Customer Reviews

Plutarch's Lives, Volume 2 (Modern Library Classics)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have now plowed through the second and final volume of this series, and though my energy began to flag, I still think this is one of the great classics of all time. Though not exactly chronological, the stories in this volume tend to occur later than in the first volume and are often longer, which is understandable given that Julius Caesar and Alex the Great are covered in this volume. THe stories are also more intricately interwoven - you get lives that overlap, such as those of Brutus and Caesar, with slightly different takes and details in each one. The upshot of all this is that the serious reader will need to keep this around as a reference, going over the text again when some question of detail comes up or to refresh one's point of view. Plutarch's take on things is very different from that of many authors: he is a pro-aristocrat conservative and admiring of martial prowess, yet pro-Republican. Once again, the reader really needs to know the historical context before undertaking this. It is not at all introductory.

Warmly recommended. Though it takes real effort at times to continue, it is well worth the slog.

Plutarch's Lives is a book of epic proportions. Essentially, it is an encyclopeadia of the biographies of famous men in the history of Ancient Greece and Rome. With over 50 biographies and comparisons, this book covers the most important people in the history of Greco-Roman civilization. The impact of this book is phenomenal. Shakespeare read it, Dante read it. Its influence is evident in their writing. The book transcends simple biography though, and contains a wealth of information about ancient cultures such as Sparta. Plutarch also compares different historical figures to one another for an interesting study of comparative politics and virtue. Some of Plutarch's information is questionable, but it remains one of the best sources available. If you are interested in classical history then this is a great reference and it's enjoyable for pleasure reading as well.

Plutarch's parallel lives, parallels the life of a great Greek with a great Roman. Theseus and Romulus, Demosthenes and Cicero, Alexander and Ceasar. There are forty- six such pairs which tell not only the story of the individuals but of their society . Plutarch brings to bear his tremendous learning from a wide variety of sources . Plutarch's first interest is in the character of the people he writes about, and the moral lessons he can draw from comparison of the lives. His work has had great influence and provided inspiration and material to Shakespeare, Montaigne, Browning and others. The reading of the work is not always easy, and there are strange and questionably credible tales and details but the work is humanly alive. The reading and studying of it was once considered a basic part of true humanistic education, and not the confine of a few scholars in the classic departments of universities. It once had broad reader appeal and anyone with a keen interest in biography, and the subject of how lives have been lived in worlds far from our own, would do well if not to read this work cover- to- cover than at very least have a good read in it.

In my review of the first volume of the Modern Library edition of Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, I explained my preference for the Modern Library edition as opposed to the Loeb or the Penguin Travesty Edition. Please refer to that review for some thoughts on which edition to choose to read.
What I first want to do in this review is to provide a little background to a reading of Plutarch. Hopefully, this will provide an explanation of why Plutarch remains such a vital author in the Western Canon.
Plutarch lived from around 46 to 120 BCE. He therefore lived in the Roman Empire from the reign of Nero to the beginnings of Hadrian's reign. He was contemporaries with Tacitus and Epictetus. He lived for a while in Rome but most of his life was spent in Boetia in Greece. He was a priest of the oracle at Delphi for several decades and a prolific writer on philosophical, scientific and ethical themes.
In addition the the Lives, Plutarch wrote many essays and dialogues that have been collected together under the general title of the Moralia. The Loeb Classical Library provides a complete English rendering and there are several good one volume selections. I mention the Moralia because I believe that a reading of some of the essays are essential to understanding the ethical explorations of the Lives.
Consider the opening to his essay, "On Moral Virtue". Plutarch starts off by distinguishing "moral" virtue from "contemplative" virtue. The differences lies "chiefly in that it has as its material the emotions of the soul and as its form reason" (p.19 of the Loeb Moralia, Vol.6).
This gives us a picture of Plutarch as Middle Platonist with an Aristotlean idea of virtue as a mean. The picture we get is of a human world where evil and vice are as real as virtue and reason, where the emotions can work as the energizing element of both virtue and vice and where the achievement of virtue is always the result of education and discipline and is never complete.
It is this picture of the world that is then explored so magnificently in the Lives. The Lives focus of the political and military realm of the statesmen and uses the various people discussed as the raw material for the exploration of all the ways that excellent men (and a few excellent women)can succeed or fail at virtuous leadership.
One of the themes that I feel Plutarch explores is whether Roman hegemony can be defended on any grounds other than their success at arms. In this, he is writing as a cultured Greek testing the Roman leadership by the standards of a conquered people.
He looks at the ways that various personal failings (lack of prudence in a general, an excessive love of drink, uncontrollable lust whether for boys or women or greed or any pretty much any excess) can waylay and overturn a lifetime of achievement.
Another favorite theme of Plutarch's is the turning of Fortuna's (or Tyche's)wheel. Plutarch exemplifies the belief that we are laid low or allowed success almost whimsically by this goddess who will surely turn our lives upside down again soon. Just because She can (At least, as far as we know).
Against these backgrounds of Roman hegemony, personal failings and the twists and turns of Fate, Plutarch tries to show us the struggle of the individual to serve his city, his Empire or his own petty whims. It is a great theme, one that he writes about with insight and with sympathy for those whose stories he is telling.
This gets to my annoyance with the Penguin volumes of the Lives. By separating the paired Greek and Roman lives and by presenting them out of sequence, Penguin is trying to present Plutarch as an historian, a role he explicitly denies for himself. While I think he is a very good historian, he is even more a uniquely great essayist in practical political and personal ethics. This is, I believe, how Montaigne read Plutarch and I think both Jefferson and Madison as well. This is how Plutarch has helped to shape our cultural history. In fact, I am going to make the claim that it is impossible to fully understand the debate around the adoption of the U.S. Constitution unless you have read the whole of both Plutarch and Livy. Anyone who wants to persue that thesis with me, please write a comment.
My recommendation is that you get the Modern Library edition and dig in. If you don't like it, wait a year or two and try it again. For Plutarch presents us with the broadest possible experience of the world. You may find, like me, that you have to wait a while for your own experience to grow broad enough in order to really see just what an amazing book this ancient neighbor of ours has given us.

Very good book. If your into that era in history, you can't go wrong on this. Hey, it's Plutarch!

Please see my review for the volume I to know my opinion about this book. Thank you.

Twain's pejorative definition of `classic' need not apply. I define classic as that (text) which speaks to the heart over an extended duration - perhaps for several generations, as in `classic rock', or several millennia, as in Plutarch's "Lives". I probably never would have read Plutarch, were it not for a glorious discovery of Montaigne in mid-life. Having acquired enough distaste for the copious demands required to master classical languages after five years of Latin in secondary school, I made an arbitrary and direly misguided vow to eschew all Classics courses at the university level. And thus again is revealed the fateful difference between post-modern (post-1945), and the modern (c. 1500 - August 5, 1945) pedagogy, of which I unwittingly, if serendipitously, caught the tail end. The modern cannon required thorough immersion in the classics, and, for many years, Plutarch was required reading in the best schools, and should be even now. The author of the Shakespearian plays came to Plutarch by way of Montaigne (and likely read the Amyot translation, and only later the North, if at all), and the English schools came to Plutarch by way of Shakespeare. We might say that the revival of Plutarch was one of the most far reaching achievements of the Northern Renaissance.
At one point in his celebrated chronicle of the self, Montaigne (as a shaper and bona fide member of that cannon, guardian of some of what is best in our cultural inheritance) amusedly reveals that, when his critics believe they are attacking his work, they are actually attacking Plutarch and/or Seneca, so profound is their presence in his writing, and, in his "Defense of Plutarch and Seneca", he declares that . . . "my book [is] built up purely from their spoils".

And what a book it is! But Plutarch's magnum (see the 14 volumes of the Loeb Classical Library for his other works), is the greater. Montaigne is one of the great students of the self. Plutarch is the first (and may yet still be the definitive) historian of virtue. Montaigne, in scrutiny of his own nature, seeks to recognize the limitations and potentials of the self, and thereby sketch our general spiritual contours. Plutarch, in an unparalleled series of real life, historically and culturally pivotal, examples, shows us what they are.

The book records in the most remarkably intimate style (Plutarch has few peers as a master of narrative and an uncanny ability to ferret out of detail the significance of individual actions as a unified whole), the major events in the lives of the most impacting figures of the ancient world. Therefore, like the best novels, the book forms a world in itself, a lost world, the world of our ancestors, through a landscape drawn of actions and consequences. The structure of the book is such that an account of the seminal moments in the life of a noble Greek and then of a noble Roman are brought forth in pairs, followed by a comparison. In some sections of the work these comparisons are absent. They appear at some point in antiquity to have either been lost to or removed from the text, which would seem to explain why, for instance, there is no comparison of Alexander and Caesar. But the comparisons are brilliant, and eminently instructive.

Of course, from the details alone, we may draw our own inferences. Alexander, as a mere teen, leading his troops in hand-to-hand combat, won his first battle fighting uphill at night. Caesar, a heavy drinker, was wont to ride horseback at full tilt with his hands clenched behind his back. He had a life-long passion for Cato's sister and it is said that from their relationship, which continued through their respective marriages, Brutus was born. Et tu? Of course, one cannot fail to mention, even in this briefest review of the abundantly rich description in the nearly 1,300 pages which comprise the book, the death of Cato the Younger - one of the most exquisitely drawn figures in the book. Hunted down with the remnants of his troops into the wastelands of Carthage by the army of Octavius Ceasar in an effort to snuff out the last vestiges of republican resistance and opposition to Empire, realizing that the last realistic hope for freedom is lost, Cato attempts ritual suicide (a Stoic custom common to Roman nobility) by disembowelment. As Plutarch describes the scene, ". . . he did not immediately die of the wound; but struggling, fell off the bed, and throwing down a little mathematical table that stood by, made such a noise that the servants, hearing it, cried out. And immediately his son and all his friends came into the chamber, where, seeing him lie weltering in his own blood, great part of his bowels out of his body, but himself still alive and able to look at them, they all stood in horror. The physician went to him, and would have put in his bowels, which were not pierced, and sewed up the wound; but Cato, recovering himself, and understanding the intention, thrust away the physician, plucked out his own bowels, and tearing open the wound, immediately expired." In Seneca's words: "For Cato could not outlive freedom, nor would freedom outlive Cato."

However, the life most appropriate for the contemporary reader, I feel (and wish that every member of the shadowy corporate/military junta that seems to be ruling us these days would read and take to heart) is the life of Crassus. Crassus was the most successful businessman in the history of the Roman Empire. Plutarch relates that at one time he owned virtually one-third of the real estate in Rome. However, such mind-boggling success was not enough for him. His yen, and later, obsession, was to be revered as a great military leader, a world conqueror, expand the domain of the already burgeoning Empire, and the object of his fantasies was the area of the world at that time known as Mesopotamia and Persia, today as Iraq and Iran. We follow as he makes extensive preparations, investing his own fortune and a great deal of the nation's wealth into outfitting an army for the venture. And at first, the invasion of Mesopotamia seems to go well. But the centers of population are spread out over great stretches of desert, and the occupation never really succeeds, because a central authority cannot be solidly established. Crassus, however, remains undaunted, even though the troops are becoming mutinous as supplies begin to run thin. Led on by treacherous advisors, he enters Parthia (somewhere in the vicinity of modern day Syria). Plutarch describes the grueling denouement with his usual detachment, aplomb, and gifted eye for pertinent detail. Having lost the greatest fortune in the world, he proceeds to lose his troops, then his sons, and finally his life. These lessons are never too late for the learning, and my apologies to Twain, but a classic is a text which retains its urgency to be read, and read now.

I read the Dryden/Clough translation. Dryden was never my favorite writer of his period, the late 17th century - hardly a match for Burton or Milton, in my opinion, but he was poet laureate, and this work I love - his English is fine, and resonates with classic dignity. Clough, the mid-nineteenth century British scholar who revised the translation, befriended Emerson when he traveled to England, and became a sort of mentor to the New England Transcendentalists in general. We can be grateful for such a wonderful rendering for one of the very greatest and edifying masterpieces.

A most concise volume of all the most important people of the Roman Empire.

I'm happy with the book and the conditions it got to me
Everything perfect!!

Although it's a very good translation, I prefer to read the books of Plutarchos in the original Greek texts because the version of Dryden is now somewhat obsolete. And if you don't understand the ancient Greek language well, I recommend you to read several volumes of Plutarch in THE LOEB CLASSICAL LIBRARY.