21 Jan The life of Plutarch
Plutarch, Greek Plutarchos, Latin Plutarchus, (born 46 CE, Chaeronea, Boeotia [Greece]—died after 119 CE), biographer and author whose works strongly influenced the evolution of the essay, the biography, and historical writing in Europe from the 16th to the 19th century.
Plutarch was the son of Aristobulus, himself a biographer and philosopher. In 66–67 Plutarch studied mathematics and philosophy at Athens under the philosopher Ammonius. Public duties later took him several times to Rome, where he lectured on philosophy, made many friends, and perhaps enjoyed the acquaintance of the emperors Trajan and Hadrian. A Delphic inscription reveals that he possessed Roman citizenship. Plutarch traveled widely, visiting central Greece, Sparta, Corinth, Patrae (Patras), Sardis, and Alexandria, but he made his normal residence at Chaeronea, where he held the chief magistracy and other municipal posts and directed a school with a wide curriculum in which philosophy, especially ethics, occupied the central place. He maintained close links with the Academy at Athens and with Delphi, where he held a priesthood for life. The size of Plutarch’s family is uncertain. In the Consolatio to his wife, Timoxena, on the death of their infant daughter, he mentions four sons; of those at least two survived childhood, and he may have had other children.
Among his approximately 227 works, the most important are the Bioi parallēloi (Parallel Lives), in which he recounts the noble deeds and characters of Greek and Roman soldiers, legislators, orators, and statesmen, and the Moralia, or Ethica, a series of more than 60 essays on ethical, religious, physical, political, and literary topics. Plutarch’s philosophy was eclectic, with borrowings from the Stoics, the Pythagoreans, and the Peripatetics (but not the Epicureans) grouped around a core of Platonism.
Plutarch’s later influence has been profound. He was loved and respected in his own time and in later antiquity; his Lives inspired a rhetorician, Aristides, and a historian, Arrian, to write similar comparisons, and a copy accompanied the emperor Marcus Aurelius when he took the field against the Marcomanni. Gradually, Plutarch’s reputation faded in the Latin West, but he continued to influence philosophers and scholars in the Greek East, where his works came to constitute a schoolbook. Proclus, Porphyry, and the emperor Julian all quote him, and the Greek Church Fathers Clement of Alexandria and Basil the Great imitate him without acknowledgment. In the 9th century the Byzantine scholar and patriarch Photius read the Lives with his friends
Plutarch’s works were introduced to Italy by Byzantine scholars along with the revival of classical learning in the 15th century, and Italian humanists had already translated them into Latin and Italian. Moreover, the Essays made known the ideal, derived from Plutarch’s presentation of character and openly expressed opinion, of “high antique virtue and the heroically moral man” that became the humanist ideal of the Renaissance period. The Lives were translated into English, from Amyot’s version, by Sir Thomas North in 1579. His vigorous idiomatic style made his Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans an English classic, and it remained the standard translation for more than a century. Even when superseded by more-accurate translations, it continued to be read as an example of Elizabethan prose style. North’s translation of Plutarch was William Shakespeare’s source for his Roman history plays and influenced the development of his conception of the tragic hero. The literary quality of North’s version may be judged from the fact that Shakespeare lifted whole passages from it with only minor changes. In the 19th century, Plutarch’s direct influence began to decline, as a result of the rise of the Romantic movement
Source: www.britannica.com
