ROME tried hard to be generous to Greece and did not quite fail. No garrisons were placed in the new province of Achaea; less was exacted from it than its own taxgatherers had claimed before; the city-states were allowed to govern themselves by their old constitutions and laws; and many of them—Athens, Sparta, Plataea, Delphi, and others—were “free cities” exempt from all restrictions except the right to wage foreign or class war.
Nevertheless, hungry for its ancient liberties, and bled by Roman generals, moneylenders, and businessmen skilled in buying cheap and selling dear, Greece joined in Mithridates’ revolt and paid the heaviest penalty. Athens suffered a devastating siege, and Delphi, Elis, and Epidaurus were pillaged of their sanctuary hoards. A generation later Caesar and Pompey, then Antony and Brutus, fought their duels on Greek territory, conscripted Greek men, requisitioned Greek crops and gold, levied twenty years’ taxes in two, and left the cities destitute. Under Augustus Greek Asia recovered, but Greece herself remained poor, ruined not so much by the Roman conquest as by a stifling despotism in Sparta, a chaotic freedom in Athens, a blighting sterility in soil and men. Her most enterprising sons deserted her for younger and richer lands. The rise of new powers in Egypt, Carthage, and Rome, and the development of industry in the Hellenistic East, left the homeland of the classic spirit outmoded and forlorn. Rome loaded Greece with compliments and ravaged her art: Scaurus took 3000 statues for his theater, Caligula ordered the husband of his mistress to comb Greece for statuary, and Nero alone took half the sculptures of Delphi. Not till Hadrian would Athens smile again.
Epirus bore the brunt of Rome’s anger in the Macedonian Wars; the Senate delivered it to the rapine of the soldiers, and 150,000 Epirots were sold as slaves. Augustus built a new capital for Epirus at Nicopolis to celebrate his triumph at near-by Actium; civilization must have had some homage there, since the City of Victory gave Epictetus an audience and a home. Macedonia fared better than its loyal neighbor; it was rich in minerals and timber, and its commercial life was quickened by the Via Egnatia that spanned it and Thrace from Apollonia and Dyrrhachium to Byzantium. On this great highway, still in part preserved, lay the chief cities of the province—Edessa, Pella, and Thessalonica. This last—known to us as Salonika, but to modern Greeks by its ancient name (Victory of Thessaly)—was the capital of the province, seat of the provincial council, and one of the great ports of trade between the Balkans and Asia. Thrace, farther east, devoted itself to agriculture, herding, and mining; but it had considerable cities at Serdica (Sofia), Philippopolis its capital, Adrianople, Perinthus, and Byzantium (Istanbul). Here at the Golden Horn the merchants and fishmongers grew rich while the Greek settlers of the hinterland gave way to the encroaching barbarians; all the grain of the interior came down to its docks, all the commerce of Scythia and the Black Sea paid toll as it passed by, and the fish almost leaped into the net as they poured through the narrow Bosporus. Soon Constantine would recognize this site as the key city of the classic world.
Thessaly, south of Macedonia, specialized in wheat and fine horses. Euboea, the great island named of old (like Boeotia) for its fine cattle, was described by Dio Chrysostom1 as reverting to barbarism in our second century; here, above all, the discouragement of the poor by the concentration of land and wealth in the hands of a few families, the discouragement of the rich by ever-rising taxes and liturgies, and the discouragement of parentage by selfish wealth and desperate poverty had almost wiped out a once thriving agricultural population, and cattle grazed within the walls of Chalcis and Eretria. Boeotia had not recovered from the death and taxes laid upon it by Sulla’s campaigns; “Thebes,” said Strabo, “is only a village,” huddled into what had once been merely its Cadmea or citadel. A century of peace, however, brought some prosperity to Plataea; and Chaeronea, on whose plains Philip and Sulla had won empires, retained enough charm to keep its most famous citizen; it had become so small, said Plutarch, that he would not make it smaller by leaving it.2 In his calm career and genial thought we find a fairer side of a somber scene, a decent middle class clinging to ancient virtues, capable of civic devotion, warm friendship, and parental love. There is no more pleasant character in our tale than Plutarch of Chaeronea.
He was born there about A.D. 46, and died there about 126. He was a student at Athens when Nero collected triumphs in Greece. He must have had a fair income, for he traveled in Egypt and Asia Minor and twice in Italy; he lectured in Greek at Rome and seems to have served his country in some diplomatic role. He liked the great capital and the good manners and honorable life of its new aristocracy; he admired their stoic code, and agreed with Ennius that Rome had been made by morality and character. As he contemplated these living nobles and the noble dead, the thought came to him of comparing the heroes of Rome with those of Greece. He proposed not merely to write history or even biography, but to teach virtue and heroism by historic exemplars; even his Parallel Lives were in his mind Moralia. He was always a teacher and never lost a chance to tie a moral to a tale; but who has ever done it more gracefully? He warns us, in his “Alexander,” that he is more interested in character than in history; he hopes that by pairing and comparing great Romans with great Greeks he will pass on some moral stimulus, some heroic impulse, to his readers. With disarming candor he confesses that he himself has become a better man through keeping company so long with distinguished men.3
We must not expect to find in him the conscience and accuracy of a proper historian; he is rich in errors of name and place and date and occasionally (if we may judge) misunderstands events; he even fails in two major tasks of the biographer—to show the derivation of his subject’s character and work from heredity, environment, and circumstance, and the development of character through growth, responsibility, and crisis; in Plutarch, as in Heracleitus, a man’s character is his fate. But no one who has read the Lives can feel their shortcomings; these are lost in the vivid narrative, the exciting episodes, the fascinating anecdotes, the wise comments, the noble style. In all these 1500 pages there is not a line of padding; every sentence counts. A hundred eminent men—generals, poets, and philosophers—have borne witness to the book; “it is,” said Mme Roland, “the pasture of great souls.”4 “I can hardly do without Plutarch,” wrote Montaigne; “it is my breviary.”5 Shakespeare takes many stories here, and his view of Brutus goes back through Plutarch to Roman aristocrats. Napoleon carried the Lives with him almost everywhere; and Heine, reading them, could hardly restrain himself from leaping upon a horse and riding forth to conquer France. Greece has not left us a more precious book.
Having seen the Mediterranean world Plutarch returned to Chaeronea, raised four sons and a daughter, lectured and wrote, journeyed now and then to Athens, but for the most part shared to the end of his days the simple life of his native town. He thought it an obligation to combine public office with his scholarly pursuits. His fellow citizens elected him building inspector, then chief magistrate, then Boeotarch—member of the national council. He presided over municipal ceremonies and festivals, and became in his spare moments a priest of the revived oracle at Delphi. He thought it unwise to reject the old faith because of its intellectual incredibility; the vital thing was not the creed but the support it gave to man’s weak morality, the reinforcing bond it wove among the members and generations of a family and a state. The thrill of religious emotion was in his judgment the most deepening experience of life. Tolerant as well as pious, he almost founded the study of comparative religion by his treatises on Roman and Egyptian cults.6 All deities, he argued, are aspects of one supreme being, timeless, indescribable, so far removed from earthly and temporal affairs that intermediary spirits (daimones) must create and regulate the world. There are also evil spirits, marshaled by some master demon who is the source and soul of all the chaos, irrationality, and viciousness in nature and man. It is good, Plutarch thought, to believe in personal immortality—a rewarding Heaven, a cleansing Purgatory, a punishing Hell; he was comforted by the possibility that a stay in Purgatory might purify even Nero, and that only a few would suffer eternal damnation.7 He denounced the terrors of superstition as worse than atheism, but he accepted divination, oracles, necromancy, and the prophetic power of dreams. He did not pretend to be an original philosopher; like Apuleius and so many others of that age, he described himself as an adapter of Plato. He condemned the Epicureans for replacing the fear of Hell with the gloom of annihilation, and criticized the “repugnances” of Stoicism; but he held, like a Stoic, that “to follow God and to obey reason are the same thing.”8
His lectures and essays have properly been collected under the title Moralia, for most of them are simple and genial preachments on the wisdom of life. They discuss everything, from the advisability of keeping old men in public office to the priority of the chicken or the egg. Plutarch is fond of his library, but confesses that good health is more precious than good books:
Some men, led by gluttony, rush off to join in drinking bouts, as if they were laying in provisions for a siege. . . . The less expensive foods are always more helpful. . . . When, in a precipitate retreat, Artaxerxes Memnon had nothing to eat but barley-bread and figs, he exclaimed, “What a pleasure is this, which has never been mine before!” . . . Wine is the most beneficial of beverages, provided there is a happy combination of it with the occasion as well as with water. . . . Especially to be feared are indigestions arising from meats, for they are depressing at the outset, and a pernicious residue from them remains behind. It is best to accustom the body not to require meat in addition to other food. For the earth yields in abundance many things not only for nourishment but for comfort and enjoyment. But since custom has become a sort of unnatural second nature, our use of meat should be … as a prop and support of our diet; we should use other foods . . . more in accord with nature, and less dulling to the reasoning faculty, which, as it were, is kindled from plain and light substances.9
He follows Plato in advocating equal opportunity for women, and gives many examples of cultured ladies in antiquity (there were some in his own circle); but he views adultery by the man with all the lenience of a pagan male:
If a man in private life, who is incontinent and dissolute in regard to his pleasures, commit some peccadillo with a paramour or maidservant, his wedded wife ought not to be indignant or angry, but she should reason that it is respect for her that leads him to share his licentiousness with another woman.10
Nevertheless, we rise from these charming essays warmed by the fellowship of a man humane, essentially wholesome, and complete. We are not offended by the commonness of his ideas; his moderation is a welcome antidote to the ideological hysteria of our time; his good sense, his kindly humor, and his engaging illustrations carry us on unresisting, even over the shoals of his platitudes. It is refreshing to find a philosopher who is wise enough to be happy. Let us be thankful, he counsels us, for the common boons and graces of life, and feel them none the less gladly for their permanence:
We must not forget those blessings and comforts which we share with many more, but must . . . joy in this, that we live, that we have our health, that we behold the light of the sun. . . . Will not the good man consider every day a festival? . . . For the world is the most august of temples, and most worthy of its Lord. Into this temple man is introduced at his birth, into the presence not of statues made with hands and motionless, but such as the Divine Mind has manifested to our senses . . . even the sun, moon, and stars, and the rivers ever pouring forth fresh water, and the earth producing food…. As this life is the most perfect of initiations into the most exalted of mysteries, we should ever be filled with good cheer and rejoicing.11