Plutarch's Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice [Paperback]

Tim Duff (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 23, 2002

This book lucidly explains how the Parallel Lives of Plutarch (c. AD 45-120) are more than mere `sources' for history. The Lives offer us a unique insight into the reception of Classical Greece and Republican Rome in the Greek world of the second century AD. They also explore and challenge issues of psychology, education, morality, and cultural identity.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The structure of the argument is intelligent and its conclusions convincing... It is a book that will be used, as well as read, by scholars and if it succeeds in resuscitating the idea of actually reading Plutarch's corpus it will have been proved itself a major achievement."--Bryn Mawr Classical Review

"The appearance of Tim Duff's book is an event in Plutarchan studies.... To be frank: students of the Lives will need to own this book, which is now the starting point for subsequent debate about Plutarchan moralism in his biographical writings."--Ploutarchos

"This intelligent, learned, and lucid book will undoubtedly (and deservedly) have an immediate and profound impact upon studies of the Lives. In its sensitive and nuanced attention to the texture and detail of Plutarch's writing, as well as its methodological reorientation, it raises the stakes substantially. No serious Plutarchan scholar (as they say) will want to be without this one."--The Classical Review

"This excellent book by an able scholar will set a new standard in Plutarch studies.... It is an outstanding contribution to the field."--American Journal of Philology

"[a] valuable analysis of Plutarch's Parallel Lives...While the scholarly tone of the volume will win it primarily a graduate student and professional audience, there is much of value for undergraduates as well in a work that offers a fresh view of these perennially-fascinating works."--The Classical Outlook

About the Author

Tim Duff is a Lecturer in Classics at the University of Reading

Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (May 23, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199252742
• ISBN-13: 978-0199252749
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,691,892 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best possible entry to Plutarch's world, November 28, 2009

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This review is from: Plutarch's Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice (Paperback)

I have been reading Plutarch's Lives in the Modern Library edition for some time now. After I finished the first volume, I went looking for some secondary sources to provide some guidance. The Lives are extraordinary- they are exciting, thoughtful, contradictory, moralisitic yet that moralism seems to be endlessly nuanced. They are wonderful and timeless and very sunk in their historical moment.
Fortunately, Tim Duff is around to straighten it out for us. This book is a revision of his Ph.D. dissertation. It has some of the excesses of such documents. Duff references practically everyone who has written on Plutarch in the last 40 years in Italian, Greek, German, French and English. Some times Duff is a little too insistent for my taste on not Latinizing Greek names. Worse, on occassion, he uses Greek in the text without translating it. But that is rare. Usually he quotes the Greek and then provides his own translation.
He is incredibly learned in Greek and Roman literature and it shows in his understanding of many of Plutarch's rhetorical devices.
Most of all, he has, as much as anyone, devoted his scholarly life to closely analyzing the Lives. He has published several studies on individual books in Plutarch and is writing several more.
Duff insists on not seperating the Parallel Lives. He sees the pairs as integral units. He notes that Plutarch provided the majority of pairs with introductions, with transitional passages and with a synkriseis (a conclusion that is also a reckoning of sorts- hopefully I am using the singular form of the word). He very dutifully notes the exceptions to this structure, notes which of these exceptions can be explained as lost text and which must be accepted as true exceptions. By the way, this is one of the few missteps that I know of in the Penguin Classics series. The decision to seperate the paired Lives out by historical period is an act of idiocy that borders on insolence. Tim Duff's book
provides all the evidence needed to support that statement.
The first part of Duff's book is devoted to explaining the moral philosophy that Duff sees as standing behind the book. The core of the book are case studies of four pairs of the Lives which display how Plutarch uses rhetorical devices to announce the theme(s) of each pair, how those themes are explored in those lives and then summed up in the synkriseis. One of the main arguments of this section is that Plutarch rarely provides us with definitive and final assessments. Plutarch will instead focus on making the comparison more complicated right up to the end of the synkriseis. Plutarch leaves us with questions that we have to tease out our own answers to.
The final section of Duff's book is devoted to two brilliant chapters. The first explores the synkrisis (plural form I am hoping) as a whole. Duff talks about the rhetorical strategies that are uniques to these and the fact that the synkrisis are not just a summing up but a taking of the comparison to a whole new level. The frequently introduce new facts not mentioned in the Lives themselves or evaluate those facts very differently.
The final chapter is devoted to Plutarch's cultural program which Duff sees (in part) as a form of resistance to Roman hegemony. The Lives as a whole evaluate Greek and Roman men by Greek cultural standards. One point that Duff made is that several of the Roman Lives are judged by the extent to which they have or have not absorbed Greek learning and culture.
Finally, the book is made useful to the expert in the field by the inclusion of an index of Greek terms, of passages quoted from classical sources, and seperate indexes for names and themes.
The only drawback to this book at all is the price. Oxford needs to learn to publish some of their scholarly texts at far more reasonable prices. This is a book that could be useful to anyone taking a course that studies Plutarch or to any "reasonably intelligent layman". I have about five or six more studies of Plutarch to read in the coming months but unless I am very much surprised, I expect this book to remain the one I recommend to anyone looking for just one book on Plutarch to read.