Plutarch - Lives - Alexander

Plutarch, born in Charonea, Boetia during the reign of Claudius around 45 AD, occupies a unique position in our classic sources as the inventor of biography to establish a new discipline for the study of the past. He lived into Rome’s golden age including under the first three of the Five Good Emperors, Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian. He wrote his “Lives” while Trajan expanded the boundaries of the Roman Empire to their greatest extent. Knowledge and culture flourished during this period, and we have covered some of his illustrious Greek and Roman contemporaries with chapters in this book including Epictetus, Arrian, Tacitus and Suetonius.

What makes Plutarch such a richly rewarding author is immediately apparent upon reading his highly learned but rewardingly accessible writing. We enjoy the benefit of his excellent education enhanced by his training in Platonic philosophy, as he generously shares the wealth of information derived from his diligent studies in the greatest libraries of the ancient world. Plutarch’s sources included all the authors that have survived to modern times such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, and all the others we have covered in earlier chapters. But he also incorporated now-lost treasures of history, often first-hand knowledge, such as Asinius Pollio’s history of the Roman Civil Wars based on his own experiences fighting with Caesar in Gaul and crossing the Rubicon. Plutarch provides a deeply informed point of view, gracefully presented to us through his careful, delightful writing, comprising a coherent series of biographical studies composed by a true philosopher.

Plutarch’s influence on Western culture extends beyond history and biography to the arts and drama. As noted in the Biographical Note at the beginning of the Modern Library editions, he deeply influenced our culture.

Intended as moral portraits rather than historical interpretations, the “Lives” are an incomparably rich trove of the facts and legends that Plutarch tirelessly collected, and an epitome of Greco-Roman concepts of character. In the English translation made by Sir Thomas North in 1579 they contributed enormously, in both incident and language, to Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” “Coriolanus,” and “Antony and Cleopatra.”

The sources for this chapter include two separate collections of Plutarch’s Lives, in two pairs of volumes. The first two books comprise the Dryden Translations, translated and first published by the poet and scholar John Dryden in 1683. This edition includes a highly beneficial Preface and Notes by another poet and scholar, Hugh Clough in 1864. The 2001 Modern Library Classics edition, published by Random House, adds an Introduction by James Atlas that provides great insight on Plutarch’s life and his essentially new way to understand history through biography. These books preserve the surviving works of Plutarch’s “Parallel Lives” in their original arrangement which was comprised of pairs of lives of great statesmen, one Greek and one Roman, followed by a comparison of the two selected men.

The other pair of books are published by Oxford World’s Classics, Greek Lives in 1998 and Roman Lives in 1999. These are modern translations by Robin Waterfield, born in 1952, who graduated from Manchester University and researched ancient Greek philosophy at King’s College, Cambridge. Both books are enhanced with Introductions and Notes by Philip Stadter, Falk Professor of the Humanities at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. These books include a subset of the original Lives covered by Plutarch, and do not include his original comparisons, but the introductions offer summary insights on Plutarch’s comparisons. The Greek Lives include the ancient lawmakers of Sparta and Athens, Lycurgus and Solon, and the great statesmen and generals who dominated Greece from the Persian invasions through the Peloponnesian War to the rise of the Hellenic Empire, including Themistocles, Cimon, Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades, Agesilaus, and Alexander. The Roman Lives focus on the last century of the Roman Republic, covering Cato the Elder, Aemilius Paullus, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, and Antony.

In addition to the differences in completeness of these two collections of Plutarch’s Lives, most readers will be struck by the language itself, Dryden was a brilliant writer employing the finest English used four hundred years ago, which is by no means foreign but does employ some words differently than modern readers typically encounter them. These usages are not a barrier to clear understanding, but Waterfield’s contemporary translation certainly feels more familiar. In both cases, it is Plutarch’s voice that we hear as we are entranced by the unique insights on these towering figures in ancient history.

NOTE: For references, the two volumes of the Modern Library Dryden Translations, Plutarch’s chapters are not numbered. For references to the Modern Library Dryden Translations, we will use “Dryden-Volume/Page,” so that a citation to Volume 1, Page 1 will appear as “Dryden-1/1”. For the Oxford Press editions of the Waterfield translations, chapter numbers are included, so we will use references in the format of Waterfield-Book/Chapter. So, chapter 1 in Alexander will appear as “Waterfield-Alexander/1.”

Depending on whether we read Plutarch before or after the histories of his subjects, we are faced with different experiences. Plutarch clearly declares and never veers from his mission of writing biography, so even if we have read the histories, we gain new insights on character and motives, and Plutarch enriches our understanding of the events through his deeply human observations. While Plutarch had access to all the great historical sources, including definitive accounts such as those of Asinius Pollio, compared to accounts of wars and battles in the words of historians like Thucydides or Appian, we will find his treatment of details to be comparatively thin. We are always aware that Plutarch is writing biography, the stories of men, not history, the story of events. But Plutarch provides an experience of the past like no other author.

Arthur Hugh Clough, in his Preface to the Dryden Translations, quotes a man named Theodorus Gaza because “the rest have commended Plutarch more than any single author, but he has extolled him above all together.”

‘Tis said that, having this extravagant question put to him by a friend, that if learning must suffer a general shipwreck, and he had only his choice left to him of preserving a single author, who should be the man who he would preserve, he answered, Plutarch; and probably might give them this reason, that in saving him, he would secure the best collection of them all.

??????????? Earlier in his Preface, Clough provides the perfect approach required by the Lives.

In reading Plutarch, the following points should be remembered. He is a moralist rather than a historian. His interest is less for politics and changes of empires, and much more for personal character and individual actions and motives to action; duty performed and rewarded; arrogance chastised, hasty anger corrected; humanity, fair dealing, and generosity triumphing in the visible, or relying on the invisible world. His mind in his biographic memoir is continually running on the Aristotelian Ethics and high Platonic theories, which formed the religion of the educated population of his time.

??????????? Plutarch himself, at the opening of his pairing of Alexander and Caesar, clearly states the difference between his biographies and conventional histories. Ironically, of all his comparisons that have survived, this one that would have compared the two greatest military leaders of antiquity is lost. This is how Plutarch opens his Life of Alexander at DRYDEN-2/139.

It being my purpose to write the lives of Alexander the king, and of Caesar … I were to blame if I should not by way of apology forewarn my reader that I have chosen to epitomize the most celebrated parts of the story … It must be borne in mind that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavor by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated of by others.

??????????? Readers of Arrian’s “Campaigns of Alexander” will be familiar with details of battles, as Plutarch informs us above, but readers of this carefully composed biography will arguably know much more about the most history-changing individual, the man who conquered all the ancient Greek poleis and the Persian and Egyptian empires, and whose successors founded the Ptolemaic, Seleucid, and Antigonid kingdoms.

??????????? In Waterfield-Alexander/4, we read of the young Alexander’s natural character.

Even as a child, however, his self-restraint was apparent in his stubborn disregard for physical pleasures and the composure with which he approached them, which contrasted with his intensity and impetuosity in other respects; moreover his ambitious desire for recognition gave his mind a certain dignity and detachment beyond his years.

??????????? We read more of this “ambitious recognition for desire” at Waterfield-Alexander/5 at a time when Alexander’s father, King Philip of Macedonia, has raised an unstoppable army and is irresistible in winning conquests throughout the greater region.

Alexander never used to greet the news that Philip had captured an important city or won a famous victory with particular delight … Since he had set his sights on excellence and fame, rather than pleasure and wealth, he thought that the more he received from his father, the less he would accomplish himself … he did not want him to bequeath an empire which would afford him wealth, luxury, and enjoyment, but one which would provide him with conflicts, wars and opportunities for distinction.

??????????? We also learn the origin story of Alexander’s famous warhorse, Bucephalus, who was brought to Macedonia from Thessaly, a kingdom famous for its indomitable calvary horses. This horse proved to be untrainable, and after many experienced men had done their best to ride him, they found him to be “intractable and quite unmanageable.” Philip decided to send the horse away because he was “wild and uncontrollable.” At this point, at Waterfield-Alexander/6, the young Alexander speaks up.

‘What a horse they are losing! All because they are too inexperienced and feeble to manage him!’ … He ran alongside the horse for a short while, until that he saw he was bursting with energy and that his spirit was up …jumped up, sat safely astride him. … Alexander made a perfect turn and started back jubilant and triumphant. … his father – so we are told – actually shed tears of joy, and when Alexander had dismounted he kissed him on the head and said, ‘Son, you had better try to find a kingdom you fit: Macedonia is too small for you.’

??????????? Plutarch also informs us of Alexander’s unique intellectual training because Philip wanted the greatest possible education, “he sent for the most famous and learned of the philosophers, Aristotle.” As payment worthy of this noble assignment, Philip rebuilt and repopulated Stagira, Aristotle’s hometown which Philip had earlier destroyed and depopulated. And a very special education it was, as Plutarch relates at Waterfield-Alexander/7.

It looks as though Alexander not only received from Aristotle his ethical and political doctrines, but also took in his more profound, secret teachings, which Aristotle’s successors used to call the ‘oral’ and ‘esoteric’ teachings and did not offer to the public.

??????????? Plutarch brings his psychological insights to Alexander’s most famous destructions of the ancient city of Thebes in Boetia and the Persian palace at Persepolis. He also delivers a bracing presentation of Alexander’s boundless courage, heedless of danger unto death. In the following example, Alexander, still a young man, has conquered Greece, Egypt, and Persia. But even his unbeaten army, after an almost unbroken series of battles and sieges over 12 years since Philip conquered the combined forces of Athens and Sparta at Chaeronea in 338 BC, all the way east to the Hyphasis, near today’s Amritsar in 326 BC, the last river in Punjab, India, his troops finally rebelled and refused to go on. After fiercely resisting their desperate pleas, Alexander agrees to end his eastward campaign, and decides to make his way down the Indus River to the “outer sea,” the Indian Ocean. But along the way, there are more battles to fight and people to conquer. At Waterfield-Alexander/63, the great conqueror’s audacious courage almost costs him his life in one of a long string of such displays in battle. This is a rare example of Plutarch painting such a vivid Homeric combat scene.

When he took on the people known as the Mallians, who have the reputation of being the best fighters in India, he came very close to being cut down. After sweeping the defenders off the walls with a hail of missiles, a ladder was placed against the wall and he was the first up it, but then the ladder was broken and he found himself exposed to the missiles of the Indians who lined the bottom of the wall below him. Despite being almost alone he crouched down and leapt into the middle of the enemy, and luckily landed on his feet. As he brandished his weapons, the Indians saw it as a flash of flame and an apparition moving in front of his body, and so at first they fled and scattered. But when they saw he was supported by only two Shield-bearers, they rushed up … trying to pierce his armor and wound him with sword and spears … an arrow from a bow with such energy and force … penetrated his breastplate and lodged in his ribcage … finally a blow on the neck from a club forced him to rest his back on the wall, with his eyes still fixed on his enemies. Meanwhile, his Macedonian troops had formed a solid mass around him and, now unconscious of his surroundings, he was snatched away….