When Emperor Julian’s private secretary, the Greek sophist and rhetorician Himerius, was trying to get his son Rufinus admitted into the Areopagus in the fourth century AD, he pulled a nepo baby move that had nothing to do with the Roman emperor but everything to do with the Empire. Himerius name-dropped to the Athenians a particularly famous member of his son’s maternal ancestry—a certain Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, or Plutarch. “This is the descendant of Plutarch, through whom you [Athens] educate all men,” he proclaimed to the prestigious council. Himerius’s suit unsurprisingly succeeded. 

A millennium later, famed French salonnière Madame Roland avowed that it had been Plutarch who had predisposed her to become a republican by inspiring in her an enthusiasm for public virtues and liberty (“Plutarque m’avait disposée pour devenir républicaine … il m’avait inspiré le véritable enthousiasme des vertus publiques et de la liberté”). Two centuries later, former President Harry Truman was telling his biographer, Merle Miller, “When I was in politics, there would be times when I tried to figure somebody out, and I could always turn to Plutarch, and 9 times out of 10 I’d be able to find a parallel in there.” Mere decades later, the late Henry Kissinger opined in what would be his last book that classical antiquity has long been “the nursery of statesmen.” He was by no means the first to voice the sentiment, of course. But Kissinger’s gloss takes for granted one important thing many of us share—that the “classical antiquity” he invokes as a legacy is a seamless melding of Greece and Rome. 

Kissinger’s assumption—and ours—of a unified Greco-Roman cultural legacy comes honestly. It was imbibed by English speakers via Shakespeare, principally; by French speakers via Montesquieu, Montaigne, Racine, and Jacques Amyot; by Spanish speakers via authors of the Spanish Golden Age and the Generation of 1898, not to mention by Cervantes; in Italy, via the Roman Empire itself, through to Petrarch and the Italian Humanists and the Medici family. All of these had one common teacher from whom they learned this idea. All of them were students of Plutarch. 

“Athens is the school of the world, Plutarch her favourite text-book,” was how scholar D. A. Russell decided to gloss Plutarch’s legacy to especially the West in 1973. There are essays to be written (and attempts already made) tracing Plutarch’s specific influence through all genres and nationalities of writers, statesmen, and generals from his day to ours. But the more interesting and tangible question is how—and why—the conquered subject, provincial civil servant, and philosophic writer Plutarch undertook the task in the first place, principally via The Parallel Lives.

The Roman Empire had a puzzling and problematic relationship with its Hellenistic forebear in the second century AD. This Plutarch knew all too well. The Boeotian plains where Chaeronea, Plutarch’s birthplace, was situated had witnessed its fair share of clashes between cities and nations, from before the battle of 338 BC, in which Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander defeated Athens to become master of Greece, to the Roman Sulla’s victory in 86 BC in the First Mithridatic War. Sulla was not the last Roman to conquer Greece, but his “vehement and implacable” desire to conquer Athens, combined with his thumotic rage, epitomized for Plutarch a deep-seated tension between the ways of Greece and Rome. 

Sulla was fueled, Plutarch writes in his Parallel Lives, by emulation, “fighting as it were against the shadow of the once famous city, or out of anger.” Simultaneously, Sulla appeared to be dismissive of the Greeks and their glorious past: “Put up your speeches and be gone. I was sent … not to take lessons, but to reduce rebels to obedience,” he had told the suppliant Athenian envoys. Greece had long been a prize for Rome and not just for its geopolitical significance. Its rich cultural heritage was a source of awe and envy across the Mediterranean region, with its legendary past of mythical or near-mythical heroism in the service of freedom being a continual source of pride and inspiration, not to mention a “rock of refuge” for the entire Greek people. 

Despite having been under Roman rule for 300 years and 10 generations by Plutarch’s day, the Greeks had resisted cultural assimilation, preserving their language, literature, customs, and thus identity. A crusty law-and-order type Roman soldier or provincial governor, determined to keep a stable peace between the cities and regions of Greece, could be understandably suspicious of how that cultural resistance might flame into a more kinetic one. Thus, while “Romans from Aemilius Paullus to Cicero and Pliny the Younger recognized Greek culture as admirable and the source of their own ideal of humanitas,” and while “Roman rule did not mean to be oppressive,” as Philip Stadter argues in Sage and Emperor, “power could always turn vicious, as Plutarch knew well.” Plutarch’s great-grandfather had suffered the lash from Antony’s Roman soldiers, and had frequently told Plutarch the stories. 

Rome’s militarism had always had a dangerous proclivity to bloodlust. Rome’s defining feature from the days of Romulus and Remus through to Coriolanus, the Gracchi brothers, Marius and Sulla, and the age of Julius Caesar was thymos or spiritedness. And thymos, as Socrates had explored it in Plato’s Republic, seeks to overcome all obstacles in its way. It lends itself toward a willingness to kill and be killed. Spiritedness is also associated with a sense of justice and injustice; it leads an individual to strike back at those who have harmed him. Spiritedness is thus attached to a concern for honor, as Catherine Zuckert has explored in Understanding the Political Spirit. But spiritedness as the political passion par excellence shows itself as a yearning for superiority, honor, and glory—a yearning toward goals the most difficult to attain. Thus, on the positive side, when it comes to honor, spiritedness gets tied to liberty, to law, and to justice. On the negative side, however, spiritedness expresses itself as moral indignation when the latter is threatened: the spirited soldier or guardian can end up destroying his community through thymos. The nature of spiritedness is inherently equivocal. And hence the soldier Sulla’s equivocal lust for Athens.

The spirited Roman is thus uniquely in need of the moderating effect of Greek reason or philosophy, in Plutarch’s eyes. Plutarch fully believes in the duty of the philosopher to advise rulers no matter the cost—his ancient master Plato had risked his own life to teach the most powerful monarch in the Greek world of his day, the tyrant Dionysius II of Syracuse (who later sold Plato into slavery for his pains). This is evidenced by Plutarch’s numerous essays on the subject, including A Philosopher Should Speak to a Ruler, To an Untrained Ruler, Whether an Old Man Should Engage in Politics, and Political Precepts, not to mention his Sayings of Kings and Commanders, dedicated to Emperor Trajan. 

But historic developments in the office of the Roman emperor and in the imperial succession made teaching a Hellenic philosophy to a Roman emperor a potentially lethal affair. Having lived under no fewer than ten Roman emperors, including Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, and Domitian, by the time that Trajan bestowed the ornamenta consularia upon him, Plutarch had personal experience of how volatile the relationship could be for the philosopher and any Roman official, up to and including the emperor. He may even have been one of the philosophers expelled from Rome in the successive waves under Vespasian and Domitian.

Plutarch’s political philosophy was disguised as narratives of the lives of the prominent kings, statesmen, and commanders of the past—of the great figures of the classical Greek and republican Roman past. 

Any connection with the imperial court could be risky during that era. (Emperor Domitian killed Senator Iunius Rusticus after he’d attended a Plutarch lecture, apparently for praising one Thrasea Paetus, who’d written a life of Cato.) Before Trajan was introduced into the line of succession via adoption by a desperate, soon-to-be-dead Nerva, the Empire—and Plutarch—had had to live through the Year of the Four Emperors, in which emperor was replaced by emperor in bloody sequence. He writes of this in his Galba, which is now included in the Parallel Lives, although it, along with his Otho, are in actuality all that survive of an earlier work, Plutarch’s Lives of the Caesars. Examining the circumstances of Nero’s suicide and the political, military, and social chaos that ensued, Plutarch compared the situation throughout the empire to “the Cyclops after his eye was out.”

But the calamities of the Roman government might be likened to the motions of the giants that assailed heaven, convulsed as it was, and distracted, and from every side recoiling, as it were, upon itself, not so much by the ambition of those who were proclaimed emperors as by the covetousness and license of the soldiery, who drove commander after commander out, like nails one upon another.

Plutarch invokes the vivid imagery of an effectively headless empire, which he concretizes via the vista of Otho’s swearing-in (as it were) as emperor by the Roman Senate, under duress by the Praetorian Guard and the Roman army, with Galba’s headless body still oozing blood. The backdrop was hundreds of “headless bodies in their consular robes” being still strewn about in the forum. Like the philosophers and the intellectual class, and indeed all of the empire, the Roman Senate suffered severely and arbitrarily from Nero up to Trajan.

Tacitus, Plutarch’s Roman historian contemporary, believed that Trajan’s reign, by contrast, was issuing in the dawn of the beatissimum saeculum, bringing about “an alliance of Principate and Liberty,” as Stadter also notes. The emperor, army, and senate all took a necessary breather when Trajan came to the throne in 98 AD. There were practical, as well as intellectual needs in play: the collapse of Domitian’s authority and the humiliation that the senatorial aristocracy at Rome had suffered under him meant that both elements were attempting to reshape their roles in relation to each other. From the start, Trajan appeared consciously to be ruling with a different style; “without surrendering the power and prerogatives of previous emperors,” the new emperor was “emphasizing his close ties to the senate and populace as well as the army.”

The intellectual arguments needed to underpin and guide the reframing of those imperial relationships help to explain the rebirth of rhetoric, oratory, philosophy, literature, and history that eventually became known as the Second Sophistic. Plutarch, Pliny the Younger, Dio of Prusa (Dio Chrysostom), and Tacitus were among those who arguably formed the first outer crest of that intellectual movement. But where Pliny and Tacitus wrote expressly to shape the nature of the Roman government (Pliny, more visionary and via adulation; Tacitus, through revealing the inadequacies and corruption of the court) and Dio wrote abstract orations addressed to Trajan on kingship and the virtues of the sovereign, Plutarch took the softer, more indirect approach. His political philosophy was disguised as narratives of the lives of the prominent kings, statesmen, and commanders of the past—of the great figures of the classical Greek and republican Roman past. 

 Plutarch’s work, no less than his contemporaries’, was also meant to educate both emperor and that senatorial aristocracy. This is made clear in the dedication of the Parallel Lives to his friend, Trajan confidante, and Roman senator and sometime consul, Sosius Senecio. Plutarch knew full well that an absolute monarchy, even when not a dictatorship, still required circumspection, indirection, and a degree of self-censorship on the part of those who would critique it and still hope to live.

The need to reevaluate the whole project of the Roman Empire after a period of upheaval, and to reset it through a re-stabilization made possible through the infusion of Greek philosophy, illustrates even further the what and the why—the content and the form—of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. As Susan Mattern has shown in Rome and the Enemy: Imperial Strategy in the Principate, the Roman elite, especially the Roman commanders and emperors, were trained and shaped by literature and rhetoric, and they more frequently made their decisions based on an image of themselves so shaped than on practical or economic considerations. 

“Trajan at the Danube was more likely to think of Croesus at the Halys, Alexander at the Granicus or Indus, or Caesar at the Rhine, than about cost-benefit analysis.” Plutarch was aware of this proclivity and the opportunity it presented for a widely-respected Greek man of letters such as himself, who could retell and interpret the stories of the past. He was strategic in exactly how he shaped the narrative of Greece’s greatness, from the foundings of Athens and Sparta, deliberately creating an opening for philosophy in Rome. He did this through his accounts of Romulus and Romulus’s successor, Numa the philosopher-king, and in pairing the Roman Poplicola with Solon. Plutarch made the former the more successful Solon—“the one … the imitator of the other, and the other his best evidence.”

Of course, Plutarch also did this through the philosophical arrangement of his narrative within each bios. How he tells the story of each of the individuals in his pantheon is no mere aesthetic whim, but directly related to the political and philosophical questions raised by that particular figure.

To make wisdom or philosophy palatable to Rome, Plutarch thus recasts Greece’s historical greatness as political greatness precisely because of its philosophical timbre. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle would have made poor heroes in the eyes of the Romans, and so Plutarch hails Alexander “as the most glorious philosopher and teacher of all,” as scholar Bernard Boulet notes in his essay “The Philosopher King.” Alexander the Great becomes the shining star of Greek thought in the Roman world, a new hero for imperial times and a philosopher-king fit for Roman imperial liking. Pericles becomes the foremost statesman of his day and the author of Athenian imperial greatness because of his philosophic training under Anaxagoras, which enables him to differentiate between natural phenomena and superstition, cause and political effect. And Alcibiades becomes the renegade turncoat of the Peloponnesian War because of his repudiation of Socrates’s teachings about moderation and the truly beautiful as the proper object of ambition. Meanwhile, Lycurgusus’s Sparta is so successful in imbuing its citizens with courage, frugality, communal life, and obedience to the laws through exercise because, in Plutarch’s telling, Sparta is “an entire city given to the love of wisdom.” To be Spartan is to philosophize, not in word—but in deed. 

Arguably the most articulate (and prolific) political writer of his era—the famous Lamprias catalogue lists 227 separate works—Plutarch used his extensive knowledge of Greek political and cultural history, antiquarianism and attenuate arcana, to weave together a tale of historical continuity between past and present, and a cultural unity between Greeks and Romans—with historical proof via monuments, sites, customs, and “questions.” Plutarch, argues Pascal Payen, is one of the greatest contributors “to the emergence of an ‘everlasting civilization’ (κτῆμα ἐς αἰεί), a classical civilization.” (Recall that κτῆμα ἐς αἰεί is the famous phrase from Thucydides, in which he refers in his History of the Peloponnesian War Book I to his project being a “possession for all time.”) For Plutarch, “knowledge about the past serves to create an enduring Greco-Roman civilization without requiring that either people renounce their specific contribution to it.” Furthermore, Plutarch, Payen avows, “is, above all perhaps, a facilitator of cultural exchange and intercultural fluency.” 

This helps to guide modern readers through reading an individual Plutarchian bios or Life as much as the work as a whole. A Plutarch Life is nothing like a modern biography or history—it’s littered with quotes and references to philosophy, comedy, tragedy, poetry, and historical accounts both attributed and unattributed. It includes many digressions and tangents, which can frustrate the linear and chronological expectations of the modern reader. But this rich array of material also helps to explain how Plutarch has influenced such a diversity of thinkers, writers, political and military leaders, and genres across both eras and nations.

These features, somewhat amusingly, seem to have also frustrated the famous sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus, who wrote to Alexius Turzo, treasurer of Hungary in relation to a Plutarch essay Erasmus has recently translated and dedicated to his king, King Henry VIII, (and as recounted by D. A. Russell in his book, Plutarch):

I have found indeed very considerable difficulty in the subtlety of Plutarch’s language, the recondite ideas drawn from the inmost stores of all authors and all disciplines, joined together in such a way that one might regard it not as a style (oratio) but as a cento [literally, a patchwork blanket] or, to put it better, a mosaic work (musaicum opus), constructed of the most exquisite inlaid pieces (emblemata). This was very easy for Plutarch, who had his head full of every kind of literary furniture, but it is very difficult for his translator to observe what he has culled from where, especially as most of the authors from whose fields he garnered the flowers with which he made these garlands are no longer extant.

Nevertheless, Plutarch has continued to captivate and delight as much as puzzle and challenge his readers, ancient, medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and modern. Whether a Beethoven, a Rousseau, a Benjamin Franklin or a Harry Truman, an Alexander Hamilton, or a Shakespeare, Plutarch inspires his readers with his account of the potholes and possibilities of human beings engaging in the political community and with each other, as much as in his grand account of the rise and fall of the Hellenic world and the coming into being of the Roman Empire.

Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series may be the most famous recent works of popular culture to draw inspiration from Plutarch’s Lives, (not to mention one particularly noteworthy episode of now-President Zelensky’s TV show, “Servant of the People”), but after decades of being banished to the academic hinterlands, Plutarch studies seem to be enjoying something of a mini-renaissance, especially among European academics. These have moved on from mere questions of translation, sourcing, and dating, to wrestle with more fundamental questions of politics, religion, and philosophy, even archeology. That more of the political theorists of a Straussian-esque persuasion attuned to arguments about esoteric writing have yet to treat Plutarch seriously or systemically remains surprising, however—and perhaps a testament to just how well Plutarch ultimately did camouflage his philosophical project within seemingly historical narrative. 

Today, our centuries-long reflexive assumption that there was a naturally occurring, inevitable, and seamless melding of Greek and Roman culture—Graeco-Roman culture—is the measure of Plutarch’s spectacular success. Plutarch bound Rome to Greece through more than conquest by crafting a narrative in which the best of the Romans and the Greeks shared a common culture, based ultimately on Greek philosophy. In his telling, Roman rulers succeed in their pacifying and civilizing mission when they reflect an awareness of Hellenic principles of reason and moderation, and fail when they disregard these in favor of passion. 

Knowing this truth may be the very beating heart of Kissinger’s “nursery” lesson—not just for statesmen and military officers, but for us all. For this lesson, we thank you, Plutarch.