Plutarch's Lives Research Articles

Statues in Plutarch's Lives

This article surveys where Plutarch mentions statues in the Lives and how they enrich his biographies. He alludes to statues in introductions, after death in conclusions, and in synkriseis. 1] They describe his subjects’ appearance. 2] They expressed community appreciation. 3] After some Hellenic and Roman honorands lost favor or were assassinated, their images suffered destruction. 4] Several communities compensated victims for ignominy by replacing their statues. 5] Several subjects erected statues as propaganda. 6] Several “heroes” address other men’s statues. 7] Statues or their absence counterpoint deaths and funerals. 8] Statues ironically embody excessive ambition. 9] Subsequent ancient receptions of material effigies contrast lives and later memory.

John Shirwood and the reading of Plutarch's Lives in late fifteenth‐century England☆

AbstractIn the fifteenth century, Plutarch's Lives were popular among humanists for their moral and historical content. They circulated widely in humanist Latin translations in manuscript and later in print. This article examines the reading of printed copies of these translations in late fifteenth‐century England. It focuses on John Shirwood (d. 1493), Bishop of Durham, an avid English reader of humanist books. The article suggests that Shirwood's annotations to Plutarch should be interpreted as evidence of humanist reading in a recreational context. While modern studies on the history of reading classical texts have often emphasised Renaissance readers' structured, methodical approaches of annotation, Shirwood's copy of Plutarch's Lives reveals a clerk at leisure, enjoying humanist books outside of formal academic study. The article goes on to compare Shirwood's annotations of Plutarch's Lives with those of two other late fifteenth‐century English humanists: the similarly eclectic historical annotations of the bishop John Russell (d. 1494); and, as a counterpoint, the more structured moral and linguistic interests of the grammarian John Stanbridge (1463–1510). These three responses to the Latin translations of Plutarch's Lives thus indicate how educated individuals engaged with humanist texts at different levels of rigour, from methodical academic study to recreational enjoyment.

NOTES ON PLUTARCH, ALEXANDER

Abstract Notes on the text and interpretation of passages in Plutarch's Life of Alexander.

La paideia plutarchea nelle Epistole di Guarino Guarini

At the court of Ferrara, the relationship between Prince Lionello d'Este and Guarino gave an impulse to a vivid interest in Greek and Latin culture. In particular, Guarino's attention, expressed in various epistles, is directed towards the study of history, since reading the deeds of the ancients, rescued from oblivion, shows the way to learn virtue and to escape wickedness. For this reason, Plutarch's Lives fulfil this cultural need well, since in them there were many examples of virtuous characters from the past, who had served the state loyally and honestly, and served as models to be imitated. History is therefore magistra vitae, because it is through it and for it that we know the events experienced in peace and war. From such examples of the past, Lionello will be able to benefit greatly, learning, for example, to recognise flatterers.

Tyrannicide, Law, and Sacrifice in Julius Caesar

This essay introduces Plutarch's Life of Publicola as a crucially important yet previously neglected intertext. The first of two passages relevant to Shakespeare's drama involves Publicola's legislation granting immunity to anyone carrying out tyrannicide if specified conditions are met; the second concerns an abortive conspiracy against the Republic's founding consuls. In conjunction with Graeco-Roman and early modern views of tyranny and antityranny, these passages act as an imaginative matrix and new interpretative framework for Julius Caesar's engagement with tyrannicide, the constitutional implications of one-person rule, the conspirators' hands immersed in the slain Caesar's blood, and the Republic's transition to Imperial rule.

NOTES ON SEVEN PASSAGES OF PLUTARCH'S LIVES

AbstractThis article discusses the text and interpretation of passages in Plutarch's Lives of Romulus, Agis and Cleomenes, Pericles, Brutus, Marcellus, Alexander and Marius.

Cherchez la femme? Fadia in Plutarch's Life of Antony

AbstractIn his Philippics Cicero more than once refers to Fadia, whom he depicts as Antony's wife, and to the children she bore him. He also discusses Fadia in his correspondence with Atticus. Plutarch was aware of the Philippics and much of Cicero's correspondence, and therefore of Fadia, and yet, in his Life of Antony, he says nothing about her. This paper examines three possible explanations for the biographer's silence: (i) an informed sensibility regarding the historical value of invective; (ii) the narrative design of this Life and its contribution to Plutarch's characterisation of Antony; (iii) Plutarch's (disturbing by contemporary standards) disapproval of an aristocrat's siring children on women of the lower orders – even by way of legitimate marriage or concubinage. It is, it appears, the ensemble of these factors which excludes Fadia from Plutarch's biography, and the pertinence of each adds to our appreciation of Plutarch's biographical principles.

Introduction: Shakespeare's Mediterranean

Introduction: Shakespeare's Mediterranean

Catherine the Great and Royal Biographies

Catherine the Great and Royal Biographies Hilde Hoogenboom Ol´ga Igorevna Eliseeva, Ekaterina II: Put´ k vlasti (Catherine II: The Path to Power). 678 Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt, 2015. ISBN-13 978-5829118273. Vera Iuŕevna Proskurina, Imperiia pera Ekateriny II: Literatura kak politika (The Empire of Catherine II's Pen: Literature as Politics). 256 Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2017. ISBN-13 978-5444806616. Following Plutarch, whose second-century Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans remained required reading well through the 19th century, Europeans and Americans have a long tradition in the art of writing biographies of their great men. These are the classic biographies that scholars have rejected in search of new narratives for the men and women of various classes, races, and nations long excluded by such histories. Modern historians' new, self-conscious approaches to the multiple subjectivities, lives, and times of often ordinary individuals, with new virtues and vices, are amply documented in earlier review essays on biographies in this journal.1 Less obvious are how these fundamental critiques of the traditional biographies of the "great" as sole agents of nations and history, driven by "character," have changed the necessary enterprise of writing such biographies. Scholars may disparage yet one more biography of Winston Churchill, the founding fathers, the presidents, Stalin, or Hitler, but they remain a staple of publishers' trade lists because they are the lifeblood of national histories, as each generation reenvisions its history. Ol´ga Eliseeva, whose career is grounded in academic research, works in publishing and straddles these [End Page 649] worlds in unusual ways. In her approximately 30 books over the past 20 years about Catherine the Great and her era, she argues against the sins of popular biography in Russia. Still, she is hardly known abroad, while Vera Proskurina, the other author discussed in this review, is an internationally recognized academic author of two important monographs about the reign of Catherine, one translated into English. These are not biographies, yet they have a lot to offer biographers. Together, these authors' work tells important new stories about how Catherine shaped, and was shaped by, intersecting political and literary networks at court, nationally and internationally. As a model of this approach to Catherine, Simon Dixon's splendid biography focuses on her life and reign through European court life as an institution and a theater that brought together the history, symbolism, culture, and networks of rulers, empires, cities, palaces, ambassadors, and families in intrigues grand and small.2 While Dixon assembles a broad swath of contemporary sources in English, Russian, French, and German, Eliseeva painstakingly compares a dozen contemporary memoirs and correspondences in Russian and Russian translation, representing different courts and national interests, of events leading up to Catherine's coup and Peter III's controversial death. Proskurina, in contrast, does not mention the memoirs, which were not published or circulated in Catherine´s lifetime, but examines her many published histories, plays, operas, and essays in the witty political dialogues of the European Republic of Letters. Proskurina nicely formulates a guiding principle in approaching anything Catherine wrote. Whether the empress wrote privately for herself or for circulation in manuscript or publication, completely or somewhat anonymously, or publicly under her name, she "usually took up her pen with a very concrete goal" (53). Catherine understood that people would pay attention, even after her death, to the act of writing, if not the words, as she continues to shape and be shaped by the perceptions of her readers. The circulation of her words, through her ink and paper, under various signatures, as manuscripts, journals, and books, in various languages at home and abroad, created and still creates the social networks that Bruno Latour argues are the power of material objects to shape meaning and identity beyond the words they contain.3 Catherine did indeed create an empire with her own pen. In cobbling together another Russian empire, Russians today are relearning the demanding craft of biography of emperors and empresses. Although [End Page 650] Plutarch's Lives was, of course, found in the libraries, drama, fiction, memoirs, and letters of the nobility through the 19th century, biographies in Russia arose in a different historical context from...

Fear and Loathing in Prague: Tom Stoppard's Cahoot's Macbeth

Fear and Loathing in Prague:Tom Stoppard's Cahoot's Macbeth Carlo Vareschi (bio) I Love Prague in the Springtime Famously, Tom Stoppard referred to himself as a "bounced Czech."1 In a typical exercise of understatement, this self-definition was intended to jokingly summarize the tragic events that took him from being a Jewish child in a small Czechoslovakian town to starting a new life as a schoolboy in England, losing his father along the way. For most of his life, Stoppard has kept this attitude, treating his Czech roots as a mere accident of history with no relevance to his life, opinions and playwriting. In his article "Another Country," published by the Sunday Telegraph on October 19, 1999, Stoppard made explicit this sense of detachment from his land of birth: "In August 1968 when the armies of the Warsaw pact put down the movement for reform in Czechoslovakia … I had no special feeling other than the general English one of impotent condemnation."2 The article mainly focused on Stoppard's discovering and coming to terms with his being Jewish, but it also included various reports of his early life by people from Zlin, his birthplace. From the fall of Communism on, Stoppard has been allowed to get more easily in touch with relatives in Czechoslovakia: these contacts sparked a process of self-discovery and soul-baring that resulted in the writing of Rock 'n' Roll (2006), a play that celebrated both the liberating power of rock music and the so-called Velvet Revolution,3 but had also interesting autobiographical undertones, particularly in one character, Jan. After fleeing with his parents to England as a Czech Jewish child following the Nazi invasion, Jan goes back to Czechoslovakia with his mother (his father died in the [End Page 123] war) in 1948: a displaced English schoolboy, constantly bewildered by life under a Communist regime, and consequently a dissident until the end of Communism. This is what might have been of Tom Stoppard if his mother, instead of marrying Kenneth Stoppard (Tom's stepfather), had been foolish enough to go back to Czechoslovakia after World War II and the seizing of power by the Communist Party. Anyway, even if Stoppard seems to have fully acknowledged his Czech roots only in his mid-fifties, he had been connected to Czechoslovakia in some ways even before then. In 1977 Kenneth Tynan devoted one chapter of his Show People to Stoppard, structuring it as a sort of Plutarch's parallel life with Vaclav Havel, Czech playwright, political dissident and then president of the newly democratic Czechoslovakia, afterward Czech Republic, from 1992 to 2003.4 Tynan recounts the first encounter between the two: June 18, 1977: By now, Stoppard has recognized in Havel his mirror image—a Czech artist who has undergone the pressures that Stoppard escaped when his parents took him into exile. After thirty-eight years' absence (and two weeks before his fortieth birthday), Stoppard goes back to his native land. He flies to Prague, then drives ninety miles north to Havel's home, where he meets his Doppelgänger for the first time. They spend five or six hours together, conversing mainly in English. Stoppard tells me later that some of the Marxist signatories of Charter 77 regard Havel primarily as a martyr with celebrity value, and didn't want him as their spokesman in the first place. "But they didn't go to jail," Stoppard adds. "He did. He is a very brave man."5 This dislike for Socialism and socialists, libertarian as they may be, is a point of convergence between Stoppard and Havel that deserves to be stressed. As Tynan remarks: "Prague spring … was a socialist society, and, of the many artists who flourished in it, Vaclav Havel was almost alone in not being a socialist. I wonder—or, rather, I doubt—whether Stoppard would seriously have relished living in the libertarian socialist Prague."6 Stoppard and Havel remained friends from this first meeting until Havel's death in 2011 and Stoppard showed his admiration for Havel by dedicating him the TV play Professional Foul (1977)7 and the already mentioned Rock 'n' Roll. I will return to Professional...

THE CLEOPATRAS AND THE JEWS

ABSTRACTThis paper explores a variety of evidence for relations between Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt, and her Jewish subjects. In the first part of the paper, the focus is on the profoundly negative portrait of the queen in the works of Josephus, with particular attention to Cleopatra's alleged antipathy to Alexandrian Jews in Josephus'sAgainst Apion. Analysis of Josephus's evidence confirms, I argue, that his case against the queen does not stand up. The second part of the paper offers a detailed consideration of other evidence, epigraphic and literary, which, I suggest, confirms a picture of the queen as continuing the policy of her predecessors with regard to the Jews of the Ptolemaic kingdom, by participating in the long-established practice of extending royal support and protection to Jewishproseuchai(places of prayer). While the evidence does not permit definitive conclusions, it suggests that Cleopatra looked to particular Jewish groups – as to others – within Egypt for support and in this, followed a path taken by Cleopatra II and Cleopatra III. Finally, a few details in Plutarch'sLife of Antonymay also suggest the queen's political and personal alliances with individual Jews, in Egypt and Judea.

In Search of Plutarch's Lost Life of Epaminondas

During his service as an artillery officer in the French army's campaigns in Italy, the noted classical scholar Paul‐Louis Courier (1773–1825) traveled to Florence in late December of 1807 to visit...

Plutarch's Lives in the Byzantine chronographic tradition: the chronicle of John Zonaras

This article focuses on the presence of material from Plutarch's Lives in Byzantine chronicles, particularly that of John Zonaras, the only chronicler to draw heavily on Plutarch's biographies. Zonaras’ strong appreciation of Plutarch is evident when he repeatedly digresses from the main narrative to incorporate Plutarchean material related to secondary topics. His method of selection from Plutarch's Roman Lives is governed by particular principles: Zonaras’ individual literary tastes, as well as those of his contemporary audience, and the adaptation of Plutarch's material to the Byzantine social and cultural context. These considerations reveal Zonaras to be not merely a copyist of earlier writings, but instead a compiler with his own authorial agenda.

I. Plutarch's Life

The fifth and fourth century bc were truly the pinnacle of Greek history and culture. In those golden days, one could deliberate on political matters with Themistocles and Pericles; discuss our human condition with Socrates and Plato and the past with Herodotus and Thucydides; watch the superb plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; visit the brand-new Acropolis at Athens or consult Apollo at Delphi; drop in at Polyclitus’ workshop or marvel at a skilfully decorated black-figure Panathenaic amphora. It was, however, also a period in which Greeks were still Greeks, whereas the rest were conveniently despised as barbarians. Greeks confidently bashed barbarian brains in (at Marathon, for instance, or Plataea) and were even proud of it. After all, they did it in a culturally justified way. With fellow Greeks, matters were somewhat different. Their brains were likewise crushed, to be sure, and even in such cases, the slaughter was usually not devoid of a certain feeling of ideological superiority, yet to refined Greek ears, the cracking of Greek skulls must have sounded differently from the smashing of the skull of an ordinary effeminate barbarian. Athenians, Spartans, and Thebans could often drink each other's blood (in a skilfully decorated cup), no doubt, but in the end, they all remained fellow Greeks.

Did the Ancient Greek Novels Have Characters?

Did the Ancient Greek Novels Have Characters?

In Accents Yet Unknown: Reenacting Caesar’s Death in a Roman Prison

This essay focuses primarily on the Italian film Cesare deve morire (2012), an adaptation and appropriation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar acted by prisoners in Rebibbia District Prison, Rome. (1) If we use Linda Hutcheons definition of adaptation as derivation that is not a derivative--a work that is second without being secondary and Jean Marsdens description of appropriation as seizure for one's own uses, this production can be seen to fall into both of these (partly overlapping) categories. (2) At the same time, the shape-shifting Julius Caesar finds a poignantly revealing representation in its new form. This paper intends also to highlight the relevance of the presence onstage of Caesar's dead body, both in the English play and in the prison courtyard, in an attempt to demonstrate that the physical presence of the corpse is a determining element in both works. While examining the choices made by the Italian directors in order to tailor the language and the scenes to the setting of a contemporary prison, some more general considerations are made on the possible affinities between theatre and jail and on some of the implications of reading and acting Shakespeare during imprisonment. In 2012, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, both in their early eighties, winners of many prizes, and well known for their literary adaptations (Tolstoy, Pirandello, Dumas) produced the film Cesare deve morire (Caesar Must Die). (3) This film, which we could call a docudrama or docufilm, is based on a performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar by prisoners held in the Carcere di Rebibbia, a high-security prison in the eastern suburbs of Rome. (4) The film won the 62nd Berlin Film Festival, five David di Donatello awards, and was selected as the Italian entry for the best foreign language Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards. The production records the yearly project carried out by the Italian theatre director Fabio Cavalli, which consists in involving prisoners--whose crimes range from drug trafficking and participation in organized crime to murder, and whose sentences vary from ten to fifteen years to life imprisonment--in acting activities organized as part of a rehabilitation program. The Taviani brothers had been to see one of these performances and suggested to Cavalli that he should attempt to put on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and that they might try to film the phases of its production, from casting and rehearsals to the actual performance on the prison stage. Cavalli agreed and the project took place. There are numerous factors specific to this Roman play contributing to making this adaptation particularly striking and memorable. The staging of the Forum scene particularly, with Caesar's dead body and speeches concerning the legitimacy of murder, acquires special resonance for inmates who know they will end their days in that same place. Widely recognized as a watershed in Shakespeare's dramatic writing, coming almost certainly in 1599 between the comedies and histories and just before the great tragedies and thus a kind of gateway to plays where the nature of power is seen in a larger perspective and with deeper symbolic significance, Julius Caesar has lent itself to multiple interpretations and classifications. Moral exemplum, chronicle, or revenge tragedy, derived mainly (but possibly not only) from North's translation of Plutarch's Lives--the lives in question being those of Caesar, Brutus, and Antony--it has often been seen as a play lacking a main character, the eponymous protagonist speaking only six percent of the total lines and dying before the middle of the play. The real theme, then, is not so much Julius Caesar but his death and the debate over the legitimacy of the killing of a sovereign when--and if--he is on his way to becoming a tyrant, a theme which has inevitably encouraged numerous rewritings for both stage and screen and which, as we shall see, brought out abundant parallels with the personal history of the Italian offenders who acted in Cesare deve morire, most of whom came from the south of Italy and were involved in criminal organizations with their own inner rules and hierarchies. …

Caesar as Comic Antichrist: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and the Medieval English Stage Tyrant

Shakespeare's representation of Julius differs notably from those of his contemporaries, as well as from picture of that emerges from his most obvious classical source, Plutarch's Lives. Plutarch's is shrewd, resilient, and relatively dignified; Shakespeare's, in contrast, is physically weak and surprisingly obtuse, prey to laughable grandiosity. Other early modern authors such as Marc-Antoine Muret and William Alexander model their versions of on Seneca's Hercules as well as Plutarch's biography. Shakespeare, however, seems to draw inspiration for his departure from Plutarch from conventional depiction of Julius Caesar's successor Augustus, as well as other tyrants such as Herod Great, in medieval English mystery plays. Over course of these pageants depicting Christian salvation history, protagonists such as Moses and Isaac set up a typology of Christ. (1) Meanwhile, however, secular antagonists such as Pharaoh of Egypt establish a contrary pattern: a typology of Antichrist. Like Lucifer, as well as Antichrist himself, Caesar in mystery plays is typecast as a blustering, comically inadequate parody of Godhead. Vaunting speeches proclaiming his supreme worldly might echo language of God Father. These boasts are then belied, however, by his inability to forestall coming of Christ, whom he fears as a potential political rival. Mystery plays, naturally enough, tend to focus on Augustus emperor of Rome at time of Christ's Nativity. (2) Shakespeare's Julius however, stands in same medieval tradition. As a type of Antichrist, he is a foil for future Christ. His failure sets stage for a different and paradoxically more powerful Messiah. The Problem of Two Caesars In nineteenth century, Shakespeare's representation of as a self-important blowhard met with cries of critical dismay. (3) William Hazlitt complains, We do not much admire representation given here of Julius nor do we think answers to portrait of him in his commentaries. He makes several vapouring and rather pedantic speeches, and does nothing. (4) George Bernard Shaw is less restrained: It is impossible for even most judicially minded critic to look without a revulsion of indignant contempt at this travestying of a great man as a silly braggart. (5) James Boswell, son of famous biographer, saw problem as evidence of Shakespeare's proverbial small Latin and less Greek. (6) Citing Caesar's own Gallic Wars, Boswell writes, cannot be a stronger proof of Shakespeare's deficiency in classical knowledge, than boastful language he has put in mouth of most accomplished man of all antiquity, who was not more for his achievements, than for dignified simplicity with which he has recorded them. (7) By twentieth century, problem of Caesars was well-established. (8) G. Wilson Knight sums up dilemma: We are, indeed, aware of two Caesars: ailing and petulant old man, and giant spirit standing colossal over Roman Empire to be. There is an insubstantial, mirage-like uncertainty about this Caesar. How are we to see him? He is two incompatibles, shifting, interchanging. (9) In his commentary on Plutarch's Life of Julius Caesar, C. B. Pelling observes that Greek biographer seems to admire Caesar. Or at least, his portrait of is more studiously neutral than that of many other classical authors. (10) Suetonius, for instance, praises for his admirable moderation and clemency both in administration and as victor in civil war but concludes that the balance is tilted by his other actions and words, so that he is thought to have abused his power and to have been justly killed. (11) Plutarch, in contrast, ends with remarkable claim that nothing cruel or tyrannical sprang from [Caesars rule]. On contrary, he maintains, it seemed that state needed monarchy, and was Heaven's gift to Rome as gentlest possible doctor. …

The Philosopher-King and the City in Plutarch's Life of Numa

Plutarch characterizes the reign of Numa Pompilius, Romulus’ successor, as a manifest illustration of Plato's philosopher-king. Numa, who reluctantly leaves his private life of quiet contemplation to assume the kingship of Rome, fits within Plutarch's general view that the philosopher has an obligation to participate in political life. Such participation, however, may not be without complication. The Rome Numa inherits is described by Plutarch, again pointing toward the Republic, as a “feverish city.” Numa's reform of “feverish” Rome begins and ends with the controversial relationship he may have had with the philosopher Pythagoras. The central role that Numa's relationship with Pythagoras plays in the Life of Numa reveals that Plutarch uses the Life as a commentary on the relationship between philosophy and the city.

Naphtha and narrative art in Plut. Alex. 35

Plutarch's Life of Alexander 35 consists of a number of sections organised around the discovery of naphtha in Babylonia. Its central episode tells of the near-fatal experiment with a boy whose body caught fire after being smeared with naphtha. This article presents an analysis of the chapter, and in particular of the Stephanus-episode, to show how Plutarch fashions his material to suit his biographical purposes. It is argued that he edits his sources in accordance with how he wishes to portray his protagonist, and deliberately inserts metaphorical allusions into the story to make it serve as a portent of the disastrous interaction between Alexander's character type and the climate of Babylonia. Finally, the story is positioned within the biographical narrative so as to herald the post-acme phase of Alexander's career.

The man behind the law: the characterization of Lycurgus in Plutarch's life

Con objeto de cumplir uno de los objetivos que nuestro alumnado fuera consciente de la importancia que la web 2.0 tiene en la administraciA³n de las PYMES, hemos realizado, con bastante A©xito, una actividad grupal bajo el enfoque del aprendizaje constructivista, consistente en la conversiA³n de una pyme existente en una pyme 2.0, fijando su estrategia de presencia en los medios sociales.