In Our Time - Plutarch's Parallel Lives

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Greek biographer Plutarch (c46 AD-c120 AD) and especially his work 'Parallel Lives' which has shaped the way successive generations see the Classical world. Plutarch was clear that he was writing lives, not histories, and he wrote these very focussed accounts in pairs to contrast and compare the characters of famous Greeks and Romans, side by side, along with their virtues and vices. This focus on the inner lives of great men was to fascinate Shakespeare, who drew on Plutarch considerably when writing his Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Timon of Athens and Antony and Cleopatra. While few followed his approach of setting lives in pairs, Plutarch's work was to influence countless biographers especially from the Enlightenment onwards.WithJudith Mossman Professor Emerita of Classics at Coventry UniversityAndrew Erskine Professor of Ancient History at the University of EdinburghAnd Paul Cartledge AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, University of CambridgeProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Mark Beck (ed.), A Companion to Plutarch (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014)Colin Burrow, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2013), especially chapter 6Raphaëla Dubreuil, Theater and Politics in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (Brill, 2023)Tim Duff, Plutarch’s Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice (Oxford University Press, 1999)Noreen Humble (ed.), Plutarch’s Lives: Parallelism and Purpose (Classical Press of Wales, 2010)Robert Lamberton, Plutarch (Yale University Press, 2002)Hugh Liebert, Plutarch's Politics: Between City and Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2016)Christopher Pelling, Plutarch and History (Classical Press of Wales, 2002)Plutarch (trans. Robin Waterfield), Greek Lives (Oxford University Press, 2008) Plutarch (trans. Robin Waterfield), Roman Lives (Oxford University Press, 2008) Plutarch (trans. Robin Waterfield), Hellenistic Lives (Oxford University Press, 2016)Plutarch (trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert), The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives (Penguin, 2023) Plutarch (trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert), The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives (Penguin, 2011) Plutarch (trans. Richard Talbert), On Sparta (Penguin, 2005)Plutarch (trans. Christopher Pelling), The Rise of Rome (Penguin, 2013) Plutarch (trans. Christopher Pelling), Rome in Crisis: Nine Lives (Penguin, 2010)Plutarch (trans. Rex Warner), The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives (Penguin, 2006)Plutarch (trans. Thomas North, ed. Judith Mossman), The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (Wordsworth, 1998)Geert Roskam, Plutarch (Cambridge University Press, 2021)D. A. Russell, Plutarch (2nd ed., Bristol Classical Press, 2001)Philip A. Stadter, Plutarch and his Roman Readers (Oxford University Press, 2014)Frances B. Titchener and Alexei V. Zadorojnyi (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Plutarch (Cambridge University Press, 2023)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, the Greek biographer Plutarch's parallel lives

have influenced perceptions of the classical world in unparalleled ways. Working around the end of the first century AD and into the second, he was writing live, she said, not histories, revealing the characters of pairs of famous Greeks and Romans, their virtues and vices. And these were just the qualities that would fascinate Shakespeare, when mining Plutarch for his Julie Caesar and Antonia and Cleopatra, for example, and later writers who saw history through the prism of Plutarch's great men.

We'd mean to discuss Plutarch's parallel lives at Judith Mossman, Professor Emerita of Classics at Coventry University, Andrew Erskine, Professor of Ancient History, at the University of Edinburgh, and Paul Cartlidge, A.G. Lamantis, senior research fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge. Paul, can you tell us something of the early life of Plutarch himself or where he was born, Tom? I can. Unfortunately, no one wrote anything like a Plutarch and biography of Plutarch. His name is slightly unusual. It means someone who's first or leading in wealth.

We know of others before him, but it's not a common name. We know the names of his father, We know the names of his grandfather. We know his wife. And he had five kids and things like that. So he was born, we think, somewhere in the 40s AD or CE. And he was born in the reign of the Emperor Claudius. And I put it that way because though he's a Greek, he's born in the province of Achaia, which is one of the provinces of the Roman Empire.

So Greece, as we think of it, independent way back way. is now a subject province of the Roman Empire. He was born and brought up in a small town, a place called Carania, as we pronounce it in English, Geronia in modern Greek, and that's sort of between Athens and Delphi. And if I put it that way, it's because Athens is the cultural capital of the Greek world,

and so Plutarch has to go there, and he becomes an Athenian citizen. On the other hand, he is very pious, very religious, and he becomes a priest in Delphi. How did he suffer being brought up in a Roman world while being so Greek? Yes, it's an interesting question, isn't it? He was one of those who made an accommodation. In other words, he wasn't that thrilled by the Romans as such.

So he had reservations about their level of what we'd call culture or civilization or taste. Nevertheless, he had some Roman mates. one of whom got him the Roman citizenship, a man called Mestrius Flores, another one of whom he dedicated the parallel lives too. So he was very integrated into the intellectual world of the Greco-Roman as it's become culture. He headed for Athens when he was 20. Absolutely right. And his particular contact there was a man called Ammonius, who was Egyptian Greek, a philosopher. and it's very important to realise that though we think of Plutarch overridingly as a biographer, he was also a philosopher and he wrote huge amounts of straight philosophy.

But before we get to Athens, can you give us a general idea of his travels, Judith? Yes, certainly. As Paul has said, he had some very important Roman friends and he was important in his own local community. So he was often sent on embassies. and that's a key reason to travel for someone of his period in class. We know that as a young man, he was sent on an embassy to the pro-consul, who was probably the pro-consul of Asia. He also was sent on what was probably an embassy to Alexandria.

The Emperor Vespasian was holding court in Alexandria at one point. So he was sent there. Of course, I'm sure when he was in Alexandria, he visited the library and no doubt and also took in the general intellectual atmosphere. The library was the greatest library in the known world, indeed, yes, at that time. He also travelled to Rome several times, and it looks as though this was for embassies as well. But when he was in Rome, he didn't just do his diplomatic business.

He also gave lectures and tutorials, as it were, in philosophy. He speaks at one point of having so many pupils in philosophy that he didn't have. time to study Latin and depth. So presumably he was teaching everyone in Greek. And there's a great story when he's lecturing in Rome on one occasion on being a busybody where he's lecturing and a man called Arulainus Rusticus, whom Domitian later killed through envy of his reputation, was among the hearers when a soldier came through the audience and delivered him a letter from the emperor. Well, this could have been Rusticus is dead. death warrant. So there's a silence. And Plutarch wrote, I also made a pause so that he could read the letter, but he refused and did not break the seal until I had finished my lecture and the audience had dispersed. And so everyone admired his dignity. That's an interesting thing for Plutarch to have witnessed. It might have made him feel that perhaps living in a small town in Akir was a lot safer than living in Rome.

I did say, at one stage, remember hanging over your head all the time is the boot of the local Roman governor. Yes, exactly. I think Paul's absolutely right that in some respects he's not enthranted by Roman rule, although on the other hand he's very aware of the benefits that it brings in terms of stability because it has prevented civil wars in Greece from recurring. And previously that was something that seemed impossible to do. There's a Greek, obviously a Greek Roman tension running through his entire life. And again, there's this quotation,

captive Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought the arts to Rustic Latium, which was a Rome was based. Do you want to develop that, you know? Yes, indeed. That's a quotation from the poet Horace, who's somewhat earlier than Plutarch is. But it reflects a long love affair that the Romans developed with Greek culture, right from the time that they conquered Greece in 146 BC. Of course, this presents huge opportunities for Greeks,

and particularly the Greek elite, who must live with the Romans and must nonetheless find an accommodation with them. So leveraging the soft power that their philosophy, that their skill in rhetoric, that their skill in the arts gives them, is something that they're very keen on doing at this period. And someone like Plutarch,

a member of a local elite in Beosha, long-established family in Chironia, very well educated, very clever, very well read, is in pole position to develop that influence. And that's one reason, I think, why he's an obvious choice for these embassies and an obvious choice for friendship for very distinguished Roman men. Is there ever a cringe factor in, I'd better watch my step,

because the Romans are looking at me with the... Or they're standing hanging upon me with a boot. If there are about that in his writing, do you think? I don't think so. The passage that you refer to is advice to a young man who's thinking of going into politics in Asia Minor. And they had... I mean, I think it's partly there

because there had been a revolt in Asia Minor which had been put down. But it's advice. It's not... The governor is a wicked person. it's just remember where you are. You know, remember the parameters within which you're going to be working. I don't think it's a cringe. I think it's a desire for moral education across the cultural divide.

Insofar as there is a cultural divide at this point. Andrew, thank you. Andrewsking, can we turn to you? Can you do a brief scan for the listeners on the lives that Plutarch included in this work and the range of time and places? Yes. The first thing to be aware of is the unusual character of these lives as biographies because they are, as you said, parallel, so that they are paired. So we have one Greek paired with the Roman.

How carefully does he put them together? Is it to do with their dates? Is it to do with what their exploits? It's not their dates. There's only one pair which is actually contemporary with each other. He tries to take themes. So something which he sees us a common theme, ambition, pruget. even, control of passions.

Also shared experiences. Because he's interested in it, and one purpose for the comparison, is to see how two different men respond to similar events, make similar kind of decisions, but maybe choose different directions in doing this. Can you give us a few examples? Take his sort of Delphi that he's very fond of. An example might be the fact that Lysander, who's paired with Sulla, Lysander is a Spartan military commander.

He shows respect to Delphi and he gives donations to it. Sulla, on the other hand, steals from Delphi. But they're both sort of important military figures. I mean, he's interested also, I think we need to say in writing biography, it's not aimed at saying everything about someone's life. It's aimed at exploring these kind of moral issues, exploring the character of someone. So in the case of Sula, we get quite a complicated,

person coming out of it. He is someone who is very successful, very militarily, very good, but at the same time he's extremely violent. And that is something which characterises his actions and his life ends with someone being brought into him to be strangled and shortly after that sort of dies. And that's how Plutag ends the life. Do we know why he wrote these lives and how they were received? He doesn't tell us sort of why he decided to compare Greeks and Romans, but he does say that he's interested in seeing what's

good and bad about people. He's interested in exploring the moral character of the figures that he's writing about, and he wants people to learn from this. He gives an example at one point of

saying he's going to write two lives, which are people who are more reprehensible, I suppose. This is Demetrius, the procedure, and Anthony. And he says, I'm writing these lives, because it's not just a matter of looking at those people who have been doing good things, but also those who are doing bad. So there's an educational aspect of this. He's trying to educate. Now, who he's trying to educate might be a question. Is it to those people that Judith were talking about, elite Romans and Greeks that surround him,

but it might also be he's interested in young men, men who might have a future in public affairs, because these lives are only of figures who are important militarily or politically. He doesn't write a life for Plato, for instance, even though it's one of his heroes and he's a philosopher. Paul, I'd like to go into it, take that a bit further, how he wrote this, and why he picked only Greeks and to compare them only with Roman. I know what you're saying. He didn't quite only pick Greeks around,

because there is one life of a Persian, but not any old Persian. It was a feed, wasn't it? He writes a life of art exerxes the second, whom the Greeks nicknamed Mnemon, he who is mindful. And I think the main reason was that Greeks were Greeks and everybody else was a barbarian until the Romans came along. And because of that quotation from Horace,

Greeks thought kindly of Romans, and they even allowed some Romans to compete at the Olympic Games, which was supposedly originally. Greeks only. So Romans become honorary Greeks, but Persians never do. Why did they become honorary? You've gone through it quite quickly. But the others didn't. The Carthaginians didn't and so on. That's right. There's another one there. Now, Aristotle going back, he was one of Plutarch's main sources in all sorts of ways, both factually and philosophically. Well, Aristotle wrote a polytire, a constitution of Carthage, because he thought it was sufficiently similar

to a Greek polis city-state for all the inclusion in his series to be useful. And I think that's the same mentality of comparison. The Greek word sun chrisis means a together judgment. So it's not that you're comparing in the sense of like with like, but you're judging which is superior to which and which is like and which is unlike. So it's an exercise both things. him. He actually says at one point, I wasn't absolutely sure I'd carry on writing lies, but I'm so enjoying doing it because I'm learning moral stuff. And as Andrew says, I mean, he's not

interested in the great battles, the great events, what the Greeks called ergo, what Herodotus wrote about, Cucydides wrote about, for themselves. But if a commander or a king, who is also a commander, exhibits a certain quality or to... much of it or not enough of it, over-ambitious, then he's interested. And I'll give you one example, Battle of Actium. Well, as a historian, what interests me is what impact did that have? The fact that Octavian won and Anthony lost on the future of the Roman world, Roman Empire. No, Plutarch is interested in what effect did it have on Anthony personally.

and Anthony is not in Plutarch's view a model in any sense or exemplar, but his readers can learn from the way he conducted himself and the way he reacted to his fate because Plutarch's very interested in reversals of fortune, what Greeks call peripetia. And so Anthony is a particularly good. He's king of Egypt married to Cleopatra. He loses the Battle of Actium.

He's nothing. And of course he dies very soon after. And in particular, he isolates himself from Cleopatra. He puts his head in his hands, won't talk to her, won't go near her, goes out to somewhere which is referred to afterwards as the Timoneum, which is a lighthouse on an island. And he sits that in the depths of despair. And Plutarch makes this sort of extra internal little comparison

between Anthony in his despair and Tyman of Athens. which is where Shakespeare gets Tyman of Athens from, someone who was very generous to his friends and whom they then all betray, and he ends up being so miserable that, well, there are a whole series of sayings of Tymon which are basically telling the world to just go away. And this is Anthony.

It takes him some time to get over this and get back to Cleopatra, and then they embark on this sort of Liebus Tod in the life. Did he structure all these lives in a similar way? And if so, what's that structure? Well, I think it's very important, what Andrews said before,

that they are structured as pairs. Very often at the beginning of the first life in a pair, you will get this introduction where he will talk about why he's picked those two people. Sometimes he might speak more generally about his methods. And then he'll go into the narrative of the first life. It's probably worth saying that it's not obvious in ancient biography that you start at the beginning and go on to the end, very much

as Plutarch does. If Svetonius, for example, doesn't really do that. He's got a basic chronology, and then he puts things in under headings. I think the other thing to say about the structure is that he will skip over quite big chunks, and then he'll really focus in, and you'll get a big scene, a big grand narrative event, which may be about something very small, like the taming of Busephine, near the beginning of the Alexander, for example. Wonderful scene elaborated in great detail

with Alexander the grumpy teenager and Philip saying, oh, well, go on, you see if you can do any better then. And then, of course, irritatingly, he can, and he rides the horse back to his father and his father's in tears of pride. This is a marvelous way of setting up an awful lot of what else, of what help happens in the life. He'll get to the end of the first life, and then he'll move into the second

and at the end of the two there'll be this well not necessarily always but some kind of formal comparison which may actually be a bit disappointing compared with the wonderful narrative that we've had in the two lives I just wanted to add in terms of originality the notion of a parallelism

whether opposition or likening it does seem to be original to him so some Romans had written biographies before him. Nepos and Varro and the genre of biography goes back, can be traced back to Encomium in the 4th century BC. But he does seem to have really created a new genre. He's one of those few people who invent an entire genre of literature. Can we look in more detail, Andrew, at, say, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, they stand out. Can he tell us about this pairing? I mean, this pairing, the life of Alexander is one of the longest lives

and he begins it by mentioning the difference between biography and history. It's one of the sort of points where he explains what he's going to be doing. And he says? He says he's not going to be talking about huge battles. It's because sometimes you can get more idea of a character of somebody by just a joke or a remark that they make. And an example of this within the life of Alexander would be the Battle of Isis, which is a major battle.

first time Alexander defeats the Persian king Darius. He covers it in a couple of sentences. But afterwards, he then has Alexander arriving in the king's camp, finding the king's bath, and saying, I'm going to take a bath in Darius's bath, I get all the mud of the battle off me. And his companion say, no, it's not Darius's bath, it's Alexander's bath. And this is done, I think, to set up what comes next with. which is the discovery of the Persian women,

the wife of Darius, Darius's children, in the camp. Because implicitly, from the bar of scene, they are also Alexander's property. So then Alexander meets them, and he tells them he will treat them with respect. And that allows Plutarch then to move on to talk about Alexander's self-control. These are the most beautiful women in the world, and he's leaving them alone. He's treating them with respect. And then we get other aspects of Alexander's self-control.

self-control. So the Battle of Isis treated very, very briefly, and then several pages exploring Alexander's self-control coming from this point. Is it possible to do something similar with Julius Caesar? At the beginning of the life of Caesar, there's quite a well-known story about how Caesar is captured by pirates, which he does include, but he expands it, and he expands it in such a way as to tell us something about Caesar. The story is that Caesar is captured by pirates when he's quite a young man, he's taken away, and he tells the pirates that he will, once the ransom is raised,

because that's the idea, pirates take you, you get people pay a ransom for you, he is going to come back and he is going to capture them and crucify them. And they let him sort of go, do they? They do, but the thing is, Plutarch describes how he is when he's with these pirates, that he engages with them, he plays with them,

he reads his poetry to them. and if they don't appreciate it, he tells them they're barbarians, which also shifts him towards that Greek position, and he tells them he will crucify them when he gets back. Is it in the Julius Caesar? Sorry, Andrew, but Caesar sees a sculpture of Alexander, or another source. It's not a sculpture. There's another story about him going through a little alpine village

and saying, I'd rather be first here than second in Rome. I think I'm thinking. I think maybe what you're thinking of is he, when he's in Spain, he sits there and someone says, why are you looking so gloomy? And he says, I just realized that, yeah, I'm already at this age. And Alexandra had done so many great things. Ruled the whole world.

And I haven't done anything. And he was weeping. So I used to use this in my lectures and say, well, I'm 60, whatever I was. You can imagine how I feel. And Andrew, the punchline of Andrew's story gives you. you another line on Caesar, doesn't it, Andrew? Because the punchline is

that when they ransom and he comes back and he makes sure they are all crucified and the joke is on them. And he says it always with a smile, I'll crucify you, I'll crucify it. And then he does it. So we get a sense of Caesar's charm

but also his ruthlessness and his thinking ahead. That's a good word here, isn't it? Paul, to continue this with you, some of the past fit better than others. Can you give us an example of something that doesn't work? Yeah, I happen to be working on a biography, if you can call it that, life in times, of Pericles. And so Plutarch had the same thought, and he paired Pericles with a...

Can you there's a little thing about Pericles? It's a long life like the Alexander, and Perigles was an Athenian politician, and Plutarch was puzzled as to how come the... The Pericles he'd read about in Thucydides was so much not the Pericles that is being attacked by his contemporary comic poets on the stage. So he comes up with a schema whereby Pericles, in order to become influential, he acts like every other wretched, demagogic politician. Having achieved a position of superiority, preeminence, he then acts the statesman, which you find in Thucydides. So that's Plutarch's reconciliation of the two. But looking for a pair for Pericles,

he obviously wanted to do Pericles. Who shall I pair him with? Well, he comes up with Quintus Fabius Maximus, who is the famous Concertor, the Delayer. Well, there's nothing specially delaying about Pericles. Pericles lives in a democracy. Fabius lives in a republic, fighting a major enemy who's not Roman.

Pericles is fighting Greek. weak enemies. There's very few points of contact except two. One is that they are both self-reliant and self-denying, so that they are morally admirable. Secondly, they are sniped at by the masses, the people. And they ride above. They rise above this sort of criticism to do what they want to do. But Fabius, it actually doesn't all go brilliant. at the end. And so he rather sort of declines. And as Judith has said, Plutarch typically writes a little synchristis, a comparison at the end.

It's always, if it's a Greek Roman, it's after the Roman. And so the synchresis comes after Fabius, whereas there's a famous one goes the other way, Coriolanus Roman, Alcibiades Greek. And so the comparison comes after Alcibiades.

But I think it's a pretty poor choice of comparison. Pericles Fabius. Judith, is it obvious when he's departing from known history? In terms of genre, biography is a comparatively new genre, and

he could just have sat down and written what you might call a world history. But I think that he wants to make it very personal. It is true that there are traces of biography and all the great Greek historian. Some Xenophon has long biographical passages, very

people, so does Herodotus, actually. You get the characters coming through and Thucydides as well. He does it in the Niki, I say that he doesn't think that he can imitate Thucydides because the Eucydides is beyond imitation. But I think he also finds it useful from a moral point of view. And Plutarch is a very moral writer, not moralistic, but truly wanting to use the examples from history to teach virtue, that he finds it easier to do that in the biographical format. He does have Nipos to draw on, and there's also at this time, although there's not much evidence of contact between the two, there's also Tacitus who writes the biography of his father-in-law, Agricula, and again, that is very much from a moral standpoint, how to be a good

person in bad times. So I think Plutarch is trying very much to emphasize. the morality of things, and he finds that easier to do in a biography than in what you might call a global history. Andrew? Yeah, we can look back at Plutarch sources. We can see some of the sources he used, because some of them do survive. We can also see that what he is doing is, I mean, people used to think that he simply looked at there were existing biographies that he took and adapted, but it's quite clear

now that what he did was he went through a huge amount of materials. He was very learned, read an awful lot, and he read histories like Thucydides, Herodotus, we've mentioned. And what he's doing is he's extracting the material about the characters he's writing about from these. It's possible sometimes, most of the lot of the time, we don't have those sources surviving. He uses a lot of sources that are lost. But in some cases like Thucydides or the historian Polybius, Greek historian writing in the second century BC. Can I just pitch you a little bit more on historiography? there's one good reason why he wouldn't want to write like Herodotus

because he wrote possibly when he was younger, we're not absolutely sure of the order of his writings, a work called in Latin on the malignity, the mean-spiritedness of Herodotus. Now, when he criticises Herodontes, he does it for what I take to be rather poor reasons, including nationalism. In other words, Herodotus makes his fellow Plutarch's fellow be oceans,

look bad. The Thebans are traitors, that sort of thing. But he shows that he knows what the conventions of writing history as opposed to writing what he wants to write, which is something he's making his own. So he could have done it, if you see what, I mean. He very much chose not to. And he knows Herodotus Insight out and backwards and in other places, he uses him extensively. But I think there's perhaps another point which is that he obviously, he obviously, feels from the beginning of the Alexander that it seems to suggest that he thinks that biography gives him a little bit more latitude than history. And there's one interesting passage in the life of Solon, the 6th century

Athenian lawgiver, which I think is worth bringing out here. As for his interview with Cresus, Solon sets up the Athenian laws and then goes on his travels, because obviously he's terribly unpopular at that point. And he goes to see Cresis, the king of Lydia. As Pluthorne wrote. Some think to prove by chronology that this meeting is fictitious, but when a story is so famous and so well attested, and what is more to the point when it comports so well with the character of Solon and is so worthy of his magnanimity and wisdom, I do not propose to reject his out of deference to any chronological canons, so called, which thousands are to this day revising, without being able to bring their contradictions into any general agreement. Well, I think

A, that's very interesting because it essentially goes on to retell a story from Pherodotus, not exactly the same, but very closely. But it also suggests that he's playing fair with everybody. He's saying, well, you know, this may not be true, but goodness, doesn't it tell you something interesting? And he can just stick it in, which he might not feel able to do in the history. Andrew, to take that on a bit, does he pass judgment on his subjects? Or does he let us make up our own minds, perhaps foreshadding some of Shakespeare's?

I think he tends to let us make up our own minds. What he does is shows us how complex these figures are. So it's not a straightforward kind of thing. And to some extent, the pairing, paralleling, helps with that. Because he can in a little way push people towards thinking certain things. I mean, the pairing of Athenian Aristides, the just, with Cato the Elder. Now, Cato, they're both famous for their kind of frugality,

but Arisnides comes out as being someone who is not interested in money, whereas Cato comes out as being someone who is maybe just stingy. The lifestyle can be the same, but the motivation can be different. He's not judgmental, but you might see judgments hidden in there. I think it's in this life that he says about how Cato would sell off his old slaves. because he doesn't need them anymore, they're old. And he says, I wouldn't even sell an ox or an ass that had served me properly and well

would let it have a comfortable old age. He's clearly quite cross with Keito about that. You had elements of judgment coming in there, yes. I mentioned Shakespeare earlier, and there isn't time to go into the full range of that, but it deserves more than a mention. Can you tell us more about Shakespeare's debt to Plutarch? Yes, certainly.

I think in many respects, it's a very significant debt. The first play in which it's obviously important is Julius Caesar in 1599. Shakespeare will have accessed Plutarch by the translation of Thomas North, which was published first in 1579. He describes it. Which is a read at school? No, I don't think so, not at school.

And not in translation. Plutarch's not on the curriculum of the King Edward of the Sixth. grammar school in Stratford, which is where we think Shakespeare went, although the records have been destroyed. So why did he get it from? I think he went out and bought it. It went into a second edition in 1595, so he could easily have picked it up. He clearly read it very closely. Julius Caesar is based on a combination of the life of Caesar and the life of Brutus, and, for example, the scene, the famous scene in Julius Caesar where the spirit comes to him the night before Filippi.

That's a very interesting one, because verbally it's exactly the same as North. I am thy evil spirit, Brutus. Why then I shall see thee at Filippi. But the actor who plays that part is always the actor who's played Caesar, so it's sort of dead Caesar coming back. Whereas in fact in Plutarch and in the words of the scene, it's actually a form of bad luck that's visiting Brutus' own bad luck.

Well, I've got one particular, if you like, B in my bonnet. And it is Coriolanus, which Judith mentioned, because I'm almost tempted to say, I think he never existed. The evidence for him is exceptionally poor of a historical kind. and he doesn't fit. His name is peculiar because Coriolanus should mean that he'd conquered some place called Corioli. And the story goes that he retreats there

and he from there attacks the Romans on until his mother persuades him not to... So he's a traitor and that's why he's likened to Alcibades. But history, it's not. And he therefore... It's one of those cases where Why did he write a life of Coriolanus? Because he was so interested in all the emotions and the character formation and revelation.

And there's a particular dimension which I think is very common to much of Plutarch, which is relations between an elite man and the masses. And Coriolanus is openly contemptuous, and Shakespeare picks this up. It makes it an exceptionally major part of the plot development of the play Coriolanus is how he is contemptuous, especially of the tribunes of the people who are the representative of the plebs. And Alcibiades, on the one hand, loves the masses

in the sense that he plays them and he needs their adulation. He's exceptionally narcissistic. But he goes in Thucydides to Sparta, where he's a traitor, and says, democracy, well, it's just as we, all know folly, madness. Now that's what the Spartans want to hear, but if the Athenian masses

hear that, they're not going to be so thrilled. So Alcibiades is a complex character, more complex. Coriolanus is rather two-dimensional, to be perfectly honest, but he needed a parallel. What interesting is why he put Coriolanus before Alcibales. So he so wants to do Alcibides. Why did you not find a Roman that he could add on to Alcibiades, but people have views on that perhaps? Maybe because it helped him set up, maybe if he's

interested in Alcabiodes, it helps him set up some of the issues to explore in Alcabiodes. Because that's the point, isn't it? The first life very often is less developed. There are exceptions. Pericles is one, Alexander's another, or it's as developed. But very often, as you say,

the first life sets up the second, and that's, of course, comparison. It's not just parallel, it's head to head. That's very explicit in the Demetrius Antony, where you have the Macedonian drama followed by the Roman. Paul, did Plutarch change the way we saw the classical world? Well, it's more, I think, people who used Plutarch, and then that transformed the way we thought about the ancient world.

We're moving on, aren't we? Shakespeare possibly move on to the Enlightenment, if we have time to consider that. So Voltaire, Rousseau and so on, they were very familiar with Plutarch. And I don't think we've mentioned Sparta yet, so I'm going to, if I might drag in Plutarch's life of Lycurgus. He starts it by saying there is not one thing asserted of Lycurgus by one source that is not contradicted by another. He cites 50, no fewer than 50 different authorities or sources for this life. So he, in effect, is saying you cannot write a biography of this man in terms of truth.

So why am I writing it? Because I'm interested in law-giving, justice, Lycurgus's character. And I'm going to compare it with Numa, the great religious legislator of the Romans and so on. And Rousseau in particular was a real fan, both of Lycurgus and of Sparta. And he thought that everybody should be like the Spartan. self-disciplined and he said like Hergus tied the Spartans to their laws. He sort of bound them and he thought that was great. It's very odd we think of Rousseau as liberationist in education in other respects,

but for some reason he loved Plutarchs like Hergus. I think there are other respects as well, perhaps more frivolous ones. He just tells so many stories that have been. come for one reason or another, the lifeblood of what people know about classical antiquity. The bucephalus story. There's one thing everybody knows about Alexander. He has a horse. He had a horse called bucephalus.

The sole source for that incident. Soul source for that. Then Cleopatra being delivered to Caesar in the carpet. It's mentioned very briefly in Antony and Cleopatra, but it's elaborated a lot more in the Burton Taylor, Cleopatra, and indeed in the carry-on Cleo, it's there, it's in everybody's background somewhere. He brings out these very vivid stories so clearly that he's somehow essential, really,

to the way a lot of us see the classical world, I think. Come to you, Andrew. Has his influence never lessened? Has he been influential throughout the 2000 years? I think so, yes. I mean, maybe there's a kind of rediscus. of him at the time of sort of Shakespeare's 16th century influence on Machiavelli and once the English translations, once he becomes available in, well, I mean English translation is translated from

the French, so he's going around Europe at that time. So maybe there's an increase in influence from then onwards. Yeah, manuscripts, we have of the Middle Ages, so before the age of printing, he was very, very popular then. And of course, he's translated into Latin. And so that's the common language of the Middle Ages. We get into the end now, but Judith. It just occurred to me. Firstly, all these biographies are of men, with a partial exception of the Antony,

which goes on after Anthony's death for nine chapters about Cleopatra. But perhaps a more interesting point is that in the reception of Plutarch, Plutarch had a big influence on politics, on political writing, on thought, on drama, and on English biography as well. Boswell's very, very keen on Plutarch.

But the one idea that Plutarch created and developed the parallelism, that's nowhere. No one else does that with a possible until Alan Bullock. Or I'm going to say Simon, Hitler and Hitler and Stalin. Our colleague Simon Hornblow has just written, Skipio and Hannibal. Has he? Excellent. Yeah.

And that's very... Parallel lines. That's very jolly because in the Renaissance, there were people who made up lives of Scipio and Hannibal and also Scipio and I Permanondas, the first pair that Plutarch wrote, but which was lost. But that parallelism idea, except for a very few countering some wars, it's just gone. And all the 18th century books called things like the British Plutarch and the French Revolutionary Plutarch, they're just collections of biographies, more of a moral nature, ordered it chronologically. They're not parallel at all.

And also you can add that if you want to go into a bookshop and buy the parallel lives, you can't. No. Because they're all sold separately as a volume of Greek lives or a volume of Roman lives. And the only exception is the Lerb classical library. It's because they tend to be used for ancient history and not read as themselves. I'd add just if I may that Plutarch is, I think, not an egalitarian. and so he liked the Roman notion of what counts as superiority and inferiority. And he did not like radical democracy personally, of which there were occasional outbursts,

even under the Roman Empire. And so he was, by and I was very happy, as Judith said about peace. Well, the peace went with top-down elite rule, and Plutarch was happy with that. Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Julius Mosman, Paul Cartledge and Andrew Erskine. Next week, Varsmania in the 18th century. How New Archaeological Finds inspired Josiah Wedgwood, John Keats and British Consumers. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What would you like to have said that you find you didn't have time to say? There is a passage in work. We didn't talk much about his. philosophy in detail, that is his Platonism, which he liked, Aristoteneism, but he didn't like Stoicism and Epicureanism, which is very strange because they were the two dominant philosophies of his era.

And there's a work he wrote how you can't possibly live well according to the tenets of Epicurus. And in it, he says now, is this tongue in cheek or is this absolutely straight? Who could possibly prefer having sex with the most beautiful woman? He's very heterosexual, Plutarch, to reading about Pantheir, who is an invented character in Xenophon's Sarapidae. She is an exemplar of the good wife. So she is a fictional Tymoxina, who is Plutarch's real wife.

Well, is that jockey? I mean, did he really not enjoy sex? Or did he so love reading? And I would add that the actual mechanics of reading, I did mention scrolls. It's exceptionally different. You unroll the scroll one way. And then if you want to read it again,

you have to unroll it again and re-roll it and start again. So I have an image of Plutarch surrounded by scrolls, whereas we have maybe those of us of my age, books, Xeroxes, yes. But Pluto had to rely on his memory. And so one reason why the same anecdote would be told in slightly different wording is not only conscious variation, but simply as you and I, when we write, we don't always tell the anecdote in exactly the same terms or the same event when we're writing. as I've done about the Battle of Isis.

Can you give the listeners some idea of the range of his friendships, which is remarkable for a young man? Well, absolutely. I mean, Messchus Flores managed to survive being an adherent of Otho in S69 AD, which is the so-called year of the four emperors, where after the fall of Nero, people squabbled about the fate of the Roman Empire,

and they managed to get through four emperors in one year. and he became someone who was a consul under Trajan. And he also knew well, Associate Seneca, who seems to have been of Spanish extraction. He was one of the Spaniards who were much favoured by the Emperor Trajan himself from Spain. So these are what you might call the senior ministers of the emperor. These are not second-tier figures or provincial figures. And at the same time, he's got lots of Greek friends, Greek plutocrats, and also people that he evidently likes because they're well-traveled, well-read and entertaining.

Why did you do it in the first place? Why did he do it? I think there is an element of trying to get Greece and Rome to speak to each other. I think he doesn't like. preferring one civilization over another for obvious reasons. He does see everything through a Greek lens. He is a proud Greek. But he does, I think, value Rome as well,

the peace and tranquility that it's created, the fairness, the laws, a lot of the things that the Romans admire about themselves, Plutarch admires about them too. So he's got these two great civilizations as he sees it. he does I think want to convince the Romans that Greece isn't just a museum the Greeks have been great statesmen great military men great conquerors and they've got lessons to teach the Romans

but he also wants to convince the Greeks that the Romans have been through some of the same things that they've been through themselves this whole element of civil war for example there are passages in the Greek lives for instance at the end of the Flamininus, where Flamoninus conquers the Macedonians and basically, according to Plutarch, secures the freedom of Greece from Macedon. Flamonininus is described as a Greek in language, a Greek in this, a Greek in that, he's not, he's a Roman, but he's done something that's so magnificently beneficent for Hellas that he has

to be seen as a Greek. Then, on the other hand, when the Romans are suffering civil wars, So in lives like the Brutus and the Pompey, you get Greeks sort of observing what's going wrong in Roman society and saying, oh, don't go there, don't do this, you know. So I think he thinks that both sides have a great deal to learn from one another. And that's why he's gone in for this remarkable structure. Was this completely original, Paul, in this work, these by their lives? Well, I think as far as we can tell, there's nothing, anything much like it.

As I say, there are possible pairings in some earlier writers of a Roman kind, not a Greek. And the pairing itself is partly cultural, partly moral, partly dynamic comparison, partly for us, the reader to judge. And I'm with those who think that the sort of people who read him, remembering how difficult it is to read the sort of. scroll. Other sort of people who were treasured, wealthy, had slaves, possibly who read out to them, or they themselves had

libraries. There weren't such things as public libraries. There were some great libraries, but they weren't exactly lending libraries. And that Plutarch was addressing elite people in an elite way. His language is extremely sophisticated and varied and rhetorical. I mean, I'd like to know personally who taught him,

because as with, for example, Pericles, we know virtually nothing of the first 20 years of Pericles' life. We know only from Plutarch about the first 20 years of Alexander Alexander the Great. I mean, ancients weren't that interested in biography in the way we are, where we go into birth, immediate family circumstances, psychodynamic development. What Plutarch meant by character was what somebody stamped with, literally, that's what the Greek means.

And so events bring out what's already in there. You don't, as it were, develop by reacting to events. Yes, although I think that's right. But I think you can also say that by monitoring, as it were, the reactions to events during the course of a life, you can trace a development in the character. So Alexander at the end of his life responds to external stimuli quite differently from the way he does a bit earlier in that life.

That's partly because of the intervening experiences and the different circumstances. So it is, but it is different from modern post-Froidian characterization. There's no doubt about that. Would you like to? Yeah, I think one, maybe could say a little bit more about his attitude to the Romans and Greek culture.

Yes, I'm interested. Because he's taking Roman lives from sort of the beginning of Rome to Anthony. And the Romans are gradually becoming more and more familiar with Greek culture during this time. So that when

he has the life of Cato, Cato, the elder, is really quite hostile to Greek culture. And Plutarch makes a comment that even though he's hostile to it, it will actually sort of become part of what it is to be Roman, this Greek culture. And later on when he gets to the life of Cicero,

he has Cicero go to learn rhetoric, learn oratory, from a road, on the island of Rhodes. And he learns from a man called Apollonius. Now, Apollonius can't speak Latin, so Cicero has to declaim in Greek. And at the end of his declamation, and everyone sort of gathers around Cicero and says how wonderful it was, except for Apollonius, who's sitting, looking very gloomy.

And Cicero goes over to him and is concerned just to what the explanation is, had he really done something really wrong. And Apollonius says, and I'm written down here, it says, You, Cicero, I admire and praise, but Greece, I pity for her sad fortune, since I see that even the only glories that were left to us, culture and eloquence, now thanks to you.

belong to the Romans. And I think that kind of captures a little bit of what Plutarch himself thinks. And there's certain sadness that Plutarch has him out of this change. It's good that the Romans have appreciated this, but there's something missing from the Greeks now. I think he thinks Cicero is quite a special Roman. The way he translates, he embarks on making Greek philosophy, putting Greek philosophy into Latin

and translating all the Greek philosophical, philosophical times. firms. And of course, Cicero himself does complain that Latin isn't really the best language to do philosophy in. So there's a little bit of give and taken in all that. But yes, that's a great story. I think the other person that he really thinks needs a bit of Greek culture is Marius, the great Roman general, who's fantastically successful militarily and fantastically successful politically. But he's a terrible thing. thug and he ends up being much too sorry for himself and plutarch says at the end of his life well if only he'd listen to plato he could have reflected on all the good things that had happened to him and and cheered up a bit so he that's a paraphrase but he's really he he does still think

I think that the Greeks have got a lot to offer so he's rolling with the with the with the times I think with a bit more about Shakespeare being okay no Just to add that between 1606 and 1608, he wrote three plays, which were based very closely on Plutarch Lives. Timon of Athens, based on one chapter of the Antony, Antony and Cleopatra, based on everything from about chapter 25 onwards, and the Coriolanus based on the life of Coriolanus. And that particularly in Anthony and Cleopatra,

you can see how very closely he is following North, the famous speech about Cleopatra meeting Antony at the Kidness, the barge she sat in, like a burnished throne, is pretty much a chunk of north turned into very beautiful iambic pantameters. And although Shakespeare does change things sometimes and to very good effect, because he's a dramatist, so, for example, Shakespeare makes Cleopatra, die on stage, whereas Plutarch conceals her death behind a pair of doors, which then open up and

show you this splendidly clad figure already dead. They still both use the last words of Cleopatra's handmade Charmian. So in North, North writes, one of the soldiers seeing her, angrily said unto her, is that well done, Sharmin? Very well, said she again, meat for a princess descended from the race of so many noble kings. In Shakespeare, that becomes, What work is here? Charmian, is this well done? It is well done. And fitting for a princess descended of so many royal kings. Oh, soldier. You can see the kinship and also the interesting differences that putting it on the stage entails. I also personally think that it's possible that Plutarch's big scenes, which I mentioned earlier, were particularly attractive for someone who's trying to stage history.

And, for example, in Henry V, which is also 1599, same year as Julius Caesar, there's an extended scene where Flewellyn compares the life of Henry V to the life of Alexander and mentions the death of Clitus, one of the great rather awful moments. the murder of Clytus by Alexander in the life of Alexander. And this comparison is developed entirely to Henry V's advantage, but the death of Clitus is compared to Henry V, sending away false stuff in the previous play in the series. We have Simon Tillotson is waiting to... He's had enough. Does anyone want to your coffee?

Melvin, do you want tea or coffee? No, I just have some more water please. Thank you very much. I'll have some tears, well please. Not for me. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production.

I'm Nicola Cochlin and for BBC Radio 4 this is history's youngest heroes. Rebellion, risk and the radical power of youth. She thought, right, I'll just do it. She thought about others rather than herself. Twelve stories of extraordinary young people from across history. There's a real sense of urgency in them, that resistance has to be mounted, it has to be mounted now. Subscribe to History's youngest heroes on BBC Sounds.

Simon's disappeared for the moment. He's making more tea. Making more tea.