Plutarch’s Lives: A Study in Virtue and Vice
A Seminar
When Shakespeare sought to understand the rise and fall of the Roman republic, and the talented and ambitious men who made, sustained, and destroyed it, he turned to the greatest biographer of the ancient world: Plutarch (AD 46-120). Plutarch’s Lives became the staple of liberal education, and for a time it was the most common book, after the Bible, in American homes. His biographies kept the memory of those men and their world alive down to our time, directly and through the statesmen and thinkers who studied him with care, a list that includes Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon, Hamilton, Napoleon, Rousseau, Emerson, and Goethe.
Yet what need have we of Plutarch’s heroes, raised as we are in a world of bourgeois virtues—of security, commerce, tolerance, and individualism? Surely we would find little to learn from the lives of those who rose up in a world of martial valor, ferocious republics, pagan gods, and strange moralities. Still, it may give us pause that so many of the makers of the modern world—our own educators—educated themselves through the lives of Plutarch. Perhaps he has something to teach us as well. How can we know that the standard by which we judge who is admirable and good is the true one without stepping beyond the horizon of our own time, our politics, our morality? How can we claim to know what is right without closely examining—with the help of sharp and sympathetic eyes—very different types of human beings, such as an Alexander, a Caesar, a Cicero, who become prominent only in societies who honor very different qualities than we do? Most of all, how can we claim to know ourselves without such knowledge?
For the question for Plutarch is the same as for us, if we are sufficiently thoughtful and self-reflective: What is virtue or goodness for a human being?