The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  A HISTORY DEVOID OF DIVINE DESIGN

  Plutarch gave ample indications regarding the timeframe in which the Lives were composed and/or published, and though we cannot reconstruct the entire sequence with confidence, the careful work of many scholars has enabled us to arrive at a substantial agreement regarding the main points.50 Naturally, the scope of this work does not permit us to account for the results of their labours analytically, nor do we discuss how the individual Lives—and above all the individual pairs—were developed in order to construct an overarching system.51 However, what we can and must say in general terms is that this historiographical plan overturns any basic idea of divine design that the previous Greek historiography, from Polybius to Diodorus and beyond, could have given the political history of the ancient world, in glorifying the global unity achieved by Roman conquest. And yet Plutarch apparently shares—whether before starting the new biographical project or not, it is difficult to say—such a concept of divine design, at least in the reflections at the beginning of the De fortuna Romanorum.52 It is clear that the very choice of biography, even though made for different reasons, called for adopting a rise-and-fall pattern: such in fact is the ratio behind telling the story of an individual’s life, from birth to death. But, beyond this, it is also the parallelistic arrangement, as we have previously mentioned, that leads Plutarch to shape the historical development both of Greece and of Rome—at different times, of course—in terms of a rise-and-fall pattern, which entails a growth period culminating in an ἀκμή inevitably followed by decline and death. The idea of a parallelism set against such a rise-and-fall pattern is particularly clear in two passages, in the Comparison between Aristides and Cato and in the proem of Phocion, in which Plutarch emphasizes this idea in order to focus better on the qualities of the figures, using “the tool, so to speak, of subtle logic.” In the Comparison between Aristides and Cato, Plutarch declares that the former “rose to eminence when Athens was not yet great, . . . whereas Cato (the Elder) plunged headlong into the boundless sea of Roman politics when they were no longer conducted by such men as Curius.”53 In Phocion, on the other hand, comparing the abilities of Phocion and Cato (the Younger) to fight against the evils of the times, he says of the former that “his virtue found an antagonist in a grievous and violent time,” and that “the fortunes of Greece rendered [it] obscure and dim”; and of the latter that his struggle took place “when his native city was not already prostrate . . . but struggling with great tempest and surge.”54 What is certain is that, just as in Greece, the rise-and-fall pattern of Rome, or at least of the Rome that Plutarch chose to consider in planning his Parallel Lives, was destined to come to an end with the civil wars and the end of political freedom, whatever Plutarch might have thought of the subsequent experience under the autocratic Empire.

  These and other passages of the Lives 55 confirm that Plutarch subscribed to, and perfected, an idea that had already been Cicero’s (especially in Brutus): that of an affinity between the political (and cultural) evolution of Athens (that is, of Greece) and that of Rome, taking place in different periods.56 Plutarch gives this concept a kind of formal sanction in the conception of the pair Philopoemen and Flamininus—the only pair in which the protagonists are contemporaries, though not of the same age—the former being the last fighter for Greek freedom, and the latter the gracious restorer of that freedom, by then already dead.57 Here we come upon a kind of generational handover loaded with symbolic value, no less than the reference to the Philippics—with which Demosthenes had tried to prevent the enslavement of Athens and Greece to Macedonia58—had been for Cicero in fighting for freedom against Anthony: Plutarch associates these figures, too, in order to form a pair, the meaning of which is certainly not limited to both figures’ exceptional oratory talent, within which a ranking might be attempted.59 Perhaps the strongest reason Demosthenes and Cicero resembled one another was precisely in the fact that both had fought a political battle in which freedom was at stake; and their defeat in this battle had marked the end of the downward curve for Athens (foreshadowing the general decline of Greece) and for Rome, respectively. But the most interesting point for us, which brings us back to our initial reflections on the nature of Plutarch’s interest in history, is that the historiographical formula of the Parallel Lives, that is, the system of biographies articulated in a parallelistic form, appears particularly suited to satisfying the conditions set by the cosmic order for memory to function as a tool for predicting the future. If the kind of social memory involved in investigation and writing history is to fulfil its task of orienting the present and directing toward the future, it cannot be limited to retracing in a pure and simple diachronic order the well-worn tale of past glories (which, incidentally, is the history of not one but two rise-and-fall patterns which had by then come to an end). Rather, it must approach in a fresh way the problem of why present reality is unsatisfactory, so as to make preparations for a better reality in the future. This implies, first of all, putting the individual at the center of attention, with his strengths and weaknesses; which implies reclaiming, while reconstructing the great figures of the past, previously forgotten documentary elements that serve to bring the figures into better focus.60 This is biography. But it also implies a different way of recomposing the complex relationships, scattered in different and complementary ways across the centuries, involved in the two fundamental components—Greek and Roman—forming the peculiar characteristic of the world in which the author lived. This is parallelism, a translation in historiographical terms of the intrinsic dualism of that world.

  Once all paradigms involving a divine design have been definitively set aside, history becomes the most complete source for the multiplicities of the past, the most significant pieces of which must serve to construct a world better than the present. We may thus attempt to guide the change that is inevitably produced according to cosmic law, using a different arrangement of the same components: those that lie in the “plains of truth,” quietly waiting to be reused in the construction of new worlds, when eternity will breathe forth the breath of time upon them. It comes as no surprise that such a staunch opponent of any idea of divine providence as Friedrich Nietzsche discovered in Plutarch a kind of prototype for his antihistoricist way of understanding history, precisely by putting together the message of the Delphic Dialogues with the lesson that can be deduced from the Parallel Lives. In the image-rich and almost oracular style so particular to him, the great German philosopher thus demonstrated, in the second of his Untimely Meditations (Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen), his profound intellectual kinship with one of the most original minds of an ancient civilization, by then in decline.

  History is to be written by the man of experience and character. He who has not lived through something greater and nobler than others will not be able to explain anything great and noble in the past. The language of the past is always oracular: you will only understand it as builders of the future who know the present. We can only explain the extraordinarily wide influence of Delphi by the fact that the Delphic priests had an exact knowledge of the past: and, similarly, only he who is building up the future has a right to judge the past. If you set a great aim before your eyes, you control at the same time the itch for analysis that makes the present into a desert for you, and all rest, all peaceful growth and ripening, impossible. Hedge yourselves with a great, all-embracing hope, and strive on. Make of yourselves a mirror where the future may see itself, and forget the superstition that you are Epigoni. You have enough to ponder and find out, in pondering the life of the future: but do not ask history to show you the means and the instrument to it. If you live yourselves back into the history of great men, you will find in it the high command to come to maturity and leave that blighting system of cultivation offered by your time: which sees its own profit in not allowing you to become ripe, that it may use and dominate you while you are yet unripe. And if you want biographies, do not look for those with the legend “Mr. So-and-so and his times,
” but for one whose title-page might be inscribed “a fighter against his time.” Feast your souls on Plutarch, and dare to believe in yourselves when you believe in his heroes. A hundred such men educated against the fashion of to-day, made familiar with the heroic, and come to maturity, are enough to give an eternal quietus to the noisy sham education of this time.61

  CONCLUSION

  Unlike Nietzsche, Plutarch naturally could not know that his world would encounter, in a short space of time, transformations of a truly epochal nature; this can explain the less dramatic and combative tone found in the Lives as compared to the Untimely Meditations of Nietzsche. Rather, Plutarch hoped that it would be possible to control a change, that he felt nonetheless imminent, through skillfully managing the relationship between sameness and diversity, such as might suggest a “parallel” rethinking of the experience of the past. As we mentioned earlier, his invocation of history was promptly received in the Greek world, giving way to those cultural phenomena which we briefly touched upon at the beginning; but it was a very partial reception, which almost exclusively involved the history of Greek identity, ignoring that of Rome.62 This was particularly true as far as the culture of the Second Sophistic was concerned; though, as we recalled, the use of exemplification and historic exposition had always been a characteristic element of rhetorical training, it seems likely that Plutarch’s biographical work—or at least its Greek side—may have contributed to spreading awareness of people and events of the distant past even beyond the schools, paving the way for that extraordinary “mass” publicizing of history which formed the basic core of the “new Sophists’ ” theatrical and oratorical performances. Perhaps the fact that each pair of Lives was published separately, at more or less regular intervals (we might say instalments), could have further aided this expansion of interest in history. In any case, we learn from Philostratus—who has provided us with the names and biographical information of many of these orators-actors as well as the themes of their performances—that for decades they successfully continued to commemorate particularly significant moments in Greek history on the stages of crowded theaters in Greek cities large and small throughout the eastern side of the empire.63 The sophist of the day would appear in the theatrical guise of one of the great figures of the past, from Solon to Alexander the Great (and not beyond him), and debate the pros and cons of a decision, heavy with future consequences, which had to be made: a sort of counterfactual history exercise, yet one conducted with historically plausible arguments. In these terms, Plutarch’s lesson appeared to have been considerably altered: these orators no longer searched through Greece’s and Rome’s shared past for elements capable of suggesting new perspectives to a weary contemporary culture; rather, they just aimed to rediscover in the “classical” age of Greek culture the identifying foundations of a present which had to be kept stable, so that it might preserve the privileged status of the Greek people in the Roman Empire. Perhaps the Greek historians straddling the two centuries, the Roman officials Appian and Cassius Dio, who wrote in Greek the history of the Roman Empire, were the intellectuals who best corresponded, though in different and more traditional historiographical forms, to the most vital urgings of Plutarch’s cultural message.

  FURTHER READING

  The main point of reference for Plutarchan studies is now Beck 2014, with ample references to relevant bibliography; many of the contributions therein are concerned with Plutarch’s biographical works, and some of them are quoted in my text (even though it has been written before the Companion’s appearance). But I list below other important studies on Plutarch’s cultural and political context which have not been included in my bibliographical list: they may be of use for delving into those themes which could not be thoroughly investigated in my text.

  Boulogne, J. 1994. Plutarque: Un aristocrate grec sous l’occupation romaine. Lille.

  Brenk, F. E. 1977. In Mist Apparelled: Religious Themes in Plutarch’s “Moralia” and “Lives”. Leiden.

  Carrière, J.-C. 1977. “À propos de la politique de Plutarque.” DHA 3: 237–251.

  Fein, S. 1994. Die Beziehungen der Kaiser Trajan und Hadrian zu den Litterati. Stuttgart and Leipzig.

  Forte, B. 1972. Rome and the Romans as the Greeks Saw Them. Rome.

  Gabba, E. 1959. “Storici greci dell’Impero Romano da Augusto ai Severi.” Rivista Storica Italiana 71: 361–381.

  Gascó, F. 1998. “Vita della polis di età romana e memoria della polis classica.” In I Greci. Storia Cultura Arte Societiài2. Unaistoria grecaiIII. Trasformazioni, edited by S. Settis, 1147–1164. Turin.

  Goldhill, S., ed. 2001. Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire. Cambridge.

  Hartog, F. 2005. “Un Ancien chez les Modernes: Plutarque.” In Anciens, modernes, sauvages, edited by id., 125–188. Paris.

  Mossman, J., ed. 1997. Plutarch and His Intellectual World. London.

  Palm, J. 1959. Rom, Römertum und Imperium in der griechischen Literatur der Kaiserzeit. Lund.

  Richter, D. S. 2011. Cosmopolis: Imagining Community in Late Classical Athens and the Early Roman Empire. Oxford.

  Schmitz, T. A., and N. Wiater, eds. 2011. The Struggle for Identity: Greeks and Their Past in the First CenturyBCE. Stuttgart.

  Stadter, P.A. 2015. Plutarch and his Roman Readers. Oxford and New York. (And cf. my review article in Histos 11 [2017] 1–13.)

  Swain, S. 1989. “Plutarch: Chance, Providence, and History.” AJPhil. 110: 272–302.

  Swain, S. 1996. Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism, and Power in the Greek World,AD50–250. Oxford.

  Theander, C. 1951. Plutarch und die Geschichte. Lund.

  Touloumakos, J. 1971. Zum Geschichtsbewusstsein der Griechen in der Zeit des römischen Herrschaft. Göttingen.

  Wardman, A. 1974. Plutarch’s Lives. London.

  Woolf, G. 1994. “Becoming Roman, Staying Greek: Culture, Identity, and the Civilizing Process.” PCPS 40: 116–143.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Beck, M., ed. 2014. A Companion to Plutarch. Oxford.

  Bowersock, G. W. 1969. Greek Sophists in the Roman Empire. Oxford.

  Bowersock, G. W. 1998. “Vita Caesarum: Remembering and Forgetting the Past.” In La biographie antique, edited by S. M. Maul and W. W. Ehlers, 193–210. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité Classique 44. Vandoeuvres and Geneva.

  Bowie, E. L. 1970. “Greeks and Their Past in the Second Sophistic.” P&P 46: 3–41. Revised reprint in Studies in Ancient History, edited by M. I. Finley, 166–209. London and Boston, 1974.

  Bowie, E. L. 1996. “Past and Present in Pausanias.” In Pausanias historien: Huit exposés suivis de discussions, edited by J. Bingen, 209–230. Entretiens sur l’Antiquité Classique 41. Geneva.

  Cordovana, O. D., and M. Galli, eds. 2007. Arte e memoria culturale nell’età della Seconda Sofistica. Catania.

  Del Corno, D. 1983. “Introduzione.” In Plutarco, Dialoghi delfici. Milan.

  Desideri, P. 1967. “Studi di storiografia eracleota: I, Promathidas e Nymphis.” Studi Classici e Orientali 16: 366–416.

  Desideri, P. 1970–1971. “Studi di storiografia eracleota: II, La guerra con Antioco il Grande” Studi Classici e Orientali 19–20: 487–537.

  Desideri, P. 1989. “Teoria e prassi storiografica di Plutarco: Una proposta di lettura della coppia Emilio Paolo-Timoleonte.” Maia NS 41: 199–214.

  Desideri, P. 1992a. “Filostrato: La contemporaneità del passato greco.” In El Pasado Renacido: Uso y abuso de la tradición clásica, edited by F. Gascó and E. Falque, 55–70. Seville.

  Desideri, P. 1992b. “La formazione delle coppie nelle Vite plutarchee.” ANRW 2.33.6: 4470–4486.

  Desideri, P. 1992c. “I documenti di Plutarco.” ANRW 2.33.6: 4536–4567.

  Desideri, P. 1995. “‘Non scriviamo storie, ma vite’ (Plut., Alex. 1.2): La formula biografica di Plutarco.” In Testis temporum: Aspetti e problemi della storiografia antica, Pavia, 16 marzo 1995, 15–25. Como.

  Des
ideri, P. 1997. “Passato e presente nella storiografia greca alto-imperiale.” In Chaire: II Reunion de Historiadores del mundo griego antiguo (Sevilla, 18–21 de diciembre de 1995). Homenaje al Prof. Fernando Gascó, edited by R. U. Martínez, F. J. Presedo Velo, P. G. Díaz, and J. M. Cortés, 365–371. Seville.

  Desideri, P. 1998a. “Forme dell’impegno politico di intellettuali greci dell’ Impero.” RSI 110: 60–87.