Plutarch's Parallel Lives
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BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you'll find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, the Greek biographer Plutarch's parallel lives have influenced perceptions of the classical world in unparalleled ways.

Working around the end of the first century AD and into the second, he was writing live, she said, not histories.

revealing the characters of pairs of famous Greeks and Romans, their virtues and vices. And these were just the qualities that would fascinate Shakespeare when mining Plutarch for his Julius Caesar and Antonia Cleopatra, for example, and later writers who saw history through the prism of Plutarch's great men. We're going to discuss Plutarch's parallel lives at Judith Mossman, Professor Emerita of Classics at Coventry University,

Andrew Erskine, Professor of Ancient History at the University of Edinburgh, and Paul Cartlidge, A.G. Lamontis Senior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge.

Paul, can you tell us something of the early life of Plutarch himself, where he was born, John? I can. Unfortunately, no one wrote anything like a Plutarchan biography of Plutarch. His name is slightly unusual. It means someone who's first or leading in wealth. We know of others before him, but it's not a common name. We know the names of his father, we know the names of his grandfather, we know his wife.

And he had five kids and things like that. So he was born, we think, somewhere in the 40s AD or CE.

And he was born in the reign of the Emperor Claudius. And I put it that way because though he's a Greek, he's born in the province of Achaia, which is one of the provinces of the Roman Empire. So Greece, as we think of it, independent way back when, is now a subject province of the Roman Empire.

He was born and brought up in a small town, a place called Chaeronea, as we pronounce it in English, Chaeronea in modern Greek.

And that's sort of between Athens and Delphi. And if I put it that way, it's because Athens is the cultural capital of the Greek world. And so Plutarch has to go there and he becomes an Athenian citizen. On the other hand, he is very pious, very religious, and he becomes a priest in Delphi. How did he suffer being brought up in a Roman world while being so Greek?

Yes, it's an interesting question, isn't it? He was one of those who made an accommodation. In other words, he wasn't that thrilled by the Romans as such.

So he had reservations about their level of what we'd call culture or civilization or taste. Nevertheless, he had some Roman mates, one of whom got him the Roman citizenship, a man called Mestrius Florus, another one of whom he dedicated the parallel lives to.

So he was very integrated into the intellectual world of the Greco-Roman, as it's become, culture. He headed for Athens when he was 20. Absolutely right. And his particular contact there was a man called Ammonius, who was Egyptian-Greek, a philosopher.

And it's very important to realize that though we think of Plutarch overridingly as a biographer, he was also a philosopher, and he wrote huge amounts of straight philosophies.

But before we get to Athens, can you give us a general idea of his travels, Judith? Yes, certainly. As Paul has said, he had some very important Roman friends and he was important in his own local community. So he was often sent on embassies. And that's a key reason to travel for someone of his period and class.

We know that as a young man he was sent on an embassy to the pro-consul, who was probably the pro-consul of Asia. He

He also was sent on what was probably an embassy to Alexandria. The Emperor Vespasian was holding court in Alexandria at one point. So he was sent there. Of course, I'm sure when he was in Alexandria, he visited the library and no doubt also took in the general intellectual atmosphere of Alexandria. The library was the greatest library in the known world. The library was the greatest library in the known world indeed, yes, at that time.

He also travelled to Rome several times, and it looks as though that this was for embassies as well. But when he was in Rome, he didn't just do his diplomatic business. He also gave lectures and tutorials, as it were, in philosophy. He speaks at one point of having so many pupils in philosophy that he didn't have time to study Latin in depth. So presumably he was teaching everyone in Greek.

And there's a great story when he's lecturing in Rome on one occasion on being a busybody, where he's lecturing and a man called Aurelanus Rusticus, whom Domitian later killed through envy of his reputation, was among the hearers. When a soldier came through the audience and delivered him a letter from the emperor, well, this could have been Rusticus's death warrant. So there's a silence there.

And Plutarch wrote, I also made a pause so that he could read the letter, but he refused and did not break the seal until I had finished my lecture and the audience had dispersed. And so everyone admired his dignity. That's an interesting thing for Plutarch to have witnessed. It might have made him feel that perhaps living in a small town in Ikea was a lot safer than living in Rome.

He did say at one stage, remember hanging over your head all the time is the boot of the local Roman governor. Yes, exactly. I think Paul's absolutely right that in some respects he's not enchanted by Roman rule, although on the other hand, he's very aware of the benefits that it brings in terms of stability.

because it has prevented civil wars in Greece from recurring. And previously that was something that seemed impossible to do. There's obviously a Greek Roman tension running through his entire life. And again, there's this quotation, captive...

Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought the arts to rustic Latium, which was where Rome was based. Do you want to develop that? Yes, indeed. That's a quotation from the poet Horace, who's somewhat earlier than Plutarch is. But it reflects a long love affair that the Romans developed with Greek culture right from the time that they conquered Greece in 146 BC.

Of course, this presents huge opportunities for Greeks and particularly the Greek elite who must live with the Romans and must nonetheless find an accommodation with them. So leveraging the soft power that their philosophy, that their skill in rhetoric, that their skill in the arts gives them is something that they're very keen on doing at this period. And someone like Plutarch, a member of a local elite in Boeotia, a long-established family in Chaeronea,

very well educated, very clever, very well read, is in pole position to develop that influence. And that's one reason, I think, why he's an obvious choice for these embassies and an obvious choice for

for friendship for very distinguished Roman men. Is there ever a cringe factor in, I'd better watch my step because the Romans are looking at me or they're hanging on me with a boot? Is there ever that in his writing, do you think?

I don't think so. The passage that you refer to is advice to a young man who's thinking of going into politics in Asia Minor. And they had, I mean, I think it's partly there because there had been a revolt in Asia Minor, which had been put down. But it's advice. It's not the governor is a wicked person. It's

Just remember where you are. Remember the parameters within which you're going to be working. I don't think it's a cringe. I think it's a desire for moral education across the cultural divide, insofar as there is a cultural divide at this point. Andrew, thank you. Andrew Erskine, can we turn to you? Can you do a brief scan for the listeners on the lives that Plutarch included in this work and the range of time and places? Yes.

Yes, I suppose the first thing to be aware of is the unusual character of these lives as biographies, because they are, as you said, parallel, so that they are paired. So we have one Greek paired with a Roman. How carefully does he put them together? Is it to do with their dates? Is it to do with their exploits? It's not their dates. There's only one pair which is actually contemporary with each other.

He tries to take themes, so something which he sees as a common theme, ambition, frugality even, control of passions, also shared experiences, because he's interested in – and one purpose for the comparison –

is to see how two different men respond to similar events, make similar kind of decisions, but maybe choose different directions in doing this. Can you give us a few examples? Take his Delphi that he's very fond of. An example might be the fact that Lysander, who's paired with Sulla...

Lysander is a Spartan military commander. He shows respect to Delphi and he gives donations to it. Sulla, on the other hand, steals from Delphi. But they're both sort of important military figures. I mean, he's interested also, I think we need to say, in writing biography, it's not aimed at saying everything about someone's life. It's aimed at exploring these kind of moral issues, exploring the character of someone. So in the case of Sulla...

We get quite a complicated person coming out of it. He is someone who is very successful, very militarily very good, but at the same time he's extremely violent, and that is something which characterises his actions, and his life ends with someone being brought into him to be strangled, and shortly after that sort of dies, and that's how Plutarch ends the life. Do we know why he wrote these lives and how they were received? He doesn't tell us...

sort of why he decided to compare Greeks and Romans, but he does say that he's interested in seeing what's good and bad about people. He's interested in exploring the moral character of the figures that he's writing about.

And he wants people to learn from this. He gives an example at one point of saying he's going to write two lives which are people who are more reprehensible, I suppose. This is Demetrius the Procedure and Antony. And he says, I'm writing these lives because it's not just a matter of looking at those people who have been doing good things, but also those who are doing bad. So there's an educational aspect to this. He's trying to educate people.

Now, who he's trying to educate might be a question. Is it those people that Judith was talking about, elite Romans and Greeks that surround him? But it might also be he's interested in young men, men who might have a future in public affairs, because these lives are only of figures who are important militarily or politically. He doesn't write a life for Plato, for instance, even though he's one of his heroes and he's a philosopher. Paul...

I'd like to go into, to take that a bit further, how he wrote this and why he picked only Greeks and to compare them only with Romans. I know what you're saying. He didn't quite only pick Greeks and Romans because there is one life of a Persian, but not any old Persian. It was a fiend, wasn't it? He writes the life of Artaxerxes II, whom the Greeks nicknamed Minimon, he who is mindful, intelligent.

And I think the main reason was that Greeks were Greeks and everybody else was a barbarian until the Romans came along. And because of that quotation from Horace, Greeks thought kindly of Romans and they even allowed some Romans to compete at the Olympic Games, which was supposedly originally Greeks only.

So Romans become honorary Greeks, but Persians never do. Why did they become honorary? You've gone through it quite quickly, but the others didn't, the Carthaginians didn't and so on. That's right, there's another one there. Now, Aristotle, going back, he was one of Plutarch's main sources in all sorts of ways, both factually and philosophically.

Well, Aristotle wrote a politia, a constitution of Carthage, because he thought it was sufficiently similar to a Greek polis, city-state, for all the inclusion in his series to be useful. And I think that's the same mentality of comparison. The Greek word synchrisis means a together judgment. So it's not that you're comparing in the sense of like with like.

but you're judging which is superior to which and which is like and which is unlike. So it's an exercise both for him, he actually says at one point, I wasn't absolutely sure I'd carry on writing lies but I'm so enjoying doing it because I'm learning.

moral stuff. And as Andrew says, I mean, he's not interested in the great battles, the great events, what the Greeks called ergo, what Herodotus wrote about, Thucydides wrote about for themselves. But if a commander or a king who is also a commander exhibits a certain quality or too much of it or not enough of it, overambitious, then he's interested in

And I'll give you one example, Battle of Actium. Well, as a historian, what interests me is what impact did that have? The fact that Octavian won and Antony lost on the future of the Roman world, Roman Empire. No, Plutarch is interested in what effect did it have on Antony personally? And Antony is not, in Plutarch's view, a model in any sense or exemplar

but his readers can learn from the way he conducted himself and the way he reacted to his fate because Plutarch's very interested in reversals of fortune, what Greeks called peripeteia.

And so Antony is a particularly good... He's king of Egypt, married to Cleopatra. He loses the Battle of Actium. He's nothing. And, of course, he dies very soon after. And in particular, he isolates himself from Cleopatra...

He puts his head in his hands, won't talk to her, won't go near her, goes out to somewhere which is referred to afterwards as the Timoneum, which is a lighthouse on an island. And he sits there in the depths of despair.

And Plutarch makes this sort of extra internal little comparison between Antony in his despair and Timon of Athens, which is where Shakespeare gets Timon of Athens from, someone who was very generous to his friends and whom they then all betray. And he ends up being so miserable that, well, there are a whole series of sayings of Timon which are basically telling the world to just...

go away. This is Antony. It takes him some time to get over this and get back to Cleopatra and then they embark on this sort of Liebestod.

in the life. Did he structure all these lives in a similar way? And if so, what's that structure? Well, I think it's very important what Andrew said before, that they are structured as pairs. Very often at the beginning of the first life in a pair, you will get this introduction where he will talk about why he's picked those two people. Sometimes he might speak more generally about his methods. And then he'll go into the narrative of the first life, probably

It's probably worth saying that it's not obvious in ancient biography that you start at the beginning and go on to the end, very much as Plutarch does. Suetonius, for example, doesn't really do that. He's got a basic chronology and then he puts things in under headings. I think the other thing to say about the structure is that he will skip over quite big chunks and then he'll really focus in and you'll get a big scene, a big grand narrative event happening

which may be about something very small, like the taming of Bucephalus near the beginning of the Alexander, for example. Wonderful scene elaborated in great detail with Alexander, the grumpy teenager, and Philip saying, oh, well, go on, you see if you can do any better then. And then, of course, irritatingly, he can. And he rides the horse back to his father and his father's in tears of pride.

This is a marvellous way of setting up an awful lot of what happens in the life.

He'll get to the end of the first life and then he'll move into the second. And at the end of the two, there'll be this, well, not necessarily always, but some kind of formal comparison, which may actually be a bit disappointing compared with the wonderful narrative that we've had in the two lives. I just wanted to add, in terms of originality, the notion of a parallelism between

whether opposition or likening, does seem to be original to him. So some Romans had written biographies before him.

Nepos and Varro and the genre of biography goes back can be traced back to encomium in the 4th century BC but he does seem to have really created a new genre he's one of those few people who invent an entire genre of literature

Can we look in more detail, Andrew, at, say, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar? They stand out. Can you tell us about this pairing? I mean, this pairing, I mean, the life of Alexander is one of the longest lives.

And he begins it by mentioning the difference between biography and history. It's one of the sort of points where he explains what he's going to be doing. And he says? He says he's not going to be talking about huge battles. It's because sometimes you can get more idea of a character of somebody by just a joke or a remark that they make.

And an example of this within the life of Alexander would be the Battle of Issus, which is a major battle. It's the first time Alexander defeats the Persian king Darius. He covers it in a couple of sentences. But afterwards, he then has Alexander arriving in the king's camp, finding the king's bath and saying, I'm going to take a bath in Darius's bath.

I'll get all the mud off the battle off me. And his companions say, no, it's not Darius's bath, it's Alexander's bath. And this is done, I think, to set up what comes next.

which is the discovery of the Persian women, the wife of Darius, Darius' children in the camp. Because implicitly, from the bath scene, they are also Alexander's property. So then Alexander meets them and he tells them he will treat them with respect. And that allows Plutarch then to move on to talk about Alexander's self-control. These are the most beautiful women in the world and...

and he's leaving them alone, he's treating them with respect. And then we get other aspects of Alexander's self-control. So the Battle of Issus, treated very, very briefly, and then several pages exploring Alexander's self-control coming from this point. Is it possible to do something similar with Julius Caesar? At the beginning of the life of Caesar, there's quite a well-known story about how Caesar is captured by pirates, which he does include, but he expands it.

and he expands it in such a way as to tell us something about Caesar. The story is that Caesar is captured by pirates when he's quite a young man, he's taken away and he tells the pirates that he will, once the ransom is raised, because that's the idea, pirates take you, you get a

people pay a ransom for you, he is going to come back and he is going to capture them and crucify them. And they let him go, do they? They do, but the thing is, Plutarch describes how he is when he's with these pirates, that he engages with them, he plays with them, he reads his poetry to them. And if they don't appreciate it, he tells them they're barbarians, which also shifts him towards that Greek position.

And he tells them he will crucify them when he gets back. Is it in the Julius Caesar? Sorry, Andrew, but Caesar sees a sculpture of Alexander or another source? It's not a sculpture. There's another story about him going through a little alpine village and saying, I'd rather be first here than second in Rome. Right.

I think maybe what you're thinking of is when he's in Spain, he sits there and someone says, why are you looking so gloomy? And he says, I just realised that I'm already at this age and Alexander had done so many great things. Ruled the whole world. And I haven't done anything. And he was weeping. So I used to use this in my lectures and say, well, I'm 60, whatever I was. You can imagine how I feel. But

But Andrew, the punchline of Andrew's story gives you another line on Caesar, doesn't it, Andrew? Because the punchline is that when they ransom him, he comes back and he makes sure they are all crucified. And the joke is on them. And he says it always with a smile. I'll crucify you. I'll crucify you. And then he does it. So we get a sense of Caesar's charm, but also his ruthlessness and his thinking ahead.

Which is a good word here, isn't it? Paul, to continue this with you, some of the pairs fit better than others. Can you give us an example of something that doesn't work? Yeah, I happen to be working on a biography, if you can call it that, Life and Times, of Pericles. And so Plutarch had the same thought, and he paired Pericles with a... Can you give us a little thing about Pericles?

It's a long life like the Alexander and Pericles was an Athenian politician and Plutarch was puzzled as to how come the Pericles he'd read about in Thucydides was so much not the Pericles that is being attacked by his contemporary comic poets on the stage.

So he comes up with a schema whereby Pericles, in order to become influential, he acts like every other wretched demagogic politician. Having achieved a position of superiority, preeminence, he then acts the statesman, which you find in Thucydides. So that's

Plutarch's reconciliation of the two. But looking for a pair for Pericles, he obviously wanted to do Pericles. Who shall I pair him with? Well, he comes up with Quintus Fabius Maximus, who is the famous conctator, the delayer. Well, there's nothing specially delaying

about Pericles. Pericles lives in a democracy. Fabius lives in a republic fighting a major enemy who's not Roman. Pericles is fighting Greek enemies. There's very few points of contact except two.

One is that they are both self-reliant and self-denying, so that they are morally admirable. Secondly, they are sniped at by the masses, the people, and they ride above, they rise above this sort of criticism to do what they want to do. But Fabius, it actually doesn't all go brilliantly at the end, and so he rather sort of declines...

And as Judith has said, Plutarch typically writes a little synchrisis, a comparison at the end. It's always, if it's a Greek-Roman, it's after the Roman. And so the synchrisis comes after Fabius, whereas there's a famous one goes the other way, Coriolanus, Roman, Alcibiades, Greek. And so the comparison comes after Alcibiades.

But I think it's a pretty poor choice of comparison. Pericles, Fabius. Judith, is it obvious when he's departing from known history? In terms of genre, biography is a comparatively new genre. And he could just have sat down and written what you might call a world history biography.

But I think that he wants to make it very personal. It is true that there are traces of biography in all the great Greek historians. Xenophon has long biographical passages about people. So does Herodotus, actually. You get the characters coming through, and Thucydides as well. He does it in the Nicias, say that he doesn't think that he can imitate Thucydides because Thucydides is beyond imitation.

But I think he also finds it useful from a moral point of view. And Plutarch is a very moral writer, not moralistic, but truly wanting to use the examples from history to teach virtue.

that he finds it easier to do that in the biographical format. He does have Nepos to draw on. And there's also at this time, although there's not much evidence of contact between the two, there's also Tacitus who writes the biography of his father-in-law Agricola. And again, that is very much from a moral standpoint, how to be a good person in bad times.

So I think Plutarch is trying very much to emphasise the morality of things, and he finds that easier to do in a biography than in what you might call a global history. Andrew? Yeah, we can look back at Plutarch's sources. We can see some of the sources he used, because some of them do survive. We can also see that what he is doing is... I mean, people used to think that he simply looked at... There were existing biographies that he took and adapted, but...

It's quite clear now that what he did was he went through a huge amount of material. He was very learned, read an awful lot, and he read histories like Thucydides, Herodotus, as we've mentioned. And what he's doing is he's extracting the material about the characters he's writing about from these. It's possible sometimes, most of the time, we don't have those sources surviving. He uses a lot of sources that are lost.

But in some cases, like Thucydides or the historian Polybius, a Greek historian writing in the 2nd century BC. Can I just pitch a little bit more on historiography? There's one good reason why he wouldn't want to write like Herodotus, because he wrote possibly when he was younger. We're not absolutely sure of the order of his writings.

a work called, in Latin, On the Malignity, the mean-spiritedness of Herodotus. Now, when he criticizes Herodotus, he does it for what I take to be rather poor reasons, including nationalism. In other words, Herodotus makes his fellow, Plutarch's fellow, Boeotians, look bad.

The Thebans are traitors, that sort of thing. But he shows that he knows what the conventions of writing history, as opposed to writing what he wants to write, which is something he's making his own. So he could have done it, if you see what I mean. He very much chose not to. And he knows Herodotus inside out and backwards and in other places uses him extensively.

But I think there's perhaps another point, which is that he obviously feels from the beginning of the Alexander era

that it seems to suggest that he thinks that biography gives him a little bit more latitude than history. And there's one interesting passage in The Life of Solon, the 6th century Athenian lawgiver, which I think is worth bringing out here. As for his interview with Croesus, Solon sets up the Athenian laws and then goes on his travels, because obviously he's terribly unpopular at that point, and he goes to see Croesus, the king of Lydia. As Plutarch wrote...

Well,

I think that's very interesting because it essentially goes on to retell a story from Herodotus, not exactly the same, but very closely.

But it also suggests that he's playing fair with everybody. He's saying, well, you know, this may not be true, but goodness, doesn't it tell you something interesting? And he can just stick it in, which he might not feel able to do in the history. Andrew, to take that on a bit, does he pass judgment on his subjects? Or does he let us make up our own minds, perhaps foreshadowing some of Shakespeare's? I think he tends to let us make up our own minds.

What he does is shows us how complex these figures are. So it's not a straightforward kind of thing. And to some extent, the pairing, paralleling, helps with that because he can in a way push people towards thinking certain things. I mean, the pairing of Athenian Aristides the Just with Cato the Elder. Now, Cato, they're both famous for their kind of frugality, but Aristides comes out as being someone who is...

not interested in money, whereas Cato comes out as being someone who is maybe just stingy. The lifestyle can be the same, but the motivation can be different.

He's not judgmental, but you might see judgments hidden in there. I think it's in this life that he says about how Cato would sell off his old slaves because he doesn't need them anymore, they're old. And he says, I wouldn't even sell an ox or an ass that had served me properly and, well, would let it have a comfortable old age.

He's clearly quite cross with Cato about that. You have elements of judgment coming in there, yes. I mentioned Shakespeare earlier. There isn't time to go into the full range of that, but it deserves more than a mention. Can you tell us more about Shakespeare's debt to Plutarch? Yes, certainly. Starting with you, Judith. I think in many respects it's a very significant debt. The first play in which it's obviously important is Julius Caesar in 1599.

Shakespeare will have accessed Plutarch by the translation of Thomas North, which was published first in 1579.

He describes it. Which he'd read at school? No, I don't think so. Not at school and not in translation. Plutarch's not on the curriculum of the King Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford, which is where we think Shakespeare went, although the records have been destroyed. So where did he get it from? I think he went out and bought it. It went into a second edition in 1595.

so he could easily have picked it up. He clearly read it very closely. Julius Caesar is based on a combination of the life of Caesar and the life of Brutus. And, for example, the famous scene in Julius Caesar where the spirit comes to him the night before Philippi, that's a very interesting one because verbally it's exactly the same as Norse.

I am thy evil spirit, Brutus. Why then I shall see thee at Philippi? But the actor who plays that part is always the actor who's played Caesar. So it's sort of Caesar, dead Caesar coming back. Whereas in fact, in Plutarch and in the words of the scene, it's actually a form of

bad luck that's visiting Brutus, his own bad luck. Well, I've got one particular, if you like, bee in my bonnet, and it is Coriolanus, which Judith mentioned, because I'm almost tempted to say I think he never existed. The evidence for him is exceptionally poor of a historical kind.

and he doesn't fit. His name is peculiar because Coriolanus should mean that he'd conquered some place called Corioli. And the story goes that he retreats there, and he from there attacks the Romans until his mother persuades him not to. So he's a traitor, and that's why he's likened to Alcibiades. But history it's not, and he therefore... It's one of those cases where,

Why did he write A Life of Coriolanus? Because he was so interested in all the emotions and the character formation and revelation. And there's a particular dimension which I think is very common to much of Plutarch, which is relations between an elite man and the masses.

And Coriolanus is openly contemptuous, and Shakespeare picks this up. It makes it an exceptionally major part of the plot development of the play. Coriolanus is how he is contemptuous, especially of the tribunes of the people who are the representative of the plebs.

And Alcibiades, on the one hand, loves the masses in the sense that he plays them and he needs their adulation. He's exceptionally narcissistic. But he goes in Thucydides to Sparta, where he's a traitor, and says, democracy? Well, it's just, as we all know, folly, madness. Now,

Now, that's what the Spartans want to hear. But if the Athenian masses hear that, they're not going to be so thrilled. So Alcibiades is a complex character, more complex. Coriolanus is rather two-dimensional, to be perfectly honest. But he needed a parallel. What interests me is why he put Coriolanus before Alcibiades. So he so wants to do Alcibiades. Why did he not find a Roman character?

that he could add on to Alcibiades. People have views on that, perhaps. Maybe because it helped him set up... Maybe if he's interested in Alcibiades, it helps him set up some of the issues to explore in Alcibiades. Because that's the point, isn't it? The first life, very often, is less developed. There are exceptions. Pericles is one, Alexander is another. Oh, it's as developed.

But very often, as you say, the first life sets up the second. And that's, of course, comparison. It's not just parallel. It's head to head. That's very explicit in the Demetrius Antony, where you have the Macedonian drama followed by the Roman. Paul, did Plutarch change the way we saw the classical world? Well, it's more, I think, people who used Plutarch.

And then that transformed the way we thought about the ancient world. And we're moving on, aren't we? Shakespeare possibly move on to the Enlightenment, if we have time to consider that. So Voltaire, Rousseau and so on, they were very familiar with Plutarch. And I don't think we've mentioned Sparta yet, so if I might drag in Plutarch's life of Lycurgus. He starts it by saying there is not one thing assertive

of Lycurgus by one source that is not contradicted by another. He cites

50, no fewer than 50 different authorities or sources for this life. So he, in effect, is saying you cannot write a biography of this man in terms of truth. So why am I writing it? Because I'm interested in law-giving, justice, like Ergis's character, and I'm going to compare it with Numa, the great religious legislator of the Romans and so on.

And Rousseau in particular was a real fan both of Lycogus and of Sparta, and he thought that everybody should be like the Spartans, self-reliant.

And he said Lycurgus tied the Spartans to their laws. He sort of bound them and he thought that was great. It's very odd. We think of Rousseau as liberationist in education in other respects. But for some reason, he loved Plutarch's Lycurgus.

I think there are other respects as well, perhaps more frivolous ones. He just tells so many stories that have become, for one reason or another, the lifeblood of what people know about classical antiquity. The Bucephalus story, if there's one thing everybody knows about Alexander is that he had a horse called Bucephalus.

The sole source for that incident. The sole source for that. Then Cleopatra being delivered to Caesar in the carpet. It's mentioned very briefly in Antony and Cleopatra, but it's elaborated a lot more in the Burton-Taylor Cleopatra and indeed in the carry-on Cleo. It's there. It's in everybody's mind.

somewhere. He brings out these very vivid stories so clearly that he's somehow essential, really, to the way a lot of us see the classical world, I think. Coming to you, Andrew. Has his influence never lessened? Has he been influential throughout the 2,000 years? I think so, yes. I mean, maybe there's a kind of...

rediscovery of him at the time of Shakespeare's 16th century influence on Machiavelli and once the English translation, once he becomes available in, well, I mean the English translation is translated from the French so he's going around Europe at that time so maybe there's an increase in influence from then onwards. Yeah, manuscripts we have of the Middle Ages, so before the age of printing, he was very, very popular then and of course he's translated into Latin.

And so that's the common language of the Middle Ages. We're getting to the end now, but Judith? It just occurred to me, firstly, all these biographies are of men, with the partial exception of the Antony, which goes on after Antony's death for nine chapters about Cleopatra. But perhaps a more interesting point is that in the reception of Plutarch...

Plutarch had a big influence on politics, on political writing, on thought, on drama and on English biography as well. Boswell's very, very keen on Plutarch. But the one idea that Plutarch created and developed, the parallelism, that's nowhere.

No one else does that until Alan Bullock. I was going to say Hitler and Stalin. Our colleague Simon Hornblow has just written Scipio and Hannibal. Excellent. That's very jolly because in the Renaissance there were people who made up lives of Scipio and Hannibal and also Scipio and Epaminondas, the first pair that Blutarch wrote, but which was lost. But it

But that parallelism idea, except for a very few counter-examples, it's just gone. And all the 18th century books called things like the British Plutarch and the French Revolutionary Plutarch, they're just...

collections of biographies more of a moral nature, ordered chronologically. They're not parallel at all. And also you can add that if you want to go into a bookshop and buy the Parallel Lives, you can't. No. Because they're all sold separately as a volume of Greek lives or a volume of Roman lives. And the only exception is the Loeb Classical Library. It's because they tend to be used for ancient history and not read as themselves. Wow.

I'd add, just if I may, that Plutarch is, I think, not an egalitarian. And so he liked the Roman notion of what counts as superiority and inferiority. And he did not like radical democracy, personally.

of which there were occasional outbursts, even under the Roman Empire. And so he was, by and large, very happy, as Judith said, about peace. Well, the peace went with top-down elite rule, and Plutarch was happy with that.

Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Julius Mossman, Paul Cartlidge and Andrew Erskine. Next week, Vars Mania in the 18th century. How new archaeological finds inspired Josiah Wedgwood, John Keats and British consumers. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

What would you like to have said that you find you didn't have time to say? There is a passage in a work, we didn't talk much about his philosophy in detail, that is his Platonism, which he liked, Aristotelianism, but he didn't like Stoicism and Epicureanism, which is very strange because they were the two dominant philosophies of his era.

And there's a work he wrote how you can't possibly live well according to the tenets of Epicurus. And in it he says now, is this tongue-in-cheek or is this absolutely straight? Who could possibly prefer having sex

with the most beautiful woman, he's very heterosexual, Plutarch, to reading about Pantheia, who is an invented character, in Xenophon's Syropidae. She is an exemplar of the good wife. So she is a fictional thymoxina, who is Plutarch's real wife. Well, is that jokey? I mean, did he really not enjoy sex?

Or did he so love reading? And I would add that the actual mechanics of reading, I did mention scrolls. It's exceptionally difficult. You unroll the scroll one way.

And then if you want to read it again, you have to unroll it again and re-roll it and start again. So I have an image of Plutarch surrounded by scrolls, whereas we have maybe, those of us of my age, books.

Xeroxes. Xeroxes, yes. But Plutarch had to rely on his memory. And so one reason why the same anecdote would be told in slightly different wording is not only conscious variation, but simply, as you and I, when we write, we don't always tell the anecdote in exactly the same terms or the same event when we're writing, as I've done, about the Battle of Issus.

Can you give the listeners some idea of the range of his friendships, which is remarkable for a young man? Well, absolutely. I mean, Mestrius Florus managed to survive being an adherent of Otho in 69 AD, which is the so-called year of the four emperors, where after the fall of Nero, people squabbled about the fate of the Roman Empire and they managed to get through four emperors in one year.

and he became someone who was a consul under Trajan. And he also knew well Socius Senecio well,

who seems to have been of Spanish extraction. He was one of the Spaniards who were much favoured by the Emperor Trajan himself from Spain. So these are what you might call the senior ministers of the Emperor. These are not second tier figures or provincial figures. And at the same time, he's got lots of Greek friends, Greek plutocrats and emperors.

also people that he evidently likes because they're well-travelled, well-read and entertaining. Why did he do it? I think there is an element of trying to get Greece and Rome to speak to each other. I think he doesn't like preferring one civilisation over another for obvious reasons. He does see everything through a Greek lens. He is a proud Greek.

But he does, I think, value Rome as well. The peace and tranquility that it's created, the fairness, the laws, a lot of the things that the Romans admire about themselves, Plutarch admires about them too.

So he's got these two great civilizations as he sees it. He does, I think, want to convince the Romans that Greece isn't just a museum. The Greeks have been great statesmen, great military men, great conquerors, and they've got lessons to teach the Romans.

But he also wants to convince the Greeks that the Romans have been through some of the same things that they've been through themselves. This whole element of civil war, for example, there are passages in the Greek lives, for instance, at the end of the Flamininus, where Flamininus conquers the Macedonians and basically, according to Plutarch, secures the freedom of Greece from Macedon.

Flamininus is described as a Greek in language, a Greek in this, a Greek in that. He's not, he's a Roman, but he's done something that's so magnificently beneficent for Hellas that he has to be seen as a Greek.

Then, on the other hand, when the Romans are suffering civil wars, so in lives like the Brutus and the Pompey, you get Greeks sort of observing what's going wrong in Roman society and saying, oh, don't go there, don't do this, you know. So I think he thinks that both sides have a great deal to learn from one another. And that's why he's gone in for this remarkable structure.

Was this completely original, Paul, this work, this part of our lives? Well, I think as far as we can tell, there's nothing anything much like it. As I say, there are possible pairings in some earlier writers of a Roman kind, not a Greek kind.

And the pairing itself is partly cultural, partly moral, partly dynamic comparison, partly for us, the reader, to judge. And I'm with those who think that the sort of people who read him, remembering how difficult it is to read the scrolls,

are the sort of people who were leisured, wealthy, had slaves possibly who read out to them, or they themselves had libraries. There weren't such things as public libraries. There were some great libraries, but they weren't exactly lending libraries.

and that Plutarch was addressing elite people in an elite way. His language is extremely sophisticated and varied and rhetorical. I mean, I'd like to know personally who taught him, because as with, for example, Pericles, we know virtually nothing of the first 20 years of Pericles' life. We know only from Plutarch about the first 20 years of Pericles'

Alexander the Great. I mean, ancients weren't that interested in biography in the way we are, where we go into birth, immediate family circumstances, psychodynamic development. What Plutarch meant by character was what somebody stamped with. Literally, that's what the Greek means. And so...

Events bring out what's already in there. You don't, as it were, develop by reacting to events.

Yes, although I think that's right, but I think you can also say that by monitoring, as it were, the reactions to events during the course of a life, you can trace a development in the character. So Alexander, at the end of his life, responds to external stimuli quite differently from the way he does a bit earlier in that life. That's partly because of the intervening experiences and the different circumstances involved.

But it is different from modern post-Freudian characterisation. There's no doubt about that. Would you like to...? Yeah, I think one maybe could say a little bit more about his attitude to the Romans and Greek culture. Yes, I'd be interested. Because, obviously, he's taking...

lives through from sort of the beginning of Rome to Antony and the Romans are gradually becoming more and more familiar with Greek culture during this time so that when he has the life of Cato, Cato the elder is really quite hostile to Greek culture and Plutarch makes a comment that even though he's hostile to it it will actually sort of become part of what it is to be Roman, this Greek culture

And later on, when he gets to the life of Cicero, he has Cicero go to learn rhetoric, learn oratory on the island of Rhodes. And he learns from a man called Apollonius. Now, Apollonius can't speak Latin, so Cicero has to declaim in Greek. And at the end of his declamation, everyone sort of gathers around Cicero and says how wonderful it was, except for Apollonius, who's sitting, looking very gloomy.

And Cicero goes over to him and is concerned as to what the explanation is. Had he really done something really wrong? And Apollonius says, and I've written this down here, it says, You, Cicero, I admire and praise, but Greece I pity for her sad fortune, since I see that even the only glories that were left to us, culture and eloquence, now, thanks to you, belong to the Romans.

And I think that kind of captures a little bit of what Plutarch himself thinks. There's a certain sadness that Plutarch has about this change. It's good that the Romans have appreciated this, but there's something missing from the Greeks now. I think he thinks Cicero is quite a special person.

The way he translates, he embarks on making Greek philosophy, putting Greek philosophy into Latin and translating all the Greek philosophical terms. And of course, Cicero himself does complain that Latin isn't really the best language to do philosophy in. So there's a little bit of give and take in all that. But yes, that's a great story.

I think the other person that he really thinks needs a bit of Greek culture is Marius, the great Roman general who's fantastically successful militarily and fantastically successful politically. But he's a terrible thug.

And he ends up being much too sorry for himself. And Plutarch says at the end of his life, well, if only he'd listened to Plato, he could have reflected on all the good things that had happened to him and cheered up a bit. So that's a paraphrase. But he does still think, I think, that the Greeks have got a lot to offer. So he's rolling with the times, I think.

Would a bit more about Shakespeare be okay? No, it's so joy. Just to add that between 1606 and 1608, he wrote three plays which were based very closely on Plutarch lives. Timon of Athens, based on one chapter of the Antony, Antony and Cleopatra, based on everything from about chapter 25 onwards, and the Coriolanus, based on the life of Coriolanus.

And particularly in Antony and Cleopatra, you can see how very closely he is following North. The famous speech about Cleopatra meeting Antony at the Kidness, the barge she sat in like a burnished throne, is pretty much a chunk of North turned into very beautiful iambic pentameteres.

And although Shakespeare does change things sometimes and to very good effect because he's a dramatist. So, for example, Shakespeare makes Cleopatra die on stage, whereas Plutarch conceals her death behind a pair of doors, which then open up and show you this splendidly clad figure already dead.

They still both use the last words of Cleopatra's handmaid, Charmian. So in North, North writes, one of the soldiers seeing her angrily said unto her, is that well done, Charmian? Very well, said she again, and meet for a princess descended from the race of so many noble kings.

In Shakespeare, that becomes, what work is here? Charmian, is this well done? It is well done, and fitting for a princess descended of so many royal kings. Ah, soldier. You can see the kinship and also the interesting differences that putting it on the stage entails. I also personally think that it's possible that Plutarch's big scenes, which I mentioned earlier,

were particularly attractive for someone who's trying to stage history. And, for example, in Henry V, which is also 1599, same year as Julius Caesar,

There's an extended scene where Flewellyn compares the life of Henry V to the life of Alexander and mentions the death of Clitus, one of the great, rather awful moments. The murder of Clitus. The murder of Clitus by Alexander in the life of Alexander. And this comparison is developed entirely to Henry V's advantage, but the death of Clitus is compared to Henry V sending away Falstaff

in the previous play in the series. We have Simon Tillotson who's waiting to... He's had enough. Does anyone want tea or coffee? Melvin, do you want tea or coffee? No, I'll just have some more water, please. I'll have some tea as well, please. Not for me, thank you very much. Thank you very much, thank you. In Our Time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production. I'm Nicola Coughlan and for BBC Radio 4 this is History's Youngest Heroes.

Rebellion, risk and the radical power of youth. She thought, right, I'll just do it. She thought about others rather than herself. 12 stories of extraordinary young people from across history. There's a real sense of urgency in them. That resistance has to be mounted, it has to be mounted now. Subscribe to History's Youngest Heroes on BBC Sounds. Simon's disappeared for the moment. He's making more tea. Making more tea.

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