Plutarch voyaged to Alexandria, but whether he penetrated further into Egypt is doubtful. Asia Minor, too, he must at the least have skirted, as one of his smaller treatises could only have been written at Sardes.

Rome, ‘beautiful Rome’ as on one occasion he calls it, he visited certainly twice, most probably oftener; drawn thither, as he tells us, by motives political and philosophical. What the political were, he has not informed us. They may very well have been the hopes of obtaining some boon for his native city or country; for he seems to have been counted apt for embassies of the kind. Already in his father’s life-time he was sent by his city on such to the Roman Proconsul. It so happened that, from one cause or another, the colleague who should have gone with him was hindered from so doing; but he mentions with gratitude the admonishment which he received from his father, that, in giving account of the successful issue of the journey, he should everywhere speak not in the singular, but in the plural, not of what he, but what they, had effected. What the philosophic motives were which attracted him to Rome, it does not seem hard to guess; delivering, as he did, lectures on ethical subjects in the city which was the heart and centre of the world's activity, and no doubt collecting there materials for that work, namely the Parallel Lives of Greeks and Romans, which was to constitute his main title to immortality. That they were no hasty or flying visits which he paid to the capital city, is sufficiently evident from the many noteworthy things and places there which he describes or refers to as one familiar with them.

What was the date of his earliest visit to Rome, it is not in our power to say. If we may accept some words which he puts into the mouth of one of the speakers in his dialogue, On the Skill of Animals as recording what he had himself seen in the theatre of Marcellus,—and I should be disposed to do this—he was already there in the time of Vespasian, whom he mentions as present on the occasion; that is, before the year 79, in which Vespasian’s death took place. Yet this is altogether uncertain. We can affirm with more confidence his presence there during the principate of Domitian, as he casually mentions the noble Roman, Arulenus Rusticus, as on one occasion among his hearers—whom the tyrant, jealous of his virtues, caused to be put to death, A.D. 94. It was a hideous time to make his first acquaintance with Rome, if indeed it was then he made it; for what sights must he have there beheld! the martyrdom of the Stoic philosophers ; the persistent warfare against all eminence, all virtue; the murder of the brave and wise ; the bloody spectacles of the Circus with its shivering wretches flung in among wild beasts; the prosperous scoundrels of servile birth, delators and others, who had won their wealth by a thousand crimes, carried in their rich litters; the imperial harlots sweeping by in chariots drawn by silver-shod mules,—all that darkened the soul of Tacitus and maddened the heart of Juvenal.

And yet it would be a mistake to suppose that even under the malignant star of Domitian there was any positive suspension of the intercourse of social life, any paralysis of literary activity. There was evidently nothing of the kind, nothing to render impossible such a mission as Plutarch desired to fulfil. At Rome he lived in familiar intercourse with many of the chief men of the city, the best and noblest Romans of the time: with Mestrius Floras, of whom presently; with Fundanus, to whom the younger Pliny addresses more than one letter; with Sosius Senecio, another of Pliny's correspondents,—all of them men of consular dignity; and with others not so well known to us as these. Thus doing, he was only true to his own convictions; it being in his judgment the duty of philosophers to associate, so far as without unworthy assentation this might be done, with princes and others that had the government of men and men’s affairs. Nowhere in his view could they spend their pains so well, seeing that in profiting one of these they in fact profited not merely one, but many. Nor, we may be quite sure, was there any need on his part to court the favour and solicit the good offices of the great men of the imperial city. According to the fashion—in the main a most honourable fashion—of the day, they would have rather courted his society than he theirs. When we read of the younger Cato, that he spent a brief intermission from the toils of office in a journey to Pergamum, if so be he might persuade a famous philosopher there residing to take up his abode with him, when, himself representing the majesty of Rome, he was noted to give the right hand of honour to another of these philosophers who was walking with him; these were only exaggerations of the deference and observance which was freely rendered to them by the great of the world. And in the hundred years or more which had elapsed since Cato’s death, this observance of those who were the hungers to ‘rustic Latium’ of the Hellenic culture, and who were assumed to be themselves the highest representatives of it, had rather grown than diminished. The audacities and insolences displayed by some of the unworthier members of the great philosophic guild—for such with all its inner differences we may call it—attest the confidence which they felt in their position, no less than the readiness on the part of some among them to abuse it.

What we now read as treatises are in many instances the revised and expanded notes of lectures which had been orally delivered by him. On more than one occasion indeed he states as much. Though delivered at Rome, these lectures, as I need hardly say, were in Greek ; for by his own confession he was a poor Latin scholar; having learned the language late in life, and even then so imperfectly that he rather took in the whole intention of a Latin sentence than construed it word by word. But the circle of his hearers was little, if at all, limited hereby; for Rome, if not that ‘Greek city’ which Juvenal indignantly calls it, had been, and probably from an earlier date than we commonly assume, a Greek-speaking city, everybody there understanding Greek, talking Greek, writing Greek, almost as much and as freely as Latin. This ignorance on his part of Latin did not weigh very heavily upon him. He might have been well pleased to have freer access to materials of history which it and it only would supply him. But as the key to a literature, we may confidently affirm that he was altogether indifferent to it; for, while every Roman who made any claim to a liberal education was familiar with Greek literature, no Greek condescended to know anything of Latin. Utterly effaced as a nation, the Greeks had yet this revenge, namely, to believe that they reigned not merely supreme, but alone, in that ideal world of poetry and art which they claimed as their exclusive domain ; they could still refuse to recognize, or even to know of, the later conquests in the same domain which their conquerors had made.

The works of Plutarch singularly illustrate the extent to which this ignoring of Roman literature reached; for in other regions of human activity he recognized their full equality. The only Latin books to which he habitually refers are histories, memoirs, and the like, with which he could not avoid acquainting himself, if he was to write Roman Lives at all. But with all his multifarious reading, with all his multitudinous citations from his own poets, he has not a single reference to Virgil; nor yet one to Ovid, whose Fasti would often have come most opportunely in, where Roman Questions, as he calls them, questions, that is, of Roman archaeology, ritualism, and the like, are treated by him;  nor, as far as I know, with one exception, to any Latin poet whatever. The one exception is Horace. A single quotation from the Epistles of Horace in his Life of Lucullus, exhausts, if I do not mistake, the entire of his references to a poetry inferior, it is true, as a whole, to that of Greece, but with superiorities of its own  stronger-thoughted, if not so beautiful; and, if often only an echo of the melodies of Greece, yet in some regions of art altogether original. His writings leave on us the impression that, with the exceptions just named, he was equally ignorant of the prose literature of Rome. There are two passages in his Life of Cicero, which might seem to indicate a certain acquaintance with his philosophic writings; but after all, not more than he could have gotten from Tiro’s Life of his master, to which in other respects Plutarch was so largely indebted.

I shall need to enter more in detail on his work in the lecture-room when I speak hereafter of his ethical writings; only here I will say, and in general terms, that Plutarch belongs to and is a principal figure in a very remarkable epoch of the moral history of the ancient world. It was not indeed an epoch of quickening to a new life, not a palingenesy, nor even a rejuvenescence. The old Greek and Roman society as such, was doomed. No revival, in the sense, that is, of a new birth, was possible for it. Before such could be, a new leaven must be mingled with the old and sinful lump. But the second century after Christ was an epoch of a very signal recovery and restoration, a final rallying of whatever energies for good the heathen world possessed, and in this way a postponing of its fall, with the total collapse of the old order of things, for a good deal more than a century. It must have seemed, in the time of the later Julian Caesars, as if that fall was imminent; as though the whole fabric of civilized society was about to crumble at once into wreck and ruin. All those moral forces, the potent but invisible ties which had hitherto held it together, appeared to have lost their binding power. In that seat of power and pre-eminence, which should have been a throne of righteousness, sat monsters not merely unworthy to reign, but unworthy to live—and indeed unable to live, four of them in little more than a year dying violent and bloody deaths. It was as though the last agony of a world perishing in its own corruption had arrived.

A brief lucid interval under Vespasian and Titus, if we may venture to call it such, was followed by blacker darkness than ever, by the long and baleful tyranny of Domitian. And then, when the gloom was thickest, there was the dawn of a better hope. On that seat of empire, profaned so long, there now succeeded one another a line of chief rulers, none of them wholly unworthy, some of them eminently worthy, of that highest place which they held. And this was no solitary token of the beginning of better things. Everywhere there went with this a reinvigoration of whatever elements of good that old world possessed; and it was seen that these, so long repressed, kept down, crushed, yet had not perished altogether. The ancient virtues were not wholly dead. The old religion could still wake up a pas­sionate devotion in the hearts of its votaries. Philosophy could still, make good her claims to assist those who submitted to her teaching in the right ordering of their lives. There went forth everywhere the teachers of a morality larger and purer than the heathen world had yet produced,—Greek literature itself partaking in the revival, and enjoying in Plutarch and Lucian, the several representatives of faith and unbelief, in Arrian, in Epictetus, in Musonius, and in Dio Chrysostom a kind of later and Martinmas summer of its own.

It was certainly not an easy task, and, regarded from the standpoint of absolute truth, it was an impossible task, which Plutarch, and those who wrought with him in this new and noble propaganda, set before them. Undertaken by him and by others in perfect good faith, it was yet nothing less than a reconciling of the popular religion with right reason; openly assailed, or secretly undermined, as that popular religion was by so many potent forces arrayed against it, by philosophy, by atheism, by Christianity; encumbered, too, and embarrassed by a mass of fables, many of them puerile, not a few immoral. There was need to disengage it from the immoral, to trace in the seemingly puerile or trivial such an underlying meaning as should justify its retention; while there was no choice but to abandon many outworks, if only the citadel might so the better be defended. Such was their task, among whom Plutarch was perhaps the foremost and most influential worker of all. If their success was only partial and temporary, if in the end they failed where failure was inevitable, who shall lay this to their charge? while for what they effected let them have the honour which is their due, and which cannot without injustice be withheld.  

How far he and his fellow-workers may have served as heralds of the Gospel, and, though they meant not this, have prepared a way for its coming triumphs, how far they may have rather hindered and delayed those triumphs, is a question which has been often debated and to which very different answers have been given. Doubtless, in the quickening of the old faiths it was sought by some to find weapons for the resisting of the advances of the new; even as a little later there were not wanting those—as, for instance, Julian the Apostate—who were fain to play off the revived heathen morality against the ethics of the Church, as equal or superior to these; while from the School of the Neo-Platonists, who were the philo­sophic outcome of this revival, some of the ablest and most determined energies of the Christian faith proceeded. Yet all this cannot rob the movement of its interest for us, nor for myself can I believe that anything which is good, so far as it is such, can do otherwise in the long run than help forward the recognition and reception of that which is best and highest of all.

Be this, however, as it may, and to whatever uses others may have sought to ton this revival, Plutarch himself may be entirely acquitted of any conscious attempt to fight against that truth which was higher than any which he had, and which within two centuries was to take the world for its own. Strange to say, Christianity is to him utterly unknown. Even such passing notices of it as we have in Tacitus, in Suetonius, in Epictetus, would be sought in his writings in vain. As far as has hitherto been traced, there is in these no single distinct reference, nor so much as an allusion to it. When we call to mind his extensive travels, his insatiable curiosity, the profound interest which he felt in all moral and religious speculations, the manner in which he was instinctively drawn to whatever was noblest and best, we could have no more remarkable commentary than this on that word of Scripture, ‘The kingdom of God cometh not with observation.’ If we place his birth, as I have suggested, at about the year A.D. 50, then long before he began to write, St. Peter and St. Paul must have finished their course. All around him, at Rome, where he dwelt so long, in that Greece where the best part of his life was spent, in Asia Minor, with which Greece was in constant communication, in Macedonia, there were flourishing Churches. Christianity, if I may so say, was everywhere in the air, so that men unconsciously inhaled some of its influences, even where they did not submit themselves to its positive teaching. But for all this, no word, no allusion of his testifies to his knowledge of the existence of these Churches, or to the slightest acquaintance on his part with the Christian books. Of such an acquaintance, whether mediate or immediate, it seems to me that we can hardly refuse to acknowledge some traces and tokens in the writings of Seneca and Epictetus, but none in his. If any notices of that sect, which was still everywhere spoken against, and which his contemporary Pliny could style ‘a perverse and excessive superstition’ reached his ears, he probably looked at it as a mere variety of Judaism; for of that he often speaks, although without any insight into its true significance, and, like most of the Greek and Latin writers of the time, seeing it only on its least attractive, or, we might say, its most repulsive side.

Champagny indeed, the historian, in many respects admirable, of the Antonines, traces a covert allusion to Christianity, and to the entrance into noblest houses which by the agency of women it often found, when in his Precepts of Wedlock Plutarch admonishes the wife that she shall have no private worship of her own, apart from and unknown to her husband, but shall honour the gods whom he honours, ‘shutting the door to all supervacaneous worships and foreign superstitions.’ It must be admitted that the language of Plutarch lends itself to such an interpretation; while yet, taking into account the many Oriental rites of all kinds which were at this time gaining a footing in the West, it is impossible to urge this as the only interpretation which his words will bear.

The later years of his tranquil life he spent at his native Chaeronea; which, small and obscure as it was, he would not quit, lest, as he says, he should make it smaller yet. He did not there disdain an humble municipal office; for indeed, as he says himself, how should he, having before his eyes the example of Epaminondas, who did not refuse the office of ‘telearch’ at Thebes, though as such having practically little more to do than to take oversight for the right cleansing of the streets of the city? What of highest and most honourable in place his native city had to bestow, he afterwards obtained.

When I spoke just now of his latter years as spent at Chaeronea, this statement does not exclude smaller excursions in that land which was to him dear beyond every other land. He is evidently familiar with each nook and comer of Greece; and is well pleased to relate, whenever a fair opportunity occurs, what he himself has seen of memorials and records, surviving there to his own day, of her ancient splendour and renown—these, both as gratifying his historic sense, and as serving to link for him and for his readers her humble present with her glorious past Athens, still in his eyes the pearl of Greece, naturally supplies him with the larger number of these. He had seen there the house of Phocion, ‘very mean and without curiosity;’ the underground retreat, ‘the cellar’ North calls it, of Demosthenes; the dedicated gifts of Nicias; and had admired the wondrous works of art with which Pericles adorned the city, and which still flourished as in the beauty of an eternal youth, as if every of those foresaid works had some living spirit in it, to make it seem young and fresh, and a soul that lived ever, which kept them in their good continuing state.’ He had seen at Sparta the spear of Agesilaus, which, however, in nothing differed from any other spear; had consulted the state archives, that he might learn the names of his wife and his daughters; had been present there when on the altar of Artemis Oreithyia young boys had endured whipping even to death. We might be tempted to think that there was some mistake here, only that Cicero reports the same in his time. He describes at large, and as an eye-witness, the grand festival still kept at Plataea in memory of the victory over the Persians won in the neighbourhood of that city, and from it deriving its name. He speaks from personal knowledge of Philopoemen’s statue at Delphi, and refers to it as disproving the assertion of some that this ‘ last of the Greeks ’ was of an ill-favoured countenance.

While we may light almost anywhere in Plutarch’s writings, and often where we should have least expected it, on some autobiographical notice, obtain some pleasant glimpse of the man himself or of his surroundings, it is perhaps his Symposiacs, or Table Talk, in which these are found strewed the most thickly. We derive from the same many pleasant and instructive hints concerning the social life of the time, among that class of well-conditioned scholars and of gentlemen more or less devoted to letters and philosophy, who constituted the circle which Plutarch drew round him, and in which he most cared to move. These Symposiacs are evidently no fancy pieces, but brief records of conversations which actually sprang up by one occasion or another at entertainments in which Plutarch, either as guest or host, took part; and were put into the permanent shape in which we have them at the request of Sosius Senecio, his Roman friend, to whom these, as well as some of his Parallel Lives and of his ethical treatises, are addressed.

The speakers, Greeks, as we conclude by the names, for the most part, but not exclusively, are naturally different upon different occasions, though there are names which recur pretty often. Of some we know nothing, except what we learn about them from Plutarch himself in this Table Talk or elsewhere: as his father, often mentioned, but nowhere named; his grandfather, Lamprias, who could relate curious anecdotes which he had heard from eye-witnesses, of the Alexandrian revels of Mark Antony himself of excellent good sense, if we may judge from one discourse of his which is here recorded These the elders of the house, taking share in some of the earlier discourses, disappear from the later; indeed in one of the latest he speaks of his grandfather as dead. Others, too, there are of the family, as his father-in-law Alexion; his brother Lamprias, probably, as bearer of his grandfather’s name, an elder brother, and evidently a character; a good trencherman, as became a Boeotian; one who on occasion could dance the pyrrhic war-dance; who loved well a scoff and a jest, even as no doubt it was counted an excellent jest by his Greek hearers, when he undertook to prove that the Latin words having to do with banquets were ‘ many times more properly devised than the Greek and who, if he thrust himself somewhat brusquely into discussions which were going forward, was quite able to justify the intrusion. Another brother, Timon by name, is a frequent speaker; to whom and to whose affection for himself Plutarch bears elsewhere this touching record (I quote from Philemon Holland’s translation of his ethical works, of which I shall have occasion to speak more at large hereafter):

“For mine own part, to say somewhat of myself, albeit that Fortune hath done me many favours, in regard whereof I am bound to render unto her much thanks, there is not any one for which I take myself so much obliged and beholden unto her, as for the love that my brother Timon hath always shewed and doth yet shew unto me; a thing that no man is able to deny, who hath never so little been in our company, and you least of all others may doubt, who have conversed so familiarly with us.”

Add to these Glaucias the rhetorician, Praxiteles the historian, Hermas the geometrician, Nicias the physician, Themistocles the stoic philosopher and a descendant of the great Athenian, Theon, Marcus, and Protogenes, grammarians, by which name, as I need hardly say, much more was then than would now be implied. Of the last of these one would gladly know no more than we learn about him here, but he puts in a very unpleasant appearance elsewhere. Besides these there is a king Antiochus Philopappus, who sometimes takes part in these conversations, and to whom Plutarch dedicates one of the happiest of his moral treatises. His royal title has long been a puzzle to commentators; but he was in all likelihood a son or grandson of Antiochus, the petty king of Commagene, harshly stript by Vespasian of his little principality, A.D. 72, but afterwards, with his sons, kindly treated, such royal allowances and titular dignity being granted to him as we have not seldom granted to dethroned princes of India.

Others are better known to us, as Ammonius, mentioned already as Plutarch’s teacher, a Peripatetic philosopher, and probably the same, some fragments of whose learned work ‘On Altars and Sacrifices’ have reached us; as Mestrius Floras, a man of consular rank, and, as Plutarch reports, a devoted archaeologist; the same who, sitting at table with the Emperor Vespasian, admonished him that he should not pronounce ‘plostra’ but ‘plaustra’; Vespasian, who, when jests were flying, was not wont to remain in any man’s debt, greeting him the next day they met as Mestrius Flauros, Flauros meaning good for nothing. In his company, Plutarch tells us elsewhere, he visited in Cisalpine Gaul the field of Bebriacum, the scene of the overthrow of the army of Otho; and heard from his lips, for he had been present at the battle, some striking particulars of the tremendous carnage of the day. Herodes is another frequent speaker, Herodes Atticus, as we cannot doubt, famous as an orator and a millionaire. Add to these his friend and Plutarch’s, partaker too of the most intimate councils of the Emperor Adrian, the sophist Favorinus, no unimportant person in his time; to whom Plutarch has dedicated more treatises than one. The list is not yet nearly complete, but these may suffice.

On the whole, the questions raised and discussed at these banquets would bear creditable comparison with the after-dinner discourses of our own day, and not less the spirit in which the discussions were conducted. The fact that they do not, for the most part, turn on subjects very profound or abstruse, cannot be esteemed a fault; it is only on rare occasions that such would have been other than unseasonable. Sometimes they are trivial enough, perhaps the triviality itself constituting the attraction, as when a question is raised whether it was the right hand of Venus, or the left, which Diomed wounded. Philological questions come in for their share of attention, Plutarch and his friends for the most part proving true to that ‘unspeakable spirit of absurdity,’ which Niebuhr lays to the door of the ancients, as often as they meddled with this subject. The happiest among these arguments are such as would spring up naturally and easily at a banquet, and have more or less reference to a right ordering of this. Thus there is a very lively and full discussion on the use and abuse of ‘Shadows;’ by which name, as I need hardly inform you, were designated uninvited guests, whom it was counted that persons of any distinction, being themselves invited to a banquet, were privileged to bring in their train, and whole troops of whom they sometimes did bring—an intolerable embarrassment of any feast, as it seems to us; but a custom to which the arrangements of ancient feasts must have somehow lent themselves more easily than we can quite understand. Then again there is another excellent discussion on the question whether the giver of a feast does best, himself ranging his guests in their several appointed places, or leaving them to range themselves. Another is on the qualities which a rex convivii or modimperator ought to possess? I have said that they sometimes take a more earnest tone; as for instance, one raises the question, why we are pleased with the mimic presentation of things which it would be most displeasing to us to witness in reality; or, more earnest still, the guests in another discuss in what sense Plato affirms that God geometrizes,—if indeed Plato does anywhere affirm aught of the kind.

The places where these Table Talks were held are naturally very different, but the most of them in Greece. It is at one time at Plutarch’s own house at Chaeronea; or at his brother Timon’s; or at that of some principal inhabitant of the same, to welcome his return from Alexandria, or from his longer absence at Rome; or they find place at Eleusis after the celebration of the mysteries; or at Delphi, where Plutarch was clothed with certain hereditary priestly functions; at Corinth; at Thermopylae; or at the table of one Callistratus, who kept almost open house at Galepsus, a Greek watering-place, pleasantly described, and wonderfully resembling a German Spa at the present day; or lastly at Athens, where his teacher, Ammonius, being chief officer of the city, entertains all the most famous professors of the University at what is meant to be a feast of reconciliation, such as shall help to bring them to forget some past differences. The feast has unfortunately a very different issue, ending as it does in general confusion, in an universal challenging and defying on their parts of one another p this banquet of the philosophers being, curiously enough, the only one of these banquets at which perfect harmony does not reign throughout. Before quitting these Symposiacs I cannot help observing, how strangely little use has been made, in descriptions of the social life of Greece and Rome at this period, of them and other miscellaneous writings of Plutarch. Gibbon has drawn upon them hardly at all, Merivale not very much, Friedlander something more.

As Plutarch was happy in the wider circle of his friends, so not less in the innermost circle of all, that of his own family. A letter of consolation addressed to his wife, Timoxena, on the death of a little daughter (she had died while he was absent from home, which must explain the epistolary form), assures us of this, besides showing him in a very tender and very attractive light as a father and a husband; as one also to whom the words of the Arabian patriarch, “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away,” would have sounded no strange language, if it could have reached his ears. This letter, too, is precious, as affording us glimpses of a family life, the existence of which we are too apt to forget when we are taking account of the moral condition of the ancient heathen world, too easily assuming, as we do, that what as wickedest and worst is there denounced, is a fair specimen of the whole. Surely there must have been many other homes where there prevailed the same simplicity, the same sobriety, the same affection, the same indifference to the pomps and vanities of the world, as in his. In this letter he commends his wife that she gave no place to ‘the turbulent storms of sorrow and passionate motions of anguish,’ ‘the excessive and insatiable desire of lamentations,’ which were so common in that heathen world where so many sorrowed without hope But this self-command takes him not by surprise, for that same constancy had not failed her at the death of her eldest born, nor again “when that gentle and beautiful Chaeron departed from us untimely, in the prime of his years.” And then, after much reminding her of the joy which they had in that child which was gone, and of the duty of thankfulness for this joy, he proceeds :

“Take you no heed to those tears, plaints, and moans that men or women make who come to visit you at this present; who also, upon a foolish custom and as it were of course, have them ready at command for every one; but rather consider this with yourself, how happy you are reputed, even by those who come unto you, who would gladly and with all their hearts be like unto you, in regard of those children whom you have, the bouse and family which you keep, and the life that you lead; for it were an evil thing to see others desire to be in your estate and condition for all the sorrow which now afflicted us, and yourself in the meantime complaining and taking in ill part the same; for herein you should resemble very well those critics, who collect and gather together all the lame and defective verses of Homer, which are but few in number, and in the mean time pass over an in­finite sort of others, which were by him most excellently made.”

Nor will he bring this letter to a close without bidding her to yield no credit to them who would fain persuade that the soul, once separate from the body, is dissolved; and he reminds her how they had both been initiated into those Eleusinian mysteries, and made partakers in them of that hope of immortality, which, if not taught in those mysteries in as many express words, yet so pierced through and informed the ceremonies and the symbols, that many of the noblest hearts in the ancient world were by them strengthened to believe that beyond this world there was a higher and a nobler, and one in which all of precious which was lost here should again be found. Let her comfort herself with these thoughts.

Such, as it presents itself to me, was the calm and equable tenor of Plutarch’s life; a life which was long drawn out, and rich in the honour, the troops of friends, and in other of those blessings which should accompany old age. But not in blessings of this world only. That it was a life not unillumined ‘by heavenly hope and high humility’ that he walked cheerfully in such light as was vouchsafed to him, and was in earnest to lead others to walk in the same; that he was one of those whom we contemplate with thanks­giving, even the heathen who, not having a law, were yet a law unto themselves; this I trust to show before I have brought these lectures to a close.

 

PLUTARCH’S PARALLEL LIVES.

 

A book does not fail to acquire an additional interest in our eyes, becomes to us a far more real and genuine thing than otherwise it would have been, when we can trace it as growing by a kind of necessity out of the conditions in which the writer found himself, as the result not of a mere literary activity impelling him to write something, but as the product and outcome of these his surroundings, as they acted upon him, and he in return upon them. It is seldom that a book has the seal of immortality upon it, which in any other way has come into being. Such a book, as I take it, is the Parallel Lives of Plutarch, the probable genesis of which I will now venture to trace.

Plutarch, as I have said, was a Greek; but the Greece which he saw around him bore little resemblance to the Greece of an earlier and more glorious age. She was the shadow of her former self, and only haunted with the spectres of her ancient renown. All her grand but turbulent activities, all her noble agitations were spent Living Greece was no more. The Imperial rule, it is true, was more tolerable for the provinces—and Greece was a province, or rather the part of a province—than that of the tyrannous oligarchy, of a Verres or a Piso, which it had superseded; but the change had brought, and could bring, no revival with it. She had played her part once in the world’s story—a part at once too glorious and too exhausting to be played a second time. And now her cultivated fields were lonely sheep-walks; her flourishing cities had dwindled into pelting villages; and, with a little exaggeration, it might have been written of her as Algernon Sidney, in a very memorable passage, writes of the Italy of his day: “for the most part the lands lie waste, and they who were formerly troubled with the disorders incident to populous cities, now enjoy the quiet and peaceable estate of a wilderness.”

All the accidents of time, all the greedy rapine of Roman proconsuls and Roman emperors may have been unable sensibly to diminish the number of the statues which still peopled every comer of Hellas, her streets, her groves, her temples, with forms of exquisite grace and beauty; but if these, the works of men’s art, survived, the men themselves were no more. Many causes working together had so depopulated the land, that all Greece, as Plutarch himself assures us, could scarcely have sent in his day 3,000 heavy-armed men into the field, that being exactly the number which the one insignificant city of Megara sent in the glorious days of old to the great armed gathering at Plataea. And the evil was of long standing. A century earlier, Athens, which had passionately espoused the cause of Pompey, could send him no more than three ships as her utmost contribution to his cause.

There was indeed another Greece, the Greece of literature, of art, of rhetoric, of philosophy, which was mighty still, which perhaps never was mightier, penetrating and pervading as it did with its spirit every interstice of society, and making all its own. But this Greece had its haunt and home everywhere rather than in that land which was still called by this name, and from which all those influences, which were now hellenizing the whole civilized world, had first proceeded. Not to say that in all this there was but poor compensation for the fact that the sceptre of dominion had passed into other hands; that, whatever harvest of men Greece, thus understood, might bear, artists, grammarians, rhetoricians, philosophers, there were other sorts,' the statesman, the warrior, whom she could bring forth no more; while her own offspring, with all their talents and accomplishments, were too often not so much Greeks as Greeklings, haunting the antechambers, and seeking by ignoble assentation to win the favour, of their Roman patrons and lords.

I put an emphasis on this : for I cannot doubt that, patriot as Plutarch was, this spectacle of the political nullity of the Greek nation, of the utter decadence and decay of that land which he loved so well, was a motive which wrought mightily with him, urging him to show what manner and breed of men she once had borne, men that could be matched and paired with the best and greatest among that other people which, having passed her in the race, was now marching in the forefront of the world. He was fain to show that Greece had worthies whom she could set man for man over against the later breed of Rome, and not fear a comparison with them.

At Rome, too, if there was not the same perishing of strength and manhood, if the great sinful city sat throned on her seven hills, the object of the world’s worship and wonder, there was much which may well have moved a thoughtful student of history to hold up before the living generation a faithful portraiture of what their fathers once had been; to remind them by what virtues, by what temperance, what frugality, what self-sacrifice those had made, and in a sense had deserved to make, the world their own ; if so be he might bring the men of his own time to recognize how far they had fallen, how much farther they were in danger of falling, from those moral heights on which their forefathers had walked of old. He must have felt that for Rome also her roll of creative men was well nigh completed, that her mightiest and best were in the past, that it was time to gather up the records of these, to set them forth in their good and in their evil, in all which they offered of example, in all which they afforded of warning to his own contemporaries and to the after world.

Yet while he may have meant, and no doubt did mean, primarily to benefit others, he gladly acknowledges the benefit which he derived himself from the work in which he was engaged (Of old Sir Thomas North’s translation of the Parallel Lives* which I have here used, I shall speak by and bye):

“When I first began to write these Lives, my intent was to profit other; but since continuing and going on, I have much profited myself by looking into these histories, as if I looked into a glass, to frame and fashion my life to the mould and pattern of these virtuous noblemen. For running over their manners in this sort, and seeking also to describe their lives, methinks. I am still conversant and familiar with them, and do as it were, lodge them with me, one after another... I do teach and prepare myself to shake off and banish from me all lewd and dishonest conditions, if by chance the company and conversation of them whose company I keep, and must of necessity haunt, do acquaint me with some unhappy or ungracious touch.”

We may perceive, I think, already some of the causes to which may be traced the rare and eminent success of Plutarch as a biographer. But to enter a little more particularly into this matter, what, it may be asked, is the charm and alluring power in these Lives, which has made them, as Madame Roland has expressed it, ‘the pasture of great souk’, the favourite reading of kings and captains, of men learned and men unlearned, of noble and simple, of women and boys? That they have been this, it needs no words of mine to prove. I might quote the consenting voices of famous men of almost all ages and countries. But these I must pass over; or rather, in the room of all, cite some few words from a very charming letter of Henry IV, of France to his wife, in which he expresses the delight with which he has learned from her that she is finding pleasure in the reading of Plutarch.  “You could not,” says the King, “have sent me tidings more agreeable. To love him is to love me; for he was the instructor of my early years ; and my good mother, to whom I owe so much, who so watched over the formation of my character, and who was wont to say that she had no desire to see her son an illustrious ignoramus, put this book into my hands when I was little more than an infant at the breast. It has been as my conscience, and has whispered in my ear many good suggestions and maxims for my conduct, and the government of my affairs.” I will only add a single word from another quarter. “It is our breviary” says Montaigne.

In answer to the question, What is the secret of his popularity—a popularity which, if not quite equal now to what it was at the Renaissance, has yet stood the test of ages,—I should be disposed to ascribe it, first and chiefly, to the clear insight which he had into the distinction between History, which he did not write, and Biography, which he did. The sense of this distinction was one not obscurely and unconsciously working in his mind; but from many utterances it is plain that he set deliberately before himself the difference between these two, and the further fact that his business was with the latter and not with the former. Vivid moral portraiture, this is what he aimed at, and this is what he achieved. It is not too much to affirm that his leading purpose in writing these Lives was not historical, but ethical. More or less of historical background he was obliged to give to the portraits which he drew; but always and altogether in subordination to the portrait itself. Whatever displayed character, served in any way to interpret the man, brought out his mental and moral features— this, however small it might seem, was precious to him, was carefully recorded by him ; whatever was not characteristic, however large, he foreshortened, if he could not let go altogether ; passed wholly by, if  he could, as something with which he had no concern. He has, in more places than one, expressed himself on this point Thus in his Life of Alexander, he desires his readers not to blame if he omits many things, and these of great importance—for, he goes on to say, “the noblest deeds do not always show virtues and vices; but oftentimes a light occasion, a word, or some sport, makes men’s natural dispositions and manners appear more plain than the famous battles won, wherein are slain ten thousand men”. So too in his Life of Nicias, all he informs the reader, which Thucydides has told, he will be found lightly to pass over—and in the rest I have endeavoured to gather and propound things not commonly marked and known, which will serve, I doubt not, to decipher the man and his nature.

This was what he proposed in each case to himself, ‘to decipher the man and his nature,’ to know him in his entirety, and in that same entirety to present him to the contemplation of others. There are biographers who deal with the hero, and biographers who deal with the man ; but Plutarch, as has been said, is the representative of ideal biography, for he delineates both in one, is never satisfied until he has connected what was personal and private in those about whom he is writing, with what was transcendent and heroic, and blended all, so far as his skill, and that is eminent, allows, into one consistent whole. On these pregnant hints of character which Plutarch so much loves to preserve, Montaigne has said excellently well, “There are in Plutarch many long discourses, very worthy to be carefully read and observed; but withal there are a thousand others, which he has only touched and glanced upon, where he only points with his finger to direct us which way we may go if we will, and contents himself sometimes with only giving one brisk hit in the nicest article of the question, from whence we are to grope out the rest.”

It was inevitable that one who thus studied the smaller incidents in the story of men’s lives, who professed to learn so much from these, should set a high value on what we call anecdotes. It is true that the treasurers and retailers of these are not always the wisest of men, often very far indeed from such. With allusion to this fact, Samuel Rogers was wont, as I remember, in the latest years of his life to say of himself that he was in his anecdotage. Had he meant this in earnest, he would have done himself infinite wrong, for his anecdotes were ever bright and sparkling ; and, if sometimes with a sting in them, yet, so far as my own experience went, never with an envenomed one. The number of what we may call by this general name, scattered over the writings of Plutarch, is enormous. He might sometimes seem to be of the same mind with the French historian, Prosper Mérimée, who has somewhere said, “Je n’aime de l’histoire que les anecdotes”—the words, of course, having only a faint umbrage of truth in the one case and in the other. Yet, numerous as those in his pages are, they are never poor, pointless, and unmeaning. They are often replete with the very highest meaning; while for not a few among them we may be the more thankful to him, seeing that, except as pre­served for us by him, they would not have reached us at all.

Thus it is from Plutarch we learn that it was Philip of Macedon who first styled a plain downrightness of speech which is hampered by no scruples of delicacy whatever—the calling of a spade a spade; and it is worth while to know the occasion on which he did so. Certain traitors who had delivered the city of Olynthus to his hands, and who afterwards haunted his court, complained to the King that some of those about him gave them that opprobrious name which by their treachery they had so richly earned, but for redress got only this reply, ‘My Macedonians are a rude and ill-mannered people. They call a spade a spade”

Here again is a word, the finished grace, the άστεϊον of which must have signally commended it to Plutarch, seeing that he has repeated it four times at the least, and it may be oftener. In this also Philip of Macedon appears, though a flute-player, and not the King, is the hero of it. This last had managed to get into a controversy with a musician on the number of stops in a certain instrument, or some other slight technical detail of his art. Philip was certainly in the wrong, yet showed no disposition to give way; on the contrary, was ill-content that the other would not yield the point to him; who, unable to do this, but seeing the necessity of bringing the discussion to an end, did so with this happiest turn, at once so firm and so respectful, “God forbid that your Majesty should know these things as well as I do”

That Philip was able to understand and enter into all which was in these words conveyed, namely, that there are accomplishments which do not become men, and least of all great men, we see plainly from some words by himself on another occasion addressed to his son Alexander, who “at a certain feast had sung passing well, and like a master in music” “Art thou not ashamed, son, to sing so well?” Let me venture to quote some words from my mother’s Remains, which seem to me to explain this indignation of his:—“It is singular how ill, in general, men bear little talents and accomplishments, and how much more overweening they are made by them than by great ones. This seems to justify what one considers at first as English prejudice—the sort of contempt that excelling in ornamental branches of education is so apt to bring on a man, unless managed with great address and apparent indifference to them; and indeed, even then I believe they rather take from his dignity.’

But pass we on from Philip to Philip’s greater son. Here are three or four mots of his, and they are only three or four out of a multitude which Plutarch has preserved for us; and having heard these, ask yourselves whether by their aid “the great Emathian conqueror” does not stand out before you in distincter outline than he otherwise would have done? and, more generally, whether Niebuhr is just and fair when he speaks of these in the main as ‘wretched stories’? This, for example, is his reply to his father, who had asked him, being a boy of twelve years, whether he too would not contend as well as others for the prizes at the Olympic games—‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘when I have kings for my competitors.’ Surely the child who could so speak was father of the man.

Or take another word of his, to my mind a very characteristic one. With all his sins and crimes, we cannot deny to Alexander a genuine, though fitful, magnanimity. It utters itself in this following word of his. A humble friend once asked from him a modest sum of money, as a dowry for his daughter, and would fain have put back the fifty talents which Alexander sent him, saying that a much smaller sum, which he specified, would satisfy all his needs. Surely it was a right royal answer which Alexander made him, such at least to my mind it is, though Seneca instances it as a supremely foolish one.  This which thou askest may be enough for thee to receive, but it is not enough for me to give.’

Another word of his implies upon his part a fine discrimination of character. He was accustomed, Plutarch tells us, among his chief friends most to honour Craterus, and most to lave Hephaestion; and to justify this distinction, saying that Craterus was a lover of the King and Hephaestion a lover of Alexander. The antithesis thus sug­gested, as is familiar to many, has in modem times been taken possession of, and transferred to relations the most sacred ; some having ventured to distinguish St Peter and St. John, as that the former was a lover of Christ and the latter a lover of Jesus.

And other sayings of Alexander are full of insight and well worth preserving. Thus when some spoke of Antipater, whom he had left to govern Macedon in his absence, that he always went dressed in plain apparel, and argued his humility therefrom,—“Nay” said the King, “but Antipater is all purple within”. Another presents him in a tenderer light. His mother, Olympias, whom also he left behind him, was constantly quarrelling with and intriguing against Antipater; he, on the other hand, writing long letters full of complaints and accusations against her, the most part, no doubt, of these perfectly well founded. “Doth not Antipater know Alexander exclaimed, on receiving one of these long catalogues of her offences, ‘that one tear of my mother will wipe out a thousand such letters as these?”

There is indeed an exquisite tenderness in some of these sayings which Plutarch has handed* down to us. They are such as only a good man, one of strong domestic affections, would have seen in their true beauty, or would have cared to treasure up for the after world. His Life of Epaminondas (the greatest military genius whom Greece produced, for Macedon was not Greece, and, take him all in all, her noblest and completest man), is unfortunately lost; but Plutarch otherwhere loves to record of him this, namely, that he was wont to count as the main felicity of his life, and heaven’s choicest gift to him, that it was his fortune to win the battle of Leuctra—a battle which had raised his native Thebes to the leadership of Greece—his father and his mother both being alive.

I take two or three more sayings, almost at random, and shall not follow up any further the ‘ anecdotage of Plutarch. They will shew, I think, that he knew what in this kind it was worth his while to preserve, and what to leave. Thus some one boasted, in the hearing of the philosopher Chilon, that he had not an enemy. “Have you a friend?” the other asked him.—To a citizen of Megara, a small and insignificant place, who at a common council of Grecian States was talking big and laying down a policy, Lysander rejoined, “Your words want a city.”—Chabrias, the famous Athenian general, did not scruple to say,—and there was a profound knowledge of men, of the need which they have of being led, of the electric currents which may pass from one into many, in the saying—“Better an army of stags led by a lion, than an army of lions led by a stag”

Not dwelling on these any longer, I would willingly, if this were possible, pass in review before you some few among the grand series of historical tableaux which the Lives present. What solemn, and oftentimes what tremendous, tragedies of history are here unrolled, one might almost say acted, before our eyes. I would instance, as standing out among these, the capture and death of Philopoemen; the defeat, flight and murder of Pompey (“le plus beau morceau de Plutarque,” Chateaubriand has called it, though in this verdict I cannot agree); the final parting of Brutus and Cassius, so wonderfully reproduced for us by Shakespeare; the grim concluding scene of the younger Cato’s life, and how “the morning broke and the little birds began to chirp,” while the fatal work was still to do; the suicide of Otho, his account of which, resting evidently on the same authorities as that of Tacitus, need not fear a comparison with it, having indeed preserved some touches which the other has let go; the magnificent triumph of Paulus Emilius after the conquest of Macedon, with the funerals in his own house, which furnish the dark background to the picture. Other historic pictures he has, embracing still wider reaches of sorrow and anguish; as, for example, his account of the immense catastrophe in which the Athenian expedition for the conquest of Sicily ended, or, not less terrible, that of the Parthian campaign of Crassus, with the death of his noble son, and the flinging down of his own head, like that of another Pentheus, as a ghastly trophy at the wild Bacchic revel of the Parthian king.

We hear much at this day of word-painting, which, however, often in my judgment fails in its intended effect, being too evidently the result of effort and design. Plutarch, and he with no effort at all, will often match with the foremost artists in this line. Let me cite in proof his description of the battle-array of the Cimbri, in that “decisive battle of the world” in which Marius destroyed, not an army only, but a nation, and made plain that, if Rome was indeed to perish, and the fierce children of the North were to execute the doom upon her, the day of that doom had not yet arrived. I can quote but a fragment, yet what a picture it presents :

“As for the troops of their footmen, because they should not open and break their ranks, the foremost ranks were all tied and bound together with girdles, leather thongs, and long chains of iron; but their horsemen, which were fifteen thousand, marched before in sumptuous furniture, for they had helmets on their heads fashioned like wild-beasts’ necks, and strange bevers or buffs to the same, and ware on their helmets great high plumes of feathers as they had been wings, which to sight made them appear taller and bigger men than they were; furthermore, they had good cuirasses on their backs, and carried great white targets before them; and for weapons offensive every man had two darts in his hand to bestow afar off; and when they came to hand strokes, they had great heavy swords, which they fought withal near hand.”

Another magnificent battle-piece, which, however, I cannot afford to quote even in part, is his account of the glorious victory which Timoleon won, on the banks of the Crimesus in Sicily, over the hosts of Carthage; the stars in their courses fighting for him, and, in fighting for Greek instead of Phoenician domination, fighting for all the best hopes of the world. And yet another is the winning by Marcellus, and, after the winning, the dedicating by him, of the spolia opima which he had won in single combat from the Gaulish king. But the same Life of Marcellus yields another passage, the description, namely, of the effect of the war-engines which Archimedes invented and employed for the defending of Syracuse against the Romans. Extraordinary as the account may seem, in all likelihood it is scarcely an exaggeration; being as Archimedes probably was the most inventive genius in his own line of things whom the world has ever seen. Hear it, at least in part:

“Now the Syracusans, seeing themselves assaulted by the Romans both by sea and by land, were marvellously perplexed, and could not tell what to say, they were so afraid; imagining it was impossible for them to withstand so great an army. But when Archimedes fell to handle his engines, and to set them at liberty, there flew in the air infinite kinds of shots, and marvellous great stones, with an incredible noise and force on the sudden, upon the footmen that came to assault the city by land, bearing down and tearing in pieces all those which came against them, or in what place soever they lighted, no earthly body being able to resist the violence of so heavy a weight —so that all these ranks were marvellously disordered. And as for the gallies that gave assault by sea, some were sunk with long pieces of timber like unto the yards of ships whereto they fasten their sails, which were suddenly blown over the walls with force of these engines into their gallies, and so sunk them by their over great weight. Other being hoised up by the prows with hands of iron, and hooks made like cranes’ bills, plunged their poops into the sea. Other being taken up with certain engines fastened within, one contrary to the other, made them turn in the air like a whirligig, and so cast them upon the rocks by the town walls, and splitted them all to fitters, to the great spoil and murder of the persons that were within them”

But neither is it always these scenes of suffering and agony and terror which he paints. Over against these, and as a relief to these, I might set before you scenes not a few of a rare idyllic beauty, as when he tells us of the peace which reigned all over Italy (this, of course, a fancy picture), in the reign of Numa; or describes the calm and honoured and beautiful old age of Timoleon, with the persistent gratitude, not always the portion of deliverers, shown to him by the Sicilians so long as his life lasted, and to his memory when he was dead. Or I might bring before you, though certainly not idyllic at all, the famous description of Cleopatra sailing up the Cydnus to meet Mark Antony, which Shakespeare has done little more than put into verse; but more than refer to these I cannot.

The book was fortunate in its first introduction to the knowledge of the English reader. It is true that Sir Thomas North, whose translation made its first appearance as early as the year 1579, did not draw from the original Greek, that his book is the translation of a translation, being derived, and announcing itself as derived, from Amyot’s French version; and as such reproducing Amyot’s blunders and mistakes, while it adds some more of its own. But for all this, as a document marking a particular stage of the English language, and some of the best aspects of the language at that time, I hold it to be of very high value, and give no heed to Dryden’s disparaging judgment about it. It may not have the same amount of interest for the student of English as Amyot’s translation has for the student of French, nor mark an epoch in our language as distinctly as that other does in the French. But for all this, the book contains treasures of idiomatic English, of word and phrase which have now escaped us, and whereof no small part might with signal advantage be recalled. We may trace, too, in this volume some of the processes by whose aid our vocabulary was at that day enriching itself from the classical tongues which were then being familiarly studied in England. The book contains a multitude of Greek and Latin words in course of naturalization, and only half naturalized as yet; transplanted into English, but in the classical terminations which they still retain bearing about them the tokens of their foreign origin, which only at a later date they should wholly lay aside: as, for example, these:— ‘Academia’ ‘aedilis’ ‘the Law Agraria’ ‘the Sea Atlanticum’ ‘aristocratia’ ‘the Sea Caspium’ ‘centauri’ ‘Creta’ ‘democratia’ ‘helleborum’ ‘hemistichion’ ‘the Sea Mediterraneum’ ‘obeliscus’ ‘ostracismos’ ‘parallelon’ ‘praedicatum’ ‘ the mountains Pyrenaei’ ‘ subjectum’ ‘ Troia’ and the like.

But the highest title to honour which this book possesses has not hitherto been mentioned, namely, the use which Shakespeare was content to make of it. Whatever Latin Shakespeare may have had, he certainly knew no Greek, and thus it was only through Sir Thomas North’s translation that the rich treasure­house of Plutarch’s Lives was accessible to him.

Nor do I think it too much to affirm that his three great Roman plays, reproducing the ancient Roman world as no other modem poetry has ever done—I refer to Coriolanus, Julius Casar, and Antony and Cleopatra—would never have existed, or, had Shakespeare lighted by chance on these arguments, would have existed in forms altogether different from those in which they now appear, if Plutarch had not written, and Sir Thomas North, or some other in his place, had not translated. We have in Plutarch not the framework or skeleton only of the story, no, nor yet merely the ligaments and sinews, but very much also of the flesh and blood wherewith these are covered and clothed.

How noticeable in this respect is the difference between Shakespeare’s treatment of Plutarch and his treatment of others, upon whose hints, more or less distinct, he elsewhere has spoken. How little is it in most cases which he condescends to use of the materials offered to his hand. Take, for instance, his employment of some novel, Bandello’s or Cinthio’s. He derives from it the barest outline—a suggestion perhaps is all, with a name or two here and there, but neither dialogue nor character. On the first occasion that offers he abandons his original altogether, that so he may expatiate freely in the higher and nobler world of his own thoughts and fancies. But his relations with Plutarch are different—different enough to justify, or almost to justify, the words of Jean Paul, when in his Titan he calls Plutarch der biographische Shakespeare der Weltgeschichte. What a testimony we have to the true artistic sense and skill, which with all his occa­sional childlike simplicity the old biographer possesses, in the fact that the mightiest and completest artist of all times should be content to resign himself in to. his hands, and simply to follow where the other leads.

His Julius Cossar will abundantly bear out what I have just affirmed—a play dramatically and poetically standing so high that it only just falls short of that supreme rank which Lear and Othello, Hamlet and Macbeth claim for themselves without rival or competitor even from among the creatures of the same poet’s brain. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the whole play—and the same stands good of Coriolanus no less—is to be found in Plutarch. Shakespeare indeed has thrown a rich mantle of poetry over all, which is often wholly his own; but of the incident there is almost nothing which he does not owe to Plutarch, even as continually he owes the very wording to Sir Thomas North.

It may be worth while a little more closely to follow this out. The play opens with the jealousy on the part of the tribunes at the marks of favour shown by the populace to Caesar: this down to the smallest details is from Plutarch, so too is that which follows: the repeated offering by Antony of a crown to Caesar at the Lupercalia, with his reluctant refusal of it; this  blended indeed into one with an earlier tendering to him of special honours on the part of the senate; Caesar’s early suspicions in regard of ‘ the lean and wrinkled Cassius,’ with his desire to have about him men fat and well-liking; the goading on of Brutus by Cassius, and the gradual drawing of him into the conspiracy, with the devices to this end; the deliberation whether Antony shall share in Caesar’s doom, and the fatal false estimate of him which Brutus makes; so too whether Cicero shall be admitted to the plot, with the reasons for excluding him; the remonstrance of Portia that she is shut out from her husband’s counsels, and the proof of courage which she gives; then, too, all the prodigies which precede the murder,—as the beast without a heart; fires in the element; men walking about clothed as in flame, and unscorched by it; the ill-omened birds sitting at noonday in the market-place; Calphurnia’s warning dream, and Caesar’s consequent resolution not to go to the senate-house; the talking of him over by Decius Brutus ; the vain attempt of Artemidorus to warn him of his danger; the ides of March; the apprehension at the last moment that all has been discovered, with the hasty purpose of Cassius, only hindered by Brutus, to kill himself thereupon; the luring away of Antony from the senate-house by Trebonius; the importunate pleading of Metellus Cimber for his brother, taken up by the other conspirators; the striking of the first blow from behind by Casca; Caesar’s ceasing to defend himself when he recognizes Brutus among his murderers; his falling down at the base of Pompey’s statue, which ran blood; the deceitful reconciliation of Antony with the conspirators; nothing of this is absent. All, too, which follows is from Plutarch: the funeral oration of Brutus over Caesar’s body, and then that which Antony has obtained leave to deliver; the displaying of the rent and bloody mantle; the reading of the will; the rousing of the fury of the populace ; the tearing in pieces of Cinna the poet, mistaken for the conspirator of the same name; the precipitate flight of the conspirators from the city; their reappearance in arms in the East; the meeting of Brutus and Cassius; their quarrel, and Lucius Pella the cause of it; the reconciliation; the division of opinion as to military operations; the giving way of Cassius, with his subsequent protest to Messala that he had only unwillingly done this; the apparition of Caesar’s ghost to Brutus, with the announcement that he should see him again at Philippi; the leave-taking of Brutus and Cassius, with the conversation on the Stoic doctrine of suicide between them; the double issue of the battle; the disastrous mistakes; the death of Cassius by the sword which had slain Caesar; the ineffectual appeal of Brutus to three of his followers to kill him, a fourth at length consenting: all this, with minor details innumerable, has been borrowed by Shakespeare from the Lives of Caesar, of Brutus, and of Mark Antony; which all have evidently been most carefully studied by him.

Yet for all this, Shakespeare does not abdicate his royal pre-eminence; but resumes it at any moment that he pleases. Thus Plutarch tells us of that funeral oration by Mark Antony, how, to conclude his oration he unfolded before the whole assembly the bloody garments of the dead, thrust through in many places with their swords, and called the malefactors cruel and cursed murderers.

It is well said — a graphic touch ; but mark how Shakespeare has taken possession of it:

             ‘You all do know this mantle; I remember

The first time ever Caesar put it on ;

’Twas on a summer’s evening, in his tent ;

The day he overcame the Nervii.

Look! in this place, ran Cassius’ dagger through :

See, what a rent the envious Casca made :

Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed;

And, as he plucked his cursed steel away,

Mark how the blood of Caesar followed it;

As rushing out of doors, to be resolved,

If Brutus so unkindly knocked, or no;

For Brutus, as you know, was Caesar’s angel.’

In Antony and Cleopatra, and in the adaptation of the story, as it lay before him in the pages of Plutarch, to the needs of his art, Shakespeare had a much harder problem to solve than any which Julius Casar offered; and his solution of this problem, when we realize what it was, may well fill us with unbounded admiration. The Brutus of Plutarch was a character ready made to his hands. Here and there a melancholy grace, a touch of gentleness and of beauty has been added by him, but hardly more than this ; while if in Cassius the lines are deepened and the character more sharply delineated, this is all that Shakespeare has done, even as it was all that was needed. But it was otherwise with Antony. The Antony of history, of Plutarch himself, would have been no subject for poetry. Splendidly endowed by nature as he was, it would yet have been impossible to claim or create a sympathy for one so cruel, dyed so deeply in the noblest blood of Rome, the wholesale plunderer of peaceful cities and provinces that he might squander their spoils on the vilest ministers of his pleasures; himself of orgies so shameless, sunken in such a mire of sin; in whom met the ugliest features, and what one would have counted beforehand as the irreconcilable contradictions, of an Oriental despot and a Roman gladiator. And yet, transformed, we may say transfigured by that marvellous touch, the Antony of Shakespeare, if not the veritable Antony of history, has not so broken with him as not to be recognizable still.

The play, starting from a late period of Antony’s career, enables Shakespeare to leave wholly out of sight, and this with no violation of historic truth, much in the life of the triumvir which was wickedest and worst. For the rest, what was coarse is refined, what would take no colour of goodness is ignored, what had any fair side on which it could be shown is shown on that side alone. He appears from the first as not himself, but as under the spells of that potent Eastern enchantress who had once held by these spells a Caesar himself. There are followers who cleave to him in his lowest estate, even as there are fitful gleams and glimpses of generosity about him which explain this fidelity of theirs, and when at the last we behold him standing amid the wreck of fortunes and the waste of gifts, all wrecked and wasted by himself, penetrated through and through with the infinite shame and sadness of such a close to such a life, the whole range of poetry offers no more tragical figure than he is, few that arouse a deeper pity ; while yet, ideal as this Antony of Shakespeare is, he is connected by innumerable subtle bands and finest touches with the real historical Antony, at once another and the same.

I showed, before leaving Julius Casar, how much Shakespeare could on occasion make of a comparatively little. It may be well, before parting from these plays, to bring before you one other passage, and this among the noblest which he has, where he counts any such effort superfluous, where he does no more than put into verse what he finds ready prepared to his hand; so recognizes the finished completeness of Plutarch’s narrative, that he makes no attempt to add anything to it, or to take anything from it All are familiar with the death of Cleopatra, the setting of that Eastern star,’ as Shakespeare calls her ; Augustus Caesar, whose suspicions of her intention to rob him of the chief trophy of his victory have been aroused too late, seeking in vain to baulk her of her purpose. These last things of her life are thus told by Plutarch:

Her death was very sudden, for those whom Caesar sent unto her ran hither in all haste possible, and found the soldiers standing at the gate, mistrusting nothing, nor understanding of her death. But when they had opened the doors, they found Cleopatra stark dead, laid upon a bed of gold, attired and arrayed in her royal robes, and one of her two women, which was called Iras, dead at her feet: and her other woman (called Charmion) half dead, and trembling, trimming the diadem which Cleopatra wore upon her head. One of the soldiers seeing her, angrily said unto her : I”s that well done, Charmion?” “Very well,” said she again, “and meet for a princess descended from the race of so many noble kings:” she said no more, but fell down dead hard by the bed.

It would not be easy to mend this, the details of which may very well have been derived from the Memoirs of Cleopatra’s physician, Olympus; of which Plutarch speaks, and which in all likelihood he used; and Shakespeare is too consummate an artist to attempt to mend it. He is satisfied with absorbing into his verse all the grandeur of this passage—not omitting the angry expostulation of the Roman soldier,

                  ‘Charmian, is this well done?’

and the high-hearted answer of the Egyptian lady in waiting, ‘noble Chairman’ her mistress had called her but a little while before, and she does not belie her name—

                  ‘It is well done, and fitting for a princess

                   Descended of so many royal kings

but he does not attempt to add anything of his own, as indeed there was no room for any such addition.

A word or two more before we leave this subject of Shakespeare’s obligations to Plutarch. Nowhere, as is abundantly clear, does our English poet make any pretence of concealing these; but adopts all, even to the very words of Sir Thomas North, with only such transposition and slight alteration as may be necessary to give to them a rhythmical cadence and flow. He is too rich, and too conscious that he is rich, to fear the charge of endeavouring to pass himself off for such by the laying of his hands upon the riches of others. And here indeed is what properly determines whether an author should be adjudged by us as a plagiarist or not. The question is not, what he appropriates, but what proportion these appropriations bear to that which he has of his own; whether, if these were withdrawn and resumed by their rightful owners, they would leave him poor. If such would be the result, then, however few and small these may have been, we can count him no better than a daw, passing himself off for a peacock by the aid of feathers stuck into his plumage, and not properly his own. If, on the other hand, all revindication 'by others of what is theirs would leave him essentially as rich as he was before, his position in the world of poetry is not affected by the bringing home to him of any number of these appropriations. We need not fear to allow Shakespeare to be tried by this rule; and we can only admire that noble confidence in his own resources which left him free without scruple to adopt and to turn to his own uses whatever he anywhere found which was likely to prove serviceable to the needs of his art

But if among all our poets he who in himself is the richest of all owes the largest debt to Plutarch, there are others who are indebted to him as well. Thus commentators on Paradise Lost are generally satisfied with referring to a passage in Thucydides as that which Milton must have had in his mind in that magnificent description of the army of fallen Spirits advancing to battle :

                                                      ‘Anon they move

In perfect phalanx, to the Dorian mood

Of flutes and soft recorders; such as raised

To highth of noblest temper heroes old,

Arming to battle, and instead of rage

Deliberate valour breathed, firm and unmoved

With dread of death to flight or foul retreat;

Nor wanting power to mitigate and swage

With solemn touches troubled thoughts, and chase

 Anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain

From mortal or immortal minds’

Any scholar, however, referring to the words of Thucydides, will perceive that merely the fact of the Spartans so marching to battle, and by aid of music keeping their ranks, is there stated, and nothing of the solemn influences, composing and elevating, which this music exercised on their minds; wherein the real grandeur of the passage consists. I cannot doubt that Milton had before him, not indeed North—for no word indicates this, and Milton was not likely to read a Greek author in other than the original—but Plutarch, who, in his Life of Lycurgus, writes thus of the Spartans :

“Afterwards when their army was set in battle array, even in the face of the enemies, the king did straight sacrifice a goat unto the gods, and forthwith commanded all his soldiers to put their garlands of flowers on their heads, and willed that the pipes should sound the song of Castor, at the noise and tune whereof he himself began first to march forward : so that it was a marvellous pleasure, and likewise a dreadful sight, to see the whole battle inarch together in order, at the sound of their pipes, and never to break their pace, nor confound their ranks, nor to be dismayed or amazed themselves, but to go on quietly and joyfully at the sound of their pipes, to hazard themselves even to death. For it is likely that such courages are not troubled with much fear, nor yet overcome with much fury: but rather they have an assured constancy and valiantness in good hope, as those which are backed with the assisting favour of the gods.”

But not in times past only,—to this day Plutarch yields hints on which poets speak. There are fountains of inspiration in him which age has done nothing to seal or to draw dry. Many of my hearers are familiar with Browning’s beautiful poem, whose name Balaustion, or Wild Pomegranate Flower, may also be beautiful in Greek, though it is certainly not beautiful in English; and these will no doubt remember the forty or fifty lines in which the modem poet sets forth to us the passionate love of the Sicilians for the poetry of Euripides, and the manifold ways in which such poor Athenian captives as had survived the great Syracusan catastrophe, if only they could repeat any portions of this poetry, obtained favour with their Sicilian masters, alleviations of their captivity at the least, and sometimes an entire release from it. These lines are drawn almost word for word from the last chapter but one of the Life of Nicias. You will recognize how closely Browning clings to his Greek original, how entirely he has borrowed the framework of his poem from it, though he has filled it in as only one who was himself a poet could do, when I quote the words in which Plutarch concludes this matter. Having spoken of all these favours which Euripides obtained for those who could repeat his poetry, he goes on:

“And this is not to be marvelled at, weighing the report made of a ship of the city of Caunus, that on a time being chased in thither [that is, into Syracuse] by pirates, thinking to save themselves within their ports, could not at the first be received, but had repulse. Howbeit, being demanded whether they could sing any of Euripides’ songs, and answering that they could, were straight suffered to enter and come in.”

It need hardly be observed that in the words of Milton’s sonnet,

                                ‘and the repeated air

Of sad Electra’s poet had the power

To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare,’

is an allusion to another event of somewhat similar character, recorded in Plutarch’s Life of Lysander.

Nor is Browning the only poet of our own age who has dug in this inexhausted and inexhaustible mine. Going back a little, we may, I think, with perfect confidence affirm that Wordsworth’s stately poem, Dion by name, would never have been written but for the life of this liberator of Sicily as by Plutarch recorded for us. The modem poem roots itself in the story as told by him, draws all its life-blood therefrom, gathers up into one brief consummate whole what the Greek biographer has more at large set forth. I move not the question here whether Plutarch may not have presented Dion to us in too favourable a light, as certainly he has presented Brutus, whom he pairs with him—Wordsworth, who is dependent on him, doing the same. The true and abiding interest of the poem remains unaffected by any conclusion on this point at which we may arrive; and the ‘ princely Dion ’ of our English poet will live as long as stateliest thoughts clothing themselves in stateliest words, and the solemn tragedy of a doom such as his—the doom, that is, of a good man who has made one great moral mistake—can awake any responsive echo in the hearts of men.

Wordsworth was not a great reader, but I track him again as a student of Plutarch, when in one of his ‘ Sonnets to Liberty’ he alludes to a Roman chief, who,

                                         ‘sick of strife

And bloodshed, longed in quiet to be laid

In some green island of the western main.’

The reference is here to Sertorius, one of the few loveable heroes of Rome, and one who, cherishing such a longing as this, cherished a longing which very few Roman hearts would have been capable even of conceiving. The passage is too long to quote, but is wonderfully illustrative of the tender character of the man. Entangled in those hideous confusions which marked the final break-up of the Republic, and struggling grandly, but hopelessly, in Spain, for what in his judgment might still be saved of law and order in the State, some sea-captains brought him tidings of certain fair islands only a few days’ sail from the coast of Spain, where (to use the words of Plutarch), “the air was never extreme, which for rain had a little silver dew, which of themselves, and without labour, bore all pleasant fruits to their happy dwellers, till it seemed to him that these could be no other than the Fortunate Islands, the very Elysian Fields” and we learn further how he, “having report of these islands, upon a certain desire now to live quietly out of tyranny and wars, had straight a marvellous longing to go dwell there so setting his heart upon this, and seeming so prepared to carry out his purpose, that many of his allies, men of blood, given altogether to war and rapine, forsook him”.

I have mainly dealt with the strong, but it would not be difficult to bring out the weak sides also of these biographies. Many have done this in times past; and there are some doing it still. Covering as they do immense spaces of time, and entering into a multitude of details, it would require but little labour to make a formidable list of the inaccuracies, the repetitions of the same story in different ways, the small contradictions between one cand another, the errors in dates, names, and places, the imperfect apprehension of Roman customs and institutions which they contain. Critical Plutarch was not in the sense in which Thucydides or Polybius was critical, much less according to the claims of modem historic science; but the freest admission of all this leaves his proper glory unimpaired and undiminished. Moreover, in this matter itself there has been no slight exaggeration. Heeren, after a careful examination of the sources from which Plutarch derived his information, and the use which he made of them, does not hesitate to affirm that the authorities which he used were generally the best to be had; that he used them intelligently and honestly ; that his standard of what an historian should be was high; and that for the most part he only fell short of this as every man in this world of imperfections must fall short of a high ideal which he sets before him.

Plutarch, as is well known, pairs his Lives, in each case a Greek with a Roman, and like with like, as seems best to him; though sometimes, it must be owned, the points of resemblance which explain the bringing of two lives together are of a very superficial kind, as for instance, when he matches Pelopidas and Marcellus, seemingly on little other ground save that both were slain, venturing into dangers which, as officers in chief command of armies, they had no business to affront; or Alcibiades and Coriolanus, as both having died violent deaths in exile. Others he pairs with more reason, orator with orator, Demosthenes with Cicero ; the greatest with the greatest, Alexander with Caesar; here and there too there is a fine insight into the innermost meaning and aim of certain lives, as when Agis and Cleomenes are set over against the two Gracchi; but these parallelisms, though they had their purpose for him, rarely add anything to the value of the Lives for us. Montaigne indeed speaks of them as the most admirable part of his work; but from this judgment I must altogether dissent; and this characteristic of the Lives, namely, that for the most part they go in pairs, I have only noticed for the purpose of making the following remarks. Some have charged the biographer that in his summings up he shows, whether consciously or unconsciously, undue favour to his own nation; having, moreover, made this the easier by a want of perfect fairness in the pairing of those whom he thus set over against one another. This charge, I am bold to say, is altogether without foundation. A meaner man might have been tempted to run into the opposite extreme, might have sought to curry favour with the dominant race by unduly exalting what was theirs, and depressing that which was his own. Doubtless there were Greek sycophants (in abundance quite ready to have done this; one of these inventing, about this time, the title for Rome of The Heaven-City, a title which leads strangely in the light which Juvenal and Tacitus cast on the things which were perpetrated there. But there is as little trace in Plutarch of the one unfairness as of the other. If he loved Greece and his Greek heroes the best, Rome and her institutions, and the virtues by which she had attained to her pre­eminence, and the men who had helped her to this, filled him with a continual marvel and admiration. He had ever an open eye for her points of superiority, and was very free in acknowledging these; as, for instance, the reverent accuracy of the great men of Rome, and of the Romans in general, in the performance of divine offices, as set over against the com­parative slovenliness and irreverence of his own countrymen,—the subject being one to which he recurs again and again. One who has excellent right to speak has borne witness to the moral dignity of the man, the just weights and balances which, in making these comparisons, he never fails to use.

Yet with all this, it is no cosmopolitan indifference which enables him to weigh Greek and Roman in such equal balances; for he is no citizen of the world in the sense of having ceased to regard one particular land with an affection and devotion greater than that which he feels for every other. Plutarch remains ever a Greek, a Theban still more than a Greek,—as such amusingly indignant with Herodotus, whose  ‘malignity’ he denounces at length for recording so plainly some ignoble passages in Theban history,—and a Chaeronean still more than a Theban.

Other accusations have been brought against him. He has been charged with painting too much en beau, with too large a toleration for the faults, and sometimes even for the crimes, of those the story of whose lives he is relating. The charge, so far as there is any truth in it, must be taken with important qualifications. Of the men who, as far as we can see, belong altogether to the kingdom of darkness, and of their evil moral conditions, he is not tolerant at all. He pourtrays them as they were, and in colours as dark as they deserve. But it is different with those who belong in part to the kingdom of darkness and in part to the kingdom of light; in whom good and evil, light and darkness, are struggling. He does, no doubt, make the most of what good he can find in them, and the least of the evil to which he cannot altogether close his eyes; and he thus defends the course which he has taken:

“Like as when we will have a passing fair face drawn and lively counterfeited, and that hath an excellent good grace withal, yet some manner of blemish or imperfection in it, we will not allow the painter to leave it out altogether, nor yet too curiously to shew it, because the one would deform the counterfeit, and the other make it very unlikely. Even so, because it is a hard thing (or to say better, peradventure impossible), to describe a man, whose life should altogether be innocent and perfect, we must first study to write his virtues at large, and thereby seek perfectly to represent the truth, even as the life itself. But where by chance we find certain faults and errors, proceeding either of passion of the mind, by necessity of the time, or state of the commonwealth, they are rather to be thought imperfections of virtue not altogether accomplished, than any purposed wickedness, proceeding of vice, or certain malice. Which we shall not need too curiously to express in our history, but rather to pass them lightly over, of reverent shame to the mere frailty of man’s nature, which cannot bring forth a man of such virtue and perfection, but there is ever some imperfection in him.”

To my mind, the most serious defect in Plutarch’s Lives is his frequent failure rightly to apprehend, or at any rate to make his readers rightly to apprehend, a political situation, this fault naturally showing itself more strongly in his Roman Lives than in his Greek. One who already understands the times of Marius and Sulla will get vast instruction from his several Lives of these, will clothe with flesh and blood what would else, in some parts, have been the mere skeleton of a story; but I am bold to say no one would understand those times from him. The suppression of the Catilinarian conspiracy was the most notable event in the life of Cicero; but one rises from Plutarch’s Life with only the faintest impression of what that conspiracy meant. Or take his Lives of the Gracchi. Admirable as in many respects these are, much as we are debtors to him here for important facts, whereof otherwise we should have been totally ignorant, few, I think, would affirm that he at all plants them in a position for understanding that great revolution which is connected with their names.

This lack of insight into the true significance of political events which he is relating, is sometimes astounding. How otherwise can we qualify the rapture with which he records the well-known proclamation of the ‘liberty’ of Greece at the Isthmian games by the Philhellene Roman commander, Titus Flamininus; this liberty delighting him the more from the fact that it had been won, as he states, though I know not how he can reconcile this statement with the facts, without the expense of a single drop of Grecian blood? He at least should have known that a liberty which was thus given was no true possession, would be withdrawn again whenever this suited the con­venience, or fell in with the caprice, of the donor. Wordsworth in his noble sonnet—

                        ‘A Roman master stands on Grecian ground,’

suggested by the same fact, has more rightly judged the worth, or rather the worthlessness of a gift such as this—

                 ‘ A gift of that which is not to be given

                 By all the blended powers of earth and heaven.’

Yet, after all, what is this fault which we thus find with Plutarch but a saying in other words what all who have any insight into the matter have ever freely admitted, namely, that the political is the weak aspect of these Lives, and the ethical the strong ? .

 

PLUTARCH’S MORALS.

 

The singular merit of the Parallel Lives, and their immense popularity, has thrown somewhat into the background the other writings of Plutarch; and doubtless it is his Lives by which he mainly lives, and on which he must rest his chief claim to deserve to live. And yet, whatever prominence and precedence we may accord to them, they never can be thoroughly understood, what they aimed at and what they accomplished, justified in what they are and in what they are not, until we know something more than those Lives themselves tell us of the spirit which animated the writer, of the points of view, moral and religious, from which he contemplated, not this man’s life or the other’s, but the whole life of man. Nor is it too much to affirm that of the two halves of Plutarch’s writings, each constitutes a complement of the other; the one half setting forth to us, and, so far as this was possible, from ideal points of view, what the ancient world had accomplished in the world of action, and the other what, in like manner, it had accomplished in the world of thought.

The works of his to which I must now turn, which thus complete his Lives, and often supply a key to these, would abundantly reward a far closer study than they have commonly obtained. In Gibbon’s great preliminary sketch of the Caesarian world, references to them, as has been already noted, are few or none; while, so far as I can judge, they have not been very largely used by later English historians of the epoch to which they more immediately belong. And yet a distinguished Dutch scholar, Daniel Wyttenbach, no dull plodder, but a man of various accomplishments, gave four-and-twenty years of his life to the editing of these; at the same time laying out his work on so grand a scheme, and with so large a critical apparatus, that he left the book incomplete at his death.

The circle of Plutarch’s writings which go by the common name of Moralia is immense; though few of them are long, and many of them very brief. They are miscellaneous in their character; while being some antiquarian, some physical, but in the main ethical, they correspond sufficiently well with the name which they bear. You will better understand the region in which they move when I have named the titles which some of them bear; as for example:—On the Profit which a man may derive from his Enemies;—How to discern between a Flatterer and a Friend;—On praising one’s-self;—How a man may know whether he is advancing in Virtue;—On the Delays in the Divine Justice;—On Oracles which have ceased to give replies;—On Chattering, or On Intemperate Speech, as Holland renders it;—On Curiosity;—On Superstition;—On Unseemly and Naughty Bashfulness;—On the Familiar Spirit of Socrates;—On Isis and Osiris;—Precepts of Wedlock. Of the treatises which I have named, some, as you will gather from their titles, are purely ethical; while in others the theological interest largely mingles with the ethical, or altogether prevails over it

Of these Moralia we possess an early translation; this too, like Sir Thomas North’s translation of the Lives, a most important monument of our early English, but of this some quarter of a century later— having been published in 1603; though, unlike the lives, it has never since been reprinted. It is wanting, too, in that interest which the other derives from having served as the channel of communication between the minds of Plutarch and Shakespeare. This version is the work of Philemon Holland, a physician of Coventry, who occupied himself much with the rendering of various Greek and Latin authors into English. To him we owe a translation of Pliny’s Natural History, of Livy, of Xenophon’s Cyropadia, of Suetonius, of Ammianus Marcellinus, and of Camden’s Britannia. His translations constitute a part of “the library of Dulness” in the Dunciad: I am unable to see with what justice, since none of the books on which he has expended his pains are themselves dull, and certainly he has not infused into them a dulness not their own. Southey, then, in my judgment shows a much truer appreciation of them than Pope had done, when in The Doctor makes two of these books, the Moralia, being one of them, to find place among the select few which Daniel Dove cared to find room for on his shelves. These volumes have already yielded something, but are capable of yielding much more, in the way of English words and idioms, unregistered hitherto, to the compilers of a Dictionary which should be indeed a Thesaurus totius Anglicitatis.

We may note, in the first instance, as used by him and forming part of his vocabulary, an immense number of French words, which, having offered themselves as candidates for admission into the English language, have been obliged in the end to withdraw their claims—words, therefore, which for us now are French, and French only. I quote a few: ‘baine,’ ‘baton,’ ‘to cass, ‘ecurie,’ ‘livraison,’ ‘mot,’ ‘mur,’ ‘ouvert,’ ‘pantofle,’ ‘pourprises,’ ‘propice,’ ‘primices,’ ‘scantillon,’ ‘sacre,’ ‘’volant.’ He has himself offered as candidates for admission some Greek words; as for instance ‘acroames,’ ‘kumbix’, ‘polypragmon,’ which the language has in like manner declined to make its own.

We note in him further, as in Sir Thomas North, many words still only imperfectly naturalized; such as, though adopted into the language, have not yet renounced their Greek or Latin terminations: thus ‘heliotropium,’ ‘hypotenusa,’ ‘praedicatum,’ ‘psaltenon,’ ‘rhythmus’ ‘spondaeus’ ‘trochaeus;’ the plural sometimes betraying the incomplete character of this adoption, where the singular would have failed to do so; as when he writes ‘musaea’ and not ‘musaeums,’ ‘sphinges,’ and not ‘sphinxes’ ‘ideas ’ and not ‘ideas’ ‘chori’ and not ‘choruses’ with other similar forms.

Many words now obsolete we meet in this volume as still in familiar use ; for there is nothing in the book to make us suspect that Holland wilfully affected the archaic; as ‘to baddie’ ‘to dad’ to ‘frapple’ ‘to maffle’ ‘maffler’ ‘pregnable’ only surviving in ‘impregnable’ to thrumble.’ It is curious, too, to find in him some compound epithets which we generally ascribe to quite a later period of the language, as ‘foulmouthed’ ‘lightfingered’ ‘strait­laced’ ‘closefisted’ and the like. It is from this translation that any quotations which I may think desirable to make will be drawn.

It has been observed already that the age in which Plutarch lived was in some sort an age of moral reaction, one in which vigorous attempts were made, and from various quarters—these too not wholly ineffectual—to arrest the advances of a corruption that threatened to sweep away all the barriers which hitherto had kept it within bounds. We know that these attempts did only very partially succeed; we can understand how in the nature and necessity of things their ultimate failure was inevitable. The moral bankruptcy of the heathen world may have been by them deferred, but it was not averted. Not philosophy, not a resuscitation of faith in the gods of Hellas, not the bringing in and combining with this the Oriental worships and wisdom, not the reviving and quickening of anything good which the old world possessed already, nor yet all of these together, but Christianity, newly born from above, was to regenerate and save society. Yet for all this, it would be a serious mis­take to underrate and to despise these well-meant efforts, though a fault less serious, it may be, than to exalt them overmuch, or to count that they rendered, or could have rendered, superfluous the bringing in of a purer hope and a better faith.

With all its weaknesses and shortcomings, the school or lecture-room was the best and highest which, as a moral teaching power, the heathen world at this time could boast—the nearest approach to the Christian pulpit which it owned. It is impossible to resist the conclusion that a very large amount of genuine and healthy work was wrought by those who laid themselves out, by the use of such helps as the best wisdom of the world at their command afforded, to serve their generation; that many were by them enabled to live their lives after a far higher and nobler fashion than else they would have attained. Saying this, I do not shut my eyes to all which was wanting here ; as, on the part of those who spoke, the ‘ mouth and wisdom’ directly given from above; with a deficiency too exactly corresponding to this on their part who heard; while even at the very best the teacher addressed, and could hope to influence, only a select and cultured minority, endowed with leisure, and not without some tincture of learning. There was indeed an attempt at a more popular propaganda on the part of some among the later Cynics, who in their good and in their evil remind us so continually of the Mendicant Orders of the Middle Ages; but these efforts of theirs were too few and isolated to count for much.

Freely admitting, then, that the sphere of these activities was comparatively a narrow one, yet within this there were many willing to guide and to teach, and more desirous to be guided and taught. I am persuaded that we very inadequately realize to ourselves the craving for what one might venture to call ‘spiritual direction,’ borrowing this term from the later language of the Christian Church, which was felt at the time by very many, the eagerness with which the spiritual director was sought out, and the absolute obedience to his injunctions which he found. Young men, desirous to order their lives according to some higher scheme, others, too, of maturerage, who had the same aspiration, but who, from one cause or another, were unable to think out for themselves a satisfying rule of life, placed themselves in a relation of learners and pupils to some distinguished philosopher, attended his lectures, sought more special help and guidance from him in private and familiar intercourse. It would be difficult to find a more tender and attractive picture of the relation in which such learner and teacher might stand to one another than that which Persius gives of his relations to Cornutus. Instructive too, as showing the extraordinary development which this spiritual direction, according to the lights which men possessed, had assumed, are the Letters of Seneca in reply to those of his youthful friend Lucilius. It is plain, from more than one of these, that the spiritual director was more embarrassed than delighted by the continual reference which was made to him for guidance in each single detail of life, and would fain have seen some greater self-reliance on the part of his pupil; just as Plutarch warns young men that in the end they must grow out of their own root, and not out of that of any other; that it must not fare with them as with those who, going to kindle a light at another man’s fire, are so well pleased with the warmth and blaze, that they sit down and tarry by it, quite forgetting that it was not for this, but to kindle their own torch, that they came thither.

There were other ways too, in which men sought to satisfy this same longing after some sort of wiser guidance than their own. Many a Roman noble entertained in his house a philosopher of his own, who would probably be at once the instructor of his children, and his own and his family’s moral director and adviser. We have, frequent references or allusions to these, ‘the domestic chaplains of heathendom,’ as Professor Lightfoot has happily called them, in the writings of the time. Thus Plutarch relates as the most natural thing in the world, that Cato, retiring into the country for a little repose, should take with him books and philosophers. Nor were these last merely fair-weather companions. It is everywhere assumed as a matter of course that where there is sorrow or trial to be borne by one with whom the philosopher stands in any relation, there he will be with admonition and comfort—with his commonplaces on life and death, which, if always old, are yet also always new. Thus Plutarch writing to Apollonius, who has lately lost a son, takes for granted that he will long since have expected to hear from him or to see him ; and proceeds to account for the delay.

We must not confound with these philosophers the sophists; this old name coming once more into use and into some sort of honour; even as those who bore this name now multiplied greatly through the whole Greek and Roman world. It is true that these sophists, or rhetoricians, and the philosophers had much externally in common. They alike used, with very rare exceptions, the Greek language, the lecture-room, and the lecture. They were thus exposed to many of the same temptations, above all, to vanity and to the seeking to make a show of themselves. But the sophist proper of this time—for I do not want to open the question of what the earlier were—was a mere dealer in words, most often a seller of them; did not profess to be anything higher; made no pretence of undertaking to improve men, but only to please, and if possible to astonish them, with the feats as of an intellectual acrobat. In a letter of the younger Pliny, we have a very curious account of the performances of one of these who had just come to Rome, of the enthusiasm and astonishment which his performances excited. It may easily be supposed that men who made this unworthy traffic with the sacred gift of speech did not escape the moral penalties which are sure to avenge such abuse. Their vanity was portentous. They got themselves up for the lecture as for a show; ‘peacocks,’ Dio Chrysostom calls them, for their ostentation and their pride. Then too, falling in as they did with the inclinations of so many, who were eager to be amused, but did not care to be improved, they were everywhere welcomed with boundless applause, of which yet it seemed impossible to them that they could ever receive enough; and we have lively descriptions of the lecturer—how, unsatisfied with all which he had obtained, and as one still greedy for more, he made, when his discourse was concluded, the circuit of his hearers, to extort from them some further tributes of admiration. ‘How’ he would demand, ‘did you find me today?’ ‘Never so well.’ ‘And that description of Pan and the Nymphs?’ ‘Incomparable! And then we are told how he expected—and often not in vain—that a crowd of his hearers, including, if possible, the principal persons in the city, should escort him through the streets to his lodging, proclaiming his merits, and kissing the hem of his garment as they went

It would be only fair to these spoilt children of their age to say that there was no affectation on their parts of despising money, or of living lives a whit stricter or purer than those of the rest of the world. With the philosophers it was otherwise. They both taught a higher rule of life, and professed to fashion their own lives thereby. As may be supposed, they became thus the mark of abundant abuse, deserved and undeserved. Besides those charges of vanity and display, to which in common with the sophists they were obvious, there were graver, and, so far as they were true, far more damaging accusations which they did not escape; as that their lives and their teaching were often at very ill accord with one another; that, denouncing the love of riches, they haunted rich men’s palaces, and showed themselves ignobly eager for gifts, were content, like the ‘tame Levite’ of more modern times, to endure any indignities, if only they could secure a place in some wealthy establishment Lucian is never weary of holding them up on charges such as these to ridicule and contempt, and Juvenal, who makes still darker accusations against them, to hatred. Let it be freely granted that these charges were not always without truth. Many, no doubt, wore the philosopher’s mantle and the philosopher’s beard, but only as the false prophets the rough garment, to deceive; some may have made shameful abuse of the opportunities which their position and the confidence with which they were treated afforded. But granting all this, we may be bold to. say that neither all nor nearly all in these accusations was true, the world at that day, as at this, having an unlimited supply of calumny at command for ‘ideologues,’ for all who have the impertinence to set up a loftier standard than its own, who profess to frame their own lives, or who seek to frame the lives of others according to a higher law.

But letting these graver imputations rest, it is impossible to read Plutarch’s admirable essay On the right Manner of Hearings without acknowledging that some of the mischiefs, which could not have failed to be at work where a sophist was displaying himself, had contrived not seldom to insinuate themselves where a philosopher was teaching; that here, too, were faults and foibles on the side of the speaker, while often­times the hearers were only too ready to play into, and by their manner of hearing to give a larger development to these. At the same time it will be only fair to remember that something not altogether unlike this is not wholly unknown in auguster places than the lecture-room of the heathen philosopher, and on the part of some who have a more solemn message than ever he had to deliver; while yet, even while we are fully aware of all this, we do not therefore conclude that the Christian pulpit is an imposture, and those who fill it mountebanks and cheats. We may fairly show, in judging of others, the same equity of forbearance which we claim for ourselves.

Certainly some of the demonstrations of admiration which were expected on one side, and granted on the other, were curious; as when Plutarch describes, after some bravura passage, the whole audience rising from their seats, waving their garments in the air, and swearing by all the gods, and as men swear in a court of justice, that they had never heard anything to equal it; how, dismissing as tame and used up, the old manifestations of approval, such as had greeted a Socrates and a Plato—‘Good’ ‘True’. Well said—they had substituted new ones for these : ‘Divine’, ‘Unapproachable’, ‘Inspired’, with much more of the like kind. That he set himself against all such clamorous and indecent outbreaks of applause, it is needless to mention. ‘You may be sure’ he says, ‘where such find place, that the speaker is nought, and the hearers are nought; that it is not so much a sage who discourses as a player who performs. The true philosopher addresses himself to the conscience, and where the conscience is reached, there is no room nor inclination for explosions of admiration such as these.’ His own lectures, judging of them by the treatises, which, no doubt, must very nearly represent them, were no showy declamations, no fightings in the air against imaginary foes, but earnest efforts, as of a spiritual physician, to heal the hurts of men’s souls. Beginning for the most part with a subtle diagnosis of the diseased moral condition against which he made war, they rarely concluded without some suggestions, testifying often a profound knowledge of the human heart, as to the best means whereby a virtuous habit might be implanted, or a vicious one might be weakened, and gradually, if not all at once, overcome.

There was much in him which evidently fitted him for the office of such a spiritual adviser as we have just described. Thus there breathes through all his writings a profound sympathy with the young, exposed, as he saw them, to all and more than all the temptations which at this day beset their paths, and with helps so far fewer than are now at command for the resisting of these. He ever lays himself out for them, if so be that the voice of a divine philosophy might deaden and drown, in their hearts those songs of the Sirens, so sweet and yet so deadly, which were ever seeking to lure them to their ruin. Thus listen to his words addressed to a young man just passing from boyhood into early manhood. Nobler have seldom been uttered concerning that obedience to the truth, in which, and in which alone, true freedom resides :

“The wiser sort, and such as have wit indeed, repute not the passage and change from childhood to man’s estate an absolute deliverance and freedom from commandment and subjection, but an exchange only of the commander; for that their life, instead either of a mercenary hireling or some master bought with a piece of money, who was wont to govern it in their nonage and minority, taketh then a divine and heavenly guide to conduct it, unto which they that yield themselves obedient are alone to be reputed free and at liberty. For they alone live as they would who have learned to will that which they should : whereas, if our actions and affections both be disordinate and not ruled by reason, the liberty of our free will is small, slender, and feeble, yea, and intermingled for the most part with much repentance and remorse.”

Surely what is here uttered is capable of being translated into a higher language, of being set to a higher key; has actually been so translated and set by St Paul at the beginning of the fourth chapter of his Epistle to the Galatians; and may be so translated by all who read heathen authors, not to glory over them and to despise them on account of the truth which they had not, but to thank God and to honour them for the truth which they had.

At the same time, his was not a starched primness, which could make no allowances, which could hope for nothing good if there was the presence of any evil. The soil which bears no crop at all, either good or bad, we may fitly despair of it; but the soil which brings forth a rich luxuriance of weeds—for this we may well hope that, duly tended and dressed, it will justify the patience of those who have waited for the precious fruit which it should one day bear. On this matter, and above all on the long-suffering of God in thus biding men’s time, he has an eloquent passage, one of many on the same theme:

“Great natures and high minds can bring forth no mean matters. Like as therefore he who altogether unskilful of husbandry maketh no reckoning at all of ground which he seeth full of rough bushes and thickets, beset with savage trees, wherein also there be many wild beasts; but, contrariwise, an expert husband, and one who hath good judgment, knoweth these and all such signs to betoken a fertile and plentiful soil: even so great wits and haughty spirits do produce and put forth at the first many strange, absurd, and lewd pranks ; which we, not able to endure, think that the roughness and offensive pricks thereof ought immediately to be cropped off and cut away; but he who can judge better, attendeth and expecteth with patience the age and season, against which time the strong nature in such is to bring forth and yield her proper and peculiar fruit.”

I shall attempt presently, by a few quotations from the moral treatises of Plutarch and a brief analysis of one or two, to put you in a right position for judging what in this line of things he accomplished; but, shut up though I am within narrow limits of time, I must preface this attempt with a few words on his philosophy—on his whole scheme, that is, of human life; its duties and obligations, its ends and aims; upon which, after all, his treatment of ethical subjects must mainly depend. I have mentioned already that, apparently by no fault of his own, he stood removed from all the immediate influences of the Christian Church. This being so, it becomes the more important to inquire to which of the Schools, that in his day disputed the allegiance of the more thoughtful heathen, he addicted himself; by what master he swore; or, declining to yield himself absolutely to any one, which were those whom he recognized as in possession of the largest fragments of the truth.

At the same time I shall offer a very brief answer to these inquiries. Plutarch was a Platonist with an Oriental tinge, and thus a forerunner of the New Platonists, who ever regarded him with the highest honour. Their proper founder indeed he more than any other deserves to be called, though clear of many of the unhealthy excesses into which, at a later date, many of them ran. But this said, I shall make no attempt to set forth to you at large his philosophy with its relations to that which preceded and that which followed it. This, which has often been done, and well done, would ill suit with the popular character of these lectures; nor, to say the truth, would the task be an easy one. As a thinker, there was not anything properly creative about him; indeed, not much constructive. ‘His teaching had for the most part a direct moral object, with little tendency to speculative refinements. He cared not for the name of any sect or leader, but pleaded the cause of moral beauty in the interests of truth only’

It was the easier to hold such an independent position as this, from the fact that the rigid lines of demarcation which had once separated the different, systems were at the time when he wrote in great measure effaced; or, where not effaced, their frontier lines were no longer guarded with the same jealous care as of old. The Schools had borrowed so much from one another, had made so many reciprocal concessions, the later teachers had severally explained away so much which was most startling, but which also was most characteristic, in the teaching of the first founders, that it seemed idle to stand absolutely aloof on the score of what still remained. There were still, it is true, Schools militant of philosophy, but not militant as they once had been. When doctrines do not affirm themselves strongly, when they cease to be intolerant and exclusive, when they transact on important points with one another, they may disarm much opposition hereby; but none must be surprised to find that they have done this at a very serious cost It has not been all gain; the same concessions which presently after he gives him. which may have partially disarmed enemies have gone far to slacken the zeal of friends. Only that which has absolute faith in itself which dares to say, ‘I am, and there is none else beside me,’ can awaken the passion of an unquestioning devotion in others. No one of the rival Schools had any longer such a faith as this in its own teaching, felt itself to be so in possession of the whole body of the truth as would justify it in claiming men’s allegiance as exclusively due to it, or, if it had done this, was in any position to make this pretension good.

The exaggerations of the Stoics, the big statements of theirs which are no sooner closely handled than they shrink into a very small compass indeed, and can only be maintained at all by shifting words to quite other than their natural and ordinary meaning, are fair objects of ridicule; while other parts of their system, breathing as they do the spirit of intolerable pride, challenge a more earnest confutation. Yet, for all this, the Stoic Porch was, in some sort, the noblest School of philosophy in the ancient world, and had never shown itself so nobly as in those evil times which, when Plutarch wrote, were just overlived. It had then been seen what this philosophy—the only philosophy which Rome ever made truly her own—could arm men to do, and, still more, to suffer. When all was base and servile elsewhere, it was the last refuge and citadel of freedom; and being felt to be such, had not failed to earn the instinctive hatred of the tyrant and the slave. I confess, therefore, that I would willingly have seen in Plutarch some recognition of this its nobler aspect As it is, he has only an eye for its contradictions and absurdities, such as Horace had laughed at already: as when they taught that all sins were of an equal malignity ; that there were no such things as a progressive advance from vice to virtue; that to be shut up in the brazen bull of Perillus, and to be roasting there, would not affect the happiness of a true sage. In some respects, too, his polemics against these were a fighting against shadows. It is the early extravagances of Zeno and Chrysippus which he sets himself to refute, not the Stoicism of his own day, of Epictetus and Seneca; which last in so many points had reconciled itself with common sense, and withdrawn, in fact, if not always in word, though sometimes also in this, from various advanced positions which experience had shown to be untenable.

But with the Stoics, despite of all points of difference, Plutarch has very much in common, and this in matters of the highest concern. Not so, however, with the Epicureans. Between him and the haunters of the Garden there lay a chasm not to be bridged over; and we recognize in his whole controversy with these a vein of earnest indignation, as he contemplates the mean ignoble thing to which they would fain reduce the life of man, shutting it up within the brief limits of this mortal existence; emptying it of every loftier aim and hope, and presenting to it pleasure, or, more properly, escape from pain, as the object to the attainment of which all efforts should be directed. From that pessimism, which saw nothing higher for man than this, Plutarch was as far as possible removed. This world for him was something better than a casino with its poor and paltry delights. It was a house inhabited in common by gods and men, an august temple into which man was introduced at his birth, and in which he was initiated into mysteries of a high and solemn gladness. Gods, such as the Epicureans taught, dwelling apart, whom it was equally impossible to please or to provoke, who answered no prayer, who punished no sin, were no gods to him. He could look with nothing but disdain at the bribe with which the teachers of this School sought to bribe men into this practical atheism, promising them deliverance from those fears of the heavenly powers which had tormented them so long. As he often reminds his hearers, they could only be thus rid of their fears by at the same time renouncing their hopes; and the price was too high a one to pay.

Two or three citations will enable us to understand the tone of his controversy with them ; as this, on the universal sense and consent of mankind that there are powers above, ordering the destinies of men; even as these powers, and men’s faith in the existence of these powers, constitute the one band and bond which knits human societies together, these without such religion never having been, and not being so much as conceivable :

“If you travel through the world, well, you may find cities without walls, without literature, without kings, moneyless, and such as desire no coin; which know not what theatres or public halls of bodily exercise mean; but never was there, nor ever shall there be, any one city seen, without temple, church or chapel; without some god or other; which useth no prayers nor oaths, no prophecies and divinations, no sacrifices, either to obtain good blessings or to avert heavy curses and calamities. Nay, methinks, a man should sooner find a city built in the air, without any plot of ground whereon it is seated, than that any commonwealth altogether void of religion and the opinion of the gods should either be first established, or afterwards preserved and maintained in that estate. This is that containeth and holdeth together all human society; this is the foundation, prop, and stay of all”

Plutarch had no toleration for that cowardly creeping into corners, that ignoble withdrawal from all the tasks and duties of life which the followers of Epicurus vaunted as the highest wisdom of all. That ‘Live hidden’ of Epicurus, or of one of his scholars, moved his special indignation—so much so, that he has dedicated a short essay to the refutation of this characteristic maxim of theirs. For first, if the author of this maxim truly wanted to ‘live hidden’, why did he not hold his tongue, instead of putting forth to the world a saying which, by the contradiction it would on one side inevitably arouse, and the applause with which it would be hailed on another, was sure to draw the eyes of many to its author, and to prevent him from living his own life according to his own rule’. But the precept demanded and received from him a more serious refutation than this, directly opposed as it was to all his profoundest moral convictions. He can speak in language not very remote from that of St Paul, and under imagery which very closely borders on that of St. Paul, of life as a contest, of man as the champion or athlete who, having contended, shall receive according to his deserts; and when he styles those who have done well by the honourable title of bearers away of victory, we are further reminded of the  language of another Apostle, for whom the life of a Christian is an overcoming of the world, and he who remains faithful to the end a conqueror or overcomer. On the other hand the meanness of the life shut up in itself, his life who has wilfully cut himself off from all opportunities of serving his fellow-men, and not the meanness only, but the practical defeat and missing which it involves of that very pleasure for the sake of which it had been chosen, has impressed him profoundly, and he often seeks to impress the same upon others; as in these noble words:

Surely impossible it is that they should ever have their part in any great, royal, and magnificent joy, who have made choice of a close and private life within doors, never meddling with the public affairs of common weale, a life sequestered from all offices of humanity, far removed from any instinct of honour or desire to gratify others ; for the soul, I may tell you, is no base and small thing, extending her desires only to that which is good to be eaten, as do those cuttlefishes, which stretch their claws as far as to their meat, and no farther; for such appetites as these are most quickly cut off with satiety and filled in a moment; but when the virtues and desires of the mind tending to virtue and honesty, to honour also and con­tentment of conscience, are once grown to their vigour and perfection, they have not for their limit only the length and term of man’s life, but surely the desire of honour and the affection to profit the society of men, comprehending all eternity, striveth still to go forward to such actions and beneficial deeds as yield infinite pleasure that cannot be expressed.

Plutarch could the less endure this voluntary abdication on men’s part of all active share in the world’s business, from the strong conviction which he entertained—a conviction, indeed, which seemed inborn to every Greek—of the necessity of public life for the harmonious and full development of the whole circle of the mental and moral faculties; and thus, that whatever might be the education of the child, this exercise of public functions was the true education of the man. Out of a sense of this, as is sufficiently known, he who was not clothed, or never had been clothed, with a public office was an an ‘idiot;’ the word already in the Greek having obtained some little share of that unfavourable meaning which it has since and in other languages more fully made its own.

For all this, he could not shut his eyes to the fact that in the Caesarian world, as in his time it existed, there was no room for this public life, save in its humblest proportions; that a small municipal activity was all which was then possible. There is something sad, with a touch of the ridiculous, in the elaborate outline which, at the desire of a pupil inspired with an honourable ambition to serve his native city, he draws of what the aims and duties of a statesman should be, by what studies and discipline he should prepare himself for the high functions which he hopes to exercise one day. Not that with all this he really indulges in any illusions. He is too sensible to believe, or to endeavour to make others believe, that public life, in any such sense as Pericles or Demosthenes understood or practised it, was any longer possible. Thus he does not bring his advice to his young friend to a close without having warned him more than once of the very narrow limits within which, at the very best, his liberty of action will be restricted, the speedy and inevitable check, the defeat, in any case ridiculous, and not impossibly dangerous, which the attempt at a bolder initiative would involve. ‘ You will have,’ he says, “no wars to wage, no tyrants to put down, no alliances to conclude. The utmost which you can hope for is to suppress some petty abuse, to make war on some evil custom, to revive some charitable institution which has fallen into decay, to repair an aqueduct or rebuild a temple, to adjust some local tax, to preside at a sacrifice, or to remove a misunderstanding with some neighbouring city.” But these and such like duties, small as they were, he yet counselled Mnesimachus should be done by a good citizen with his might; and that local independence which still survived, small as it was, cherished and made much of, and not further diminished by any act of his. He is no friend to centralisation, as these words which follow abundantly bear witness:

“Moreover, a governor, in yielding his country unto the obedience of mighty sovereigns abroad, ought to take good heed that he bring it not into servile subjection; for some there be who, reporting all things both little and great to these potentates, deprive their country of all policy and form of government, making it so fearful, timorous, and fit for no authority or command at all; and like as they, who use themselves to live so physically that they can neither dine nor sup nor yet bathe without their phy­sician, have not so much benefit of health as nature itself doth afford them—even so those states and cities which, for all grace and favour, yea, and for the smallest administration of affairs, must needs adjoin the consent, judgment, and good-liking of those signiors of theirs, they even compel the said good lords to be more absolute over them than they would themselves.”

And he then traces this wilful renouncing of the petty fragments of self-government which remained to its true cause, namely, the unpatriotic conduct of citizens who, whenever worsted in any little dispute at home, appeal to the central authority; whereas the true patriot would choose rather for his own part to be vanquished and overthrown by fellow-citizens than to vanquish and win the victory by foreign power.’

But I have many things still to say—more than in this lecture could be included.

 

Continued

 

We have not yet undertaken the analysis of any one of Plutarch’s moral treatises, and I must despair of finding time for such an analysis as should be exhaustive even of the very briefest among these. It will, I believe, be a better economy of our time, if I pass under review a very few of the most noteworthy of these treatises, and briefly call your attention to some salient points which they offer. Let us then first deal with two which the moralist himself links closely together, on the ground that the faults which they severally note have intimate connection, though one which might be easily missed, with one another. The first of these, On Chattering, or On Intemperate Speech, may be regarded as a long, and yet not a very long, commentary on the words of the Psalmist, ‘ A man full of words shall not prosper on the earth.’ Very amusing is the indignation with which he denounces here the man who has not a door, and one which, when need is, he can keep shut, to his mouth,—a man as elsewhere he calls him. Some faults, he observes, are ridiculous, some odious, some dangerous; but this is all three in one: which then he proceeds by various examples—for such are never wanting to him—to prove. “We think ill of traitors, who for a great reward, or who, it may be, under strong torments, reveal secrets which have been confided to them; but this chatterer is one who reveals them under no temptation, no compulsion at all”. And then, urging how this is a vice which infects the whole fife of a man, he proceeds: “The drunkard babbles at his wine; but the prattler doth it always and in every place, in the market, in the theatre, walking, sitting, by day, by night. Does he wait on the sick? He is worse than the disease. Sailing with you, he is more unwelcome than the sea-sickness; praising you, he is more distasteful than another who should blame. And, worst of all, his malady is incurable, or well-nigh incurable. He might be healed by wholesome words, but all tongue, no ear as he is, he never listens; in his self-chosen deafness he hears nothing.”

With a true insight into the human heart Plutarch closely connects this fault with another. Curiosity Holland calls it—a better rendering perhaps of the original word than Meddlesomeness, which one might at first be tempted to prefer, seeing that in the later uses of the Greek word for which we are seeking an equivalent, the ‘ much-doing ’ has fallen into the back­ground, and the ‘ much-noting’ or ‘ spying’ has become the prominent notion of the word. The two, indeed, are linked closely together. He who would chatter much can only find the materials for his endless babble by much prying into the affairs of other people. How much of this, Plutarch exclaims, is there everywhere! Of how many things we are content to remain ignorant, taking no means to know them; meanwhile, we can tell of our neighbour’s grandfather that he was no better than a Syrian slave; of such a one that he owes three talents; that, moreover, the interest is far in arrear. And here he brings out with a very earnest emphasis indeed, making this the chief subject of the treatise, the evil root out of which this curiosity springs; the evil moral conditions to which it ministers; how this ‘polypragmon’—for Holland has attempted to naturalize the word—with all his eagerness to know, cares only to know things which lower the character, abate the felicity, or in some way tend to the depreciation and disparagement of others. Recount to him the prosperities of his fellow-men, report of fair and fortunate events, things comely and of good report, he can hardly find patience to hear you out; but tell of discord which has sprung up between brethren, of a wife that has proved unfaithful to her husband, of a maiden who has been found to be no maiden, he is all ear. Being thus minded, his haunt and home is naturally the city, and not the country, which ‘for the most part bringeth forth no great and tragical events.’ If for once or twice he has made an expedition there, and been absent for three or four hours, he is full of eagerness to know what has befallen in his absence, cross-examines the first acquaintance whom he meets on his return, can hardly be persuaded that there is nothing new, that in all this time no accident has happened, no scandal come to light.

As a physician of the soul—and it is his ambition to be nothing less than this—Plutarch does not conclude without some counsels as to the means by which this curiosity may be checked, and in the end overcome. And, first, let it never be forgotten how full of danger it is for those who give allowance to it He who has ferreted out the secrets of other men may be feared, but he will be also hated; and then he recounts the excellent story of Philippides the comic poet; of whom king Lysimachus, being in an effusive and generous mood, once demanded, ‘What of mine shall I impart to you?’ and to whom the wary poet made answer, ‘Anything, O king, but your secrets.’ But more than this, let this curiosity be seen for what it truly is; not a harmless weakness at the worst, but a disease of the mind, not clear from envy and maliciousness, a vice, seeing that it mainly occupies itself with the faults, imperfections, and infelicities of others.

If then you wish to overcome it, exercise yourself in all which is most opposite to it. Be willingly ignorant of things which in themselves it would be no harm to learn. You are passing through a street of tombs; be content to leave the epitaphs, and the remarks on these by previous passers-by, unread. There are evidently high words passing between two of your acquaintance in the market-place; resist the temp­tation to draw near in the hope of gathering what the quarrel is about. Make a covenant with your eyes and with your ears, against seeing or hearing vanity ; for, as he goes on to say, and a Christian moralist could not have said it better—

“in mine opinion it is not meet that our sense should gad and wander abroad like a wild and untaught girl; but when Reason hath sent it forth to some business, after it hath done the errand about which it was set, to return speedily again unto her mistress the soul, and make report how she hath sped and what she hath done; and then afterwards to stay at home discreetly, like a modest waiting-maiden, giving attendance upon Reason, and ready always at her command.”

If letters are brought you, be not as some, who run eagerly to meet the messenger, who, in their impatience, tear with their teeth the threads which tie them ; and then he concludes—

“I remember upon a time, when I declaimed at Rome, that orator Rusticus, whom afterwards Domitian put to death for envy that he bare to his glory, happened to be there to hear me. Now, in the midst of my lecture, there came a soldier with letters from the Emperor, which he delivered to Rusticus; whereupon there was great silence in the school, and I myself made some pause whilst he might read the letter; but he would not read it then, nor so much as break it open, before I had made an end of my discourse and dismissed the auditory; for which all the company there present highly praised and admired the gravity of the man”

It will be perceived from these specimens which I have adduced that his suggestions in the way of cure have the merit of being practical and practicable; and this merit, I may say, they always have. They are practical, for they bear directly on the matter in hand, and must have commended themselves to those to whom they were addressed, as well adapted to bring about the results which they desired. They are practicable, for it cannot be affirmed that they make too large demands, that they are not fairly within the reach of any who are seeking in earnest to shun the evil, or to make the good proposed their own.

Further too, it is indeed evident from admonishments such as these, that Plutarch ascribed much value to the exercising of ourselves in the resisting of small temptations, if we wish to prove able to stand when greater ones arrive; by slight self-denials voluntarily imposed, disciplining ourselves f or the same when they should be required of us on a larger scale. The same often reappears in other of his writings, as in his admirable little treatise Against Naughty Bashfulness (so Holland calls it) or False Shame—such he means as, for example, leads us to shrink from saying No, when truth and honour and religion demand this refusal from us. In this little essay he urges excellently well the importance of truthfulness in speech and act, in matters which make no difficult demand upon us, so to prepare and arm ourselves for harder exercises of the same:

“Say that, when you ate at a feast of your friends, the harper or minstrel do either play or sing out of tune, and yet, nevertheless, the vulgar sort do applaud, clap their hands, and highly commend him for his deed: in my advice, it would be no great pain or difficulty for thee to give him the hearing with patience and silence, without praising him after a servile and flattering manner. For if in such things as these you be not master of yourself, how will you be able to hold, when some dear friend of yours shall read unto you some foolish rhyme that himself have composed, if he shall show unto you some oration of his own foolish and ridiculous penning? You will fall a-praising of him, will you? you will keep a-clapping of your hands, with other flattering jacks? And if you do so, how can you reprove him when he shall commit some gross fault in greater matters? how shall you be able to admonish him, if he chance to forget himself in the administration of some magistracy, or in his carriage in wedlock, or in politic government.”

I am unwilling to interrupt my lecture by seeking to trace at any length the uses to which this and other ethical writings of Plutarch have been turned by those who have come after him. Only I will briefly observe that they have proved, as may easily be supposed, a rich store-house, from {which Christian writers in all ages have largely and freely drawn, not always remembering to acknowledge the source from which their wealth has been derived. Thus Basil the Great has a homily against those who borrow money at usurious interest, not needing it except for purposes of ostentation, luxury and excess. In this homily the eloquent Greek father treads closely on the foot­steps of our moralist, who has written an earnest little treatise on the same subject; though, indeed, he brings forward enough of his own, both in the matter and form of his discourse, to vindicate this from the charge of servile imitation, which has lately been brought against it? Another homily or treatise of the great Cappadocian bishop, addressed to young men, and having for its argument, the gain which may be gotten from the study of heathen authors, has derived many hints from a treatise of Plutarch which deals with a very similar subject, and has for its theme, how a young man may draw profit and not harm from the writings of the poets.1 And in all ages the moral writings of Plutarch have been i quarry in which moralists and divines have freely wrought; but one which, for all this, is far from wrought out “I can hardly,” writes Montaigne, “do without Plutarch; he is so universal and so full, that upon all occasions, and what extravagant subject soever you take in hand, he will still intrude himself into your business, and holds out to you a liberal and not to be exhausted hand of riches and embellishments.” The index to the works of Jeremy Taylor (Eden’s edition) gives no less than 256 allusions or direct references made by him to the writings of Plutarch, many others having no doubt escaped the notice of the editor; while in our own day the Bishop of Orleans, in his admirable Letters on the Education of Girls, has more than once respectfully referred to the writings of Plutarch as containing hints on this subject which are valuable for all times. But this of the uses to which Plutarch’s moral writings have been put, it would be impossible for me to follow further, and I must return.

His essay which has for its theme, How a Man may distinguish a Flatterer from a Friend, deals with a subject which was a very favourite one, which had almost grown into a commonplace, among the ethical writers of antiquity; for whom friendship was more, and love was less, than they severally are for us in the modern Christian world. This essay, one of the most elaborate and complete which Plutarch has bequeathed to us, affords very curious evidence of the high perfection which the art of flattery or assentation had at his time reached; the infinite variety of unlooked-for shapes which the flatterer, or spurious imitator of the friend, knew how to assume; the unexpected quarters from which to make his approaches, so as often to deceive those who counted themselves the most completely armed against him. It was an art in which, as Juvenal assures us, the Greek reigned supreme; his cleverness, his versatility, the total absence in too many cases of all self-respect, giving him advantages which made it hopeless for the duller Roman, who still retained some sparks of this, with any prospect of success to contend against him. Leaving this treatise, as I am compelled to do, almost untouched, I yet cannot leave it without citing the subtle observation with which, at its opening, he accounts for the success of the flatterer, and warns of the danger in which men lie of falling a prey to him; namely, that, blinded as they are as to their true character by self-love, every man is his own first and chiefest flatterer, prepared therefore to welcome the flatterer from the outside, who only comes confirming the verdict of the flatterer within. Again, he is wonderfully happy in laying bare the various arts and devices of the flatterer; as, for instance, how, knowing that freedom of speech is part of a true friendship, he does not shrink from something which affects to be this, and bears some external resemblance to this; though, indeed, it is only itself a subtler flattery all the while. But the whole essay is one of the finest and most complete which Plutarch has bequeathed us.

A lively French author, who has recently written a volume of some merit On the Morality of Plutarch, more than once implies that his ethical writings are mainly occupied in inculcating the minor morals and smaller virtues, while the vices which he denounces scarcely go beyond the foibles of the petite ville, such as he may have had before his own eyes in his own little Chaeronea. The charge is not a just one. It might perhaps have some show of justice in it, though, to my mind, not the reality, if these writings dealt only with such matters as we have just been treating. But they attempt, and often accomplish, much more than this. They may not offer always satisfactory solutions of the great problems of humanity; for, indeed, how should they, when revealed religion itself on so many of these bids us to wait and to be content with the assurance that we shall know hereafter? but he does not shrink from looking these problems in the face; and neither the heights which there is need to scale, nor the depths which must be fathomed, remain altogether unattempted by him.

His little treatise On Superstition, or The Wrong Fear of the Gods, is a favourite one with those who care about these writings of his at all; and justly: ‘liber vere Plutarcheus,’ as Wyttenbach calls it, though ending so abruptly as to leave upon one the impression that it is rather the fragment of a book than one complete. This ‘superstition’ he treats in the fashion of the Peripatetics, as one of two extremes, atheism being the other; men not seldom falling into the latter of these while they seek to flee from the former. Between these extremes as the golden mean, alike removed from both, piety or the right reverence of the gods resides.

It was a subject which called for very careful handling, lest in getting rid of what was harmful and mischievous, there might also be put away that which it would be a most serious calamity to lose. No man was more conscious of the need of caution here, of the danger which waited on any rude and rough dealing with faults which yet had something akin to that which was not faulty, but good and worthy to be retained. He more than once compares it to the de­molishing of houses which join on to temples—a process demanding the exercise of a most reverent heed, lest in removing what is man's, what is ruinous and ought to disappear, there be drawn after this, and into the same ruin, what is God’s, and ought to stand. Another image he has elsewhere on the same subject and to the same effect:

“The skilful husbandman, when he would rid the ground of some wild bushes, layeth at them mainly with his grubbing hook or mattock, until he have fetched them up by the root; but when he comes to prune or cut a vine, an apple-tree, or an olive, he carrieth his hand lightly, for fear of wounding any of the sound wood in fetching off the superfluous and rank branches, and so kill the heart thereof.”

Whether he escapes altogether the danger which he so clearly sees, will best be judged when we have made a little closer acquaintance with this most interesting essay, to which I return.

Of the two extremes, superstition and atheism, the former, as Plutarch argues, at least on this occasion—for elsewhere he has somewhat modified this statement—is the worst The atheist, indeed, does not believe that there are gods; while the superstitious is persuaded that there are such, but that they are capricious, cruel, and revengeful; which is a far worse affront. “I had much rather” he urges, that men should say, “There is no such man as Plutarch, than that they should say, Plutarch is a man inconstant, capricious, easily offended, seeking on the least and lightest provocation to do the utmost harm to those who have offended him.”

Many noble utterances this treatise contains on the duty of thinking right things of the heavenly powers, and things honourable to them, than which no service is more acceptable to them; and first and chiefly, that they are friends to men, saviours and not destroyed; whose nearness, therefore, brings with it not hurt and harm, but help and salvation. At the same time it is impossible to affirm that all the truth is with him, and that these poor superstitious, despite of all their exaggerations, were not witnessing, however blindly, for truths in their kind quite as important as those glorious ones which Plutarch was so strong to maintain. There was something also to be said for them. They, with their consciousness of disturbed relations between themselves and the Highest, and with their sense that there needed something to be done to restore these disturbed relations again—who, when a child was snatched away, or some other misfortune befell them, traced up this, not to chance, not to the blind walk of mortal accident, but went back upon their past lives, on all of duty which they had omitted, of sin which they had committed, who thereupon clothed themselves in sackcloth, wallowed in ashes, heard angry voices in the thunder, counted all nature to be armed for their hurt—were not so wholly astray as Plutarch believed them to be. There were obscurely working in their minds truths to which he failed to do justice. They may often have erred, condemning themselves for what were petty faults or no faults at all, while they passed by the more real and graver transgressions of their lives. When they devised devices of expiation for themselves, of these some may have been childish follies, some hideous mistakes. But there was a truth behind them all. To say to one thus refusing comfort, and exclaiming to those who would fain bring it, “Let me alone, wicked and profane creature that I am, accursed, hated of all the gods, demigods, and saints in heaven,”—to tell such a one that the heavenly powers are gentle, well-willers to man, saviours and not destroyers, this is well: but it is not the whole message which he needs. There is something which Plutarch could not tell him, and no fault therefore can be found with the omission upon his part; but yet which needs to be told; of One, that is, who already when Plutarch wrote, had bornme, and borne away, the sins of the world, although the tidings of this finished work had not reached his ears nor theirs for whom he wrote.

There is another treatise in a still higher strain, which I would willingly bring to your knowledge. In my last lecture I mentioned it under this title, On the Delays in the Divine Justice, The title by which in Latin it is known, De Sera Numinis Vindicta, perhaps better explains its character and intention. It may be regarded as Plutarch’s Theodicee, his answer to the question, ‘Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? Wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously?’ It is his ‘Fret not thyself because of the evil doers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity;’ his justification of the ways of God in a matter which has perplexed so many, in so many ages and in so many lands; which sorely perplexed Job, and for which the friends of Job could find only unsatisfying solutions, and such as the God of truth disallowed (Job 41, 8); which perplexed the Psalmist, so that he could find no answer at all, until he went into the sanctuary of God; which perplexed the heathen no less, all, that is, among them, to whom the righteousness of God was dear, all who yearned to believe that there was a righteous government of the world, and who yet found it hard to reconcile this faith with so much which they saw everywhere around them of the prosperity of the wicked and the suffering of the good. Plutarch perceived clearly that for a completely satisfying vindication of the divine righteousness, there needed to bring in another and a higher world, as the complement of this; which should redress all that had been left unredressed in this present; and the dialogue (for the discussion is thrown into this form), closes with a report of the account given by a revenant of all which he had seen in that world of retributions from which he had been permitted to return. This, of which the hint has been plainly taken from the vision of Er the Pamphylian in the Republic of Plato, is not altogether unworthy to stand beside it. At the same time Plutarch is careful not to throw the whole weight of the argument for this righteous government of the earth on a world out of human sight. Men might find it hard to believe in a God of judgment, if He did not, even here and now, give signs and tokens of his presence, repaying men and nations to their face, and extorting, in this present time, even from the most unwilling a confession, ‘Verily there is a God that judge the earth.’ And such signs and tokens there are; for if, in this present world, judgments seem to tarry, and in some sense do tarry long, yet in another sense they often do not tarry at all, the punishment being twin-born with the sin, both springing together from the same bitter root: for, as he nobly says, ‘wickedness frameth of herself the engines of her own torment, as being a wonderful artisan of a miserable life,’—all which he speaks on this matter running worthily parallel with what Juvenal has so nobly uttered upon the same theme.

And, moreover, this tarrying of theirs involves no chance of impunity. The fish which has swallowed the bait, and with the bait the hook, is already taken, though it be not yet drawn to land, nay, though it be still sporting in the waters, unconscious of its certain fate. God can afford to wait. A malefactor under sentence in his prison has not escaped his doom, the bitterness of death is not passed for him, because he may not be executed today or tomorrow. The world is such a prison-house for wicked men, and one out of which there is no chance of their escaping. ‘ Now if in the meanwhile,’ he goes on to say, they sit at feasts, send presents, wear crowns, disport themselves in divers manners, what is all this but as the games at dice, or other plays, with which condemned malefactors pass away the time, and amuse themselves, while as yet the death’s man is not actually at the door?’

Then, too, as he proceeds to urge, there are judgments which, lighting not on one generation, do yet light on a succeeding; for he is very profoundly impressed with the solidarity of families and of nations; and he thus justifies the dealing with them as with a moral unit, of which the component parts cannot isolate themselves, nor claim immunity from the common lot:

“There seemeth to be very apparent reason of justice that public vengeance from above should fall upon cities many a year after; for that a city is one entire thing, and a continued body as it were, like unto a living creature, which goeth not beside or out of itself for any mutations of ages, nor in tract and continuance of time changing first into one and then into another by succession; but is always uniform and like itself, receiving evermore and taking upon it all the thank for well-doing, or the blame for misdeeds, of whatsoever it doth or hath done in common, so long as the society that linketh and holdeth it together maintaineth her unity; for to make many, yea, and innumerable cities of one, by dividing it accord­ing to space of time, were as much as to go about to make of one man many, because he is now become old, who before was a youth, and in times past also a very stripling or springall”

And he proceeds further to justify this dealing of God with men in words which would have gone far to satisfy St Augustine, and to meet the demands of his theology; for indeed they need only to be pushed a little further, and they would declare the moral solidarity of the whole human race, and the deep ground of reality on which this reposes, so that it is possible for the head of a race to diffuse a taint through the whole of the race of which he is the source and spring:

“Now if it be that a city is an united and continued thing in itself, we are to think no less of a race and progeny, which dependeth upon one and the same stock, producing and bringing forth a certain power and communication of qualities; and the same doth reach and extend to all those who descend from it; neither is the thing engendered of the same nature that a piece of work is, wrought by art, which incontinently is separate from the workman, for that it is made by him, and not of him ; whereas contrariwise that which is naturally engendered is formed of the very substance of that which engendered it, in such sort that it doth carry about some part thereof, which by good right deserveth either to be punished or to be honoured even as in itself.”

This truth, let me note in passing, he contemplates here, not on its sadder side only, but in words which do not exclude its more blessed aspect as well. And this more blessed aspect it has; for if there be who, like the first Adam, diffuses death through the whole race and progeny which trace their origin to him, so also there may be another Head, who is the author, not of death, but of life to all.

Such are in the main Plutarch’s explanations of the awful silences of Heaven, the mysterious tarryings of the divine judgments, the manifold occasions on which they seem to miscarry altogether. No doubt they do linger, he does not deny it, but he counts that he has answer and explanation sufficient of these delays.

I may observe here, and as nearly connected with that which just has gone before, that there is no truth which has more deeply impressed itself on Plutarch’s mind, none to which he more often recurs than this, namely that the springs and fountains of all true satisfaction for the soul of man are from within; that this satisfaction is not to be found in our sur­roundings, however favourable these maybe; that it is we who must first impart to these things which surround us the grace and charm, which afterwards enables them to contribute to our happiness, just as, to use his own familiar and felicitous illustration, it is we who make our clothes warm, and not our clothes which make us warm.

And not less firm for him stands the counterpart of this, namely, that wickedness of itself suffices to make men miserable,—he has indeed a little essay bearing this very title,—that the true fountains of bitterness are those which men open in their own hearts, not those which they meet with on their outward path; that “while with virtue any sort of life is pleasant and void of sorrow, vice causeth those things which otherwise seemed great, honourable, and magnificent, to be odious, loathsome, and unwelcome to those that have them.” Let me quote his own words here :

“It seemeth, and commonly is thought, that they be the garments which do heat a man ; and yet of themselves they neither do heat nor bring any heat with them; for take any of them apart by itself, you shall find it cold. But the truth is this, look what heat a man doth yield I from himself, the clothes or garments which cover the body do keep in the same, and being thus included and held in, suffer it not to evaporate and vanish away. The same error in the state of life hath deceived many men, who imagine that if they may live in stately and gorgeous great houses, be attended upon with a number of servants, retain a sort of slaves, and can gather together huge sums of gold and silver, they shall live in joy and pleasure; whereas in very sooth the sweet and joyful life proceedeth not from anything without; but contrariwise, when a man hath those goodly things about him, it is himself that addeth a pleasure and grace unto them, even from his own nature and civil behaviour, composed by moral virtue within him, which is the very fountain and lively spring of all good contentment”

The oracles, as voices and utterances of a god directly speaking to man, interested Plutarch profoundly; and he often treats of the subject, and from I various points of view. It would be impossible for me to follow him here. Only I will observe that it is not a little curious to find the whole question of inspiration, of the human and divine elements which meet in this, of what are the several limits of each, and what the mutual action and reaction of each upon the  other, carefully discussed and defined on more than one occasion by him. It is not a little interesting to find the same difficulties urged, and the same solutions of these difficulties proposed, as those with which at this day we are familiar. Thus an Epicurean argues of the oracles of Delphi that they cannot be utterances of a god, on the ground of the faulty structure of many of the verses in which they are delivered, being such, he urges, as never could have proceeded from Apollo, the god of music and of song. To this Plutarch, or one who evidently expresses his sentiments, replies very much as at this day it is replied, that the enthusiasm, though most truly a divine afflatus and influence, yet has human souls for the sphere of its operation, and will necessarily take much of its outward form and fashion from these; that the agitation of the spirit is divine, but that much after this is human, and is the result of the varying conditions of different souls, or of the same at different times. Thus, on these lame Delphian verses he says:

“Howsoever these be worse than those of Homer, let us not think that it is Apollo who made them ; but when he hath given only the beginning of motion, then each prophetess is moved according as she is disposed to receive his inspiration. For surely that voice is not the god’s, nor the sound, nor the phrase, nor yet the metre and verse ; but a woman’s they be all. As for him, he representeth unto her fancies only and imaginations, kindling a light in the soul to declare things to come; and such an illumination as this is that which they call enthusiasmos.”

I have already brought before you passages not a few from the writings of Plutarch, in which the natural piety of the man finds utterance. Before we bring all to an end, I would fain adduce one or two more of the same character. Thus, on the duty of thank­fulness, and the multitude of reasons which we have for this, he has many excellent words—these, for instance, on those common everyday mercies of life, whose very commonness, which ought to enhance our gratitude, often causes that they draw forth from us no gratitude at all:

“And yet we must not forget nor omit those blessings and comforts of this life which we enjoy in common with many more, but to make some reckoning and account of them ; and namely, to joy in this, that we live, that we have our health, that we behold the light of the sun; that we have neither war abroad nor civil sedition at home; but that the land yieldeth itself to be tilled, and the sea navigable to every one that will, without fear of danger; that it is lawful for us to speak and keep silence at our pleasure; that we have liberty to negotiate and to deal in affairs, or to rest and be at repose. And verily the enjoying of these good things present will breed the greater contentment in our spirit, if we would but imagine within ourselves that they were absent; namely, by calling to mind what a miss and desire those persons have of health who be sick and diseased; how they wish for peace who are afflicted with wars... And surely a thing cannot be great and precious when we have lost it, and the same of no valour and account all the while we have and enjoy it.”

What I just now ventured to call the natural piety of Plutarch’s mind utters itself still more distinctly in. the words which follow. There were some to whom the service of the heavenly powers might present itself as a joyless task, a heavy bondage; not such was his experience of it:

“For surely no exercises recreate us more than those of religion and devotion in the temples of the gods; no times and seasons are more joyous than solemn feasts in their honour ; for at such times our soul is nothing sad, cast down or melancholic, as if she had to deal with some terrible tyrants or bloody butchers, where good reason were that she should be heavy and dejected. But look where she thinketh and is persuaded most that God is present, in that place especially she casteth behind her all anguishes, agonies, sorrows, fears and anxieties: there, I say, she giveth herself to all manner of joy, whereof he hath no part at all who denieth the providence of God; for it is not the abundance of wine there drunk, nor the store of roast and sodden meat there eaten, which yieldeth joy and contentment, but the assured hope and full persuasion that God is there present, propitious, favourable and gracious, and that He accepteth in good part the honour and service done unto Him.”

I shall bring my pleasant task to a close, with a very few remarks which have often suggested themselves to me as I have occupied myself with the ethical writings of Plutarch. It may, I think, very fairly be a question whether we do not exaggerate the moral corruption of the age to which he belongs, as compared with that of other ages in the world’s history. Doubtless there was then, as there is always, a world lying in the Wicked One, monstrous outbreaks of evil; but it may very well have been that these only seemed, and now seem to us, more monstrous than any similar outbreaks which had gone before, because acted on a wider and more conspicuous stage; because Rome, gathering to herself the riches and resources of the whole civilized world, enabled those who wielded those resources to indulge in more frantic excesses of luxury, to sin upon a more Titanic scale than had been within the power of any that went before. It may very fairly be a question whether we do not sometimes accept as the rule, deeds and practices which were only the exceptions, and which, indeed, attest themselves as such by the indignation which, in their own day, they aroused, by the vehemence with which they were denounced.

All acknowledge that the age was one in which there were at least some efforts made, and those not wholly ineffectual, to arrest the progress of the world’s corruption, the terrible swiftness with which it had been travelling to its doom. Certainly the sum-total impression which Plutarch’s own moral writings leave upon the mind is not that of a society so poisoned and infected through and through with an evil leaven, that there was no hope of mingling a nobler leaven in the lump. He does not speak as one crying in the wilderness, but as confident that he will find many hearts, a circle of sympathetic hearers, to answer to his appeals.

It may be urged, indeed, that his native kindliness, that benignant interpretation of things which I have already noticed as objected to him, his readiness to believe the best of every man, reaching, as he himself admits, to a credulity on his part,1 hindered him from taking the full measure of the sin round him and about him; and no doubt it is true that the fierce indignation which consumed the heart of Tacitus, which put a lash into the hands of Juvenal, was deficient in him. Yet surely his was no rose-coloured view of life, who could speak of the course and fashion of the world in language like the following :

“All human affairs are full throughout of vice; and man’s life, even from the very first beginning and entry as it were of the prologue, and unto the final conclusion of all and epilogue, yea and to the very plaudite, being disordinate, degenerate, full of perturbation and confusion, and having no one part thereof pure and unblameable, is the most unpleasant and odious interlude of all others that can be exhibited.”

Or hear him once more. There are moralists who can denounce sin, but have no eye for sin. That he had an eye for both, and saw the important distinction between them, is sufficiently evident from such an utterance as the following:

“And to say truth, herein are we mightily deceived, that we think men are become unjust then only, and not before, when they do injury; or dissolute, when they play some insolent and loose part; cowardly-minded, when they run out of the field; as if a man should have the conceit, that the sting in a serpent was then bred, and not before, when he gave the first prick; or the poison in vipers was engendered then only, when they bit or stung; "which surely were great simplicity and mere childishness : for a wicked person becometh not then such an one, even when he appeareth so, and not before; but he hath the rudiments and beginnings of vice and naughti­ness imprinted in himself; but he sheweth and useth the same, when he hath means, fit occasion, good opportunity? and might answerable to his mind.”

But still more remarkable are some other words of his, words far in advance of all which a Pelagian would admit, words, indeed, in which the listening Christian ear can detect the voice of one who is not very far from the confession, not of sin only as superinduced and learned, but of sin original and innate:

“If thou wilt anatomize and open thyself, thou shalt find within a store-house and treasure of many evils and maladies, and those of divers and sundry sorts, not entering and running in from abroad, but having their original sources springing out of the ground and home-bred, the which vice, abundant, rich, and plenteous in passions, putteth forth.”

Such statements as these must have their weight; and in forming our estimate from Plutarch’s own writings of the moral conditions of that world in which he lived and wrought, let the needful allowance be made for his disposition to see all things and persons in the most favourable light; yet certainly it cannot be affirmed of one who could express himself in language like this, that as a physician of souls he only faintly apprehended the malignity of the hurts which he was fain to heal; that he saw only men’s faults and foibles, when he should have seen their sins and their crimes. The remedies he proposed may have been often insufficient, and in some sense they must have been insufficient; the deep hurt of the heathen world was not healed. But that just about this time voices were lifted up in behalf of righteousness and truth, and these out of the midst of the heathen world itself, such as had not before been heard, all capable of judging are agreed. What share in so excellent a work the Sage of Chaeronea bore it is impossible to determine, but some share he assuredly had And here we part with him, glad to think, in the midst of that sad perplexity with which oftentimes we contemplate the world before Christ, or out of Christ, that it has had such men; glad to believe, and surely this is no amiable delusion, that their work and witness, with all, its weaknesses and shortcomings, was not in their own time altogether in vain; and that even in times long after the value of it has not wholly past away.