Selected Essays of Plutarch, Vol. I

Selected Essays of Plutarch, Vol. I.

The age in which Plutarch was educated and in which he wrote his Ethica is, from the literary point of view, closely similar to the so-called Augustan age of English writing. Of all the periods of English style and thought, he would probably have found himself most at home in that of Pope, Addison, and Steele, or in its continuation with Goldsmith and Johnson. He flourished at a time when intellectual interests were remarkably keen, if not very profound; when literature, if for the most part it ventured on no high imaginative flights, did at least aim at some practical bearing upon the conduct of life; when men found entertainment, and probably some measure of moral or social help, in the readable essay or the friendly epistle; when facts, merely as such, were accepted as interesting if interestingly set forth; and when Philosophy, if she deigned to keep her feet upon the ground and to speak as one of the mortals, met with a due welcome from either sex. An eighteenth-century Plutarch might conceivably have written the moral papers of Johnson without Johnsons ponderousness, or have contributed to the Spectator papers more full than Addisons of those ideas in which Matthew Arnold found that writer so deficient. He might have written, though in a prose form, the Essay on Man, being meanwhile as willing as Pope to owe the bulk of his matter to other minds, but not so willing as Pope to play the expositor without first playing the earnest and critical student. Plutarch did not, so far as we are aware, try his hand at verse. To judge by his comments upon poetic duty and by his quotationswhich are regularly taken from the best writers of a classical age already far remotehis conception 6of the poetic office was too exalted to permit of his dabbling in that domain. Had he done so, and had he followed the fashion of his times, he would perhaps have come nearer to our Augustans even than in his prose. In poetry it was the age of description, reflection, satire, and moralizing, in the highest degree sensible, studiously informed with witin the broader Queen Anne sense of that wordand characterized by extreme deftness of pointed and quotable phrase, but in no sense creative, imaginative, or inspired. Its ideal contents consisted of what oft was thought, but neer so well expressed. The attitudes of both prose-writer and poet belonged to the intellectual and aesthetic spirit of the period, and so far as that spirit finds an individual embodiment in the Greek half of the Roman Empire, it finds him in Plutarch of Chaeronea. It would be difficult to suggest with any precision the place which Plutarch might have filled in Victorian literature. A distinguished and popular man of letters and an educator of public opinion he assuredly would have been. Given a width of reading, a persistent self-culture, and a careful but unpedantic style, corresponding to those which he practised in his own generation, he might have madeas he did thenan admirable biographer and essayist. He might have been a contributor of substantial papers to the quarterlies and other higher reviews. He might, and probably would, have been an eminent lecturer; possibly, with a broad practical Christianity substituted for his broad practical Platonism, a preacher not only eminent but also in the best sense popular. He would certainly have made a brilliant expositor of whatever he undertook to expound. He was no Plato or Aristotle; he would have been no Carlyle or Herbert Spencer; but he might have been much that Macaulay was outside of politics. As to the date of Plutarchs birth there can be no certainty. Approximately it may be put down as A. D. 48. It is accepted 7that his death did not occur before the year 120; it may have taken place somewhat, though not much, later. Born in the days of Claudius, he lived through the reigns of Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus, Domitian, Nerva, and Trajan, and saw at least the first three years of the rule of Hadrian. He must have been nearly fifty before the last tyrant of the early Empire fell, but the remainder of his life was spent under the most beneficent rgime, and amid the greatest peace and prosperity, ever experienced in the ancient world. The pax Romana was at its profoundest, the sense of security at its fullest; the fact of general well-being was everywhere most palpable. There was at the same time, or in consequence, a vigorous revival of intellectual life. At no period of antiquity would it have been possible for a man of studious habits and of mild and genial disposition to enjoy a leisure so undisturbed or a society so free from those forms of preoccupation which preclude an engrossing interest in things purely of the mind. For the orator who is fired by the natural heat of democratic politics, for the patriotic poet from whom thrilling verse must be wrung by the wrongs, the decline, or the yet unrealized aspirations of his country, there was indeed no stimulation or scope. But for the cultivation of the humanities, for the indulgence of a taste for art and belles-lettres, for the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity, for the search after interesting knowledgephysical, mathematical, antiquarian, historical, philologicaland for the thoughtful observation of men and manners, the time was almost ideal. In the absence of anxious and absorbing problems of the present there was leisure for a contemplative and critical survey of the past, and for making acquaintance with the best that had been thought and said by it. Since the immediate human environment was no longer distracted and distracting with the clamorous urgencies of external or internal strife and danger, it was possible to look abroad over a wider field, to 8contemplate the more spacious world of man and his work, of Nature and her facts, beauties, and marvels. It was therefore the age of the encyclopaedist, the traveller, the commentator, the describer, the collectorcollector of curiosities, of objects of art, of books, of stories from history, of apophthegms, of pointed and interesting quotations. The prevailing aim was mental and social culture. This was the one object of education, however much its professors might dissent from each other according to the degrees of philistinism in their respective temperaments. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 62618
Author: Plutarch, 46-120?
Release Date: Jul 11, 2020
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Translator: Tucker, T. G. (Thomas George), 1859-1946