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Hello and welcome to the Ancient History Podcast.

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Today, I am absolutely delighted to be joined by Professor Judith Mossman,

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who is the pro Vice Chancellor for Arts and Humanities at Coventry University.

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Judith is also president of the International Plutarch Society.

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So Judith, welcome. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your work with Plutarch.

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Well, thank you very much, James. I've worked on Plutarch now for quite a long time, alongside Greek tragedy.

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One of the things that I really enjoy about Plutarch is the breadth of his writing.

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I tend to work on it more from a literary critical point of view than from strictly ancient historical point of view.

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But I hope that will enable me to bring an interesting perspective to this ancient history podcast to day.

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Thank you. Well, let's dive straight in then. So just set the scene for us.

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Who was Plutarch? What do we know about him? Where was he living?

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Where was he living? And what are these parallel lives?

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So while Plutarch was born around 45 A.D., and he was a member of an elite family in the rather small town of Charonea in Boeotia,

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more or less midway between Athens and Delphi.

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It's on the Boeotian plain, and it's an ancient, but not particularly large place.

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However, it's a very important place in the history of Greece. There were two big, important, decisive battles, Charonea.

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Now, one fought between the Macedonians and the Athenians and Thebans, which the Macedonians won.

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The teenaged Alexander the Great, commanding one of the wings, at Charonea,

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and the other in 86 B.C. between the forces of of Sulla and the forces of Mithridates

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So although Charonea was not big wealthy, it was a place with a great deal of significance in Greek history.

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Some people might think that the wrong side won on both of those battles,

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and certainly in the battle between the Macedonians and the Greeks was celebrated by an enormous stone lion.

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So Plutarch grew up in the shadow of that stone lion.

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His family were wealthy, not ridiculously so, but extremely comfortable.

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They were well respected. And he was very well-educated.

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He was educated, partly in Athens. He, as an adult, was an honorary citizen of Athens and a priest at Delphi, and he was also a Roman citizen.

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His name was Lucius Mestrachus Plutarchus, because his sponsor in the Roman citizen citizenship was Lucius Mestrius Florus,

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and that was how he therefore was named.

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He made a few trips during his lifetime, more than one trip to Rome and also a trip to the Great Library of Alexandria.

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And he had a great many friends, some of them very important.

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So the parallel lives and some other works are dedicated to a man called Celsius Ineccio,

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who was twice consul under Trajan, and he was the first person who was picked to be consul alongside the emperor Trajan.

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So he really was one of the top men in the entire empire.

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And he was a friend of Plutarch's and visited him in Charonea.

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So Plutarch was very attached to his home and often talks about serving as a public servant,

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going around inspecting the drains in the street, making sure everything's working properly.

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And at the beginning of one of his lives the Demosthenes he says,

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I come from a small town and I go on living there in order to make sure that it doesn't get any smaller, which sounds like a slightly feeble joke,

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but actually by being a well-known writer and I think what the Romans would at the time called a philosopher,

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he was able to ensure that there was investment into Charonea the Roman road,

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for example, went closer, than to some other places it might have gone past.

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And that meant that Charonea indeed didn't become as small as some other places in Greece at that time.

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So he was in an unobtrusive sort of way, a very important man in that area, because he was able to secure favours and investment from Rome.

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He was a family man. He had a wife Timoxena, and he had three sons and another son who died and a daughter Ternoxena, who died when she was two.

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But he was seems to have been a very loving family man.

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He also this in his works portrays himself relating to his father, his grandfather and his brothers, as well as a group of friends.

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So one of the rather agreeable things about Plutarch is you get this sense of someone who has is having a a good life,

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a virtuous life, but quite a congenial and by no means humourless life.

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You get a nice picture of an intellectual family in this late first early 2nd century A.D.,

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this part of of the Roman Empire, which is a little bit of a backwater, but still a very pleasant place to live.

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That's very helpful. Thank you. And I guess it's worth really contextualising for our listeners when he's writing.

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So I think he dies in about 128AD. And you've mentioned the emperor Trajan.

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He's a little bit before that he dies during the era of Hadrian.

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So for our students, this is just after obviously a few decades after our Roman period study, which ends in 68.

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And one of the remarkable things about Plutarch is that he is a source in the A level for both the Greek and the Roman papers.

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And he's got that perspective of being a Greek in the Roman world, in the Roman Empire.

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And that brings us, I think, to the idea of these parallel lives, doesn't it?

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Yes, it does. The parallel lives take one Greek and one Roman and ties them together and compares them.

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But not all the lives have a formal comparison after them. But they're all of these pairs of lives.

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You are met clearly whether there's a formal comparison and not too clearly meant to compare the

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two characters and they're clearly chosen because there are points of comparison you can make.

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So you have Theseus, Romulus.

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You have in the case of Pericles, you have Pericles and Fabius Maximus the man who defeated Hannibal and you have Demetrius and Antony.

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Dimitrius been one of the successes of Alexander and Antony being the the last of the lives chronologically.

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Plutarch also wrote a work called The Lives of the Caesars, which we only have the Galba and Otho,

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the also, but that's a completely different work and rather different in its construction.

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But in the parallel lives you have no one after Antony, so no one after the end of the Roman Republic and no one after the Romans take over in Greece.

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So it's a set appointment that is the last of the Greek lives chronologically.

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Clearly he is very alert to patterns in people's lives, to coincidences,

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and to the way in which some people's work lives work out in terms of they start very well and then they go off,

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or maybe they start very badly and then they get better.

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But above all, what he's really keen on doing is drawing the moral lessons from the lives of these important people.

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And I think it's important that his main priority in all of this is to allow the

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reader to use the life as an example of how to behave or how not to behave.

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There aren't actually that many lives of people who are so bad that they're just unlikeable.

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I think there's probably only one person, one of his subjects that Plutarch really actually dislikes, and that's Marius.

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He obviously thought very badly of Marius, but it doesn't in general do hatchet jobs, even when he says at the beginning,

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as he does Demetrius and Antony, that some of these lives are examples of how not to do things.

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He then goes on to write a life in which there's plenty of sympathy for the subject and in which the subjects have significant virtues,

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and in which he he makes this impossible to some extent not to sympathise with the subject.

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So he's not someone who does invective.

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He is someone who is careful to record virtues as well as vices.

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Okay. And if we just pick up on one or three things there,

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is that the sense as well as a Greek living in the Roman Empire with a high point of Greek culture, centuries gone,

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that there's a sense with these parallel lives that he's trying to persuade the Romans of

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the excellence of the Greeks and put Greeks and Romans on a shared pedestal together.

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I think what he is arguing tacitly through many of the lives is that the problems of leadership don't necessarily change that much,

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and that in his modern times it's still perfectly possible to get lessons from people who lived a long time ago.

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I don't think he's actually as he's not he's not chauvinistic about the Greeks.

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I mean, it's certainly not true that the Greek gods are always better than the Romans so

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that we're left feeling that the Greek heroes or better than the Roman heroes.

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It's all it's it's got more to do with a sense that at one point or another in Greek history,

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most of the potential political problems arose and were faced and were dealt with somehow.

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And what can be learned from that?

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I don't think he's doing it with a sense that history has come to a full stop and that because the Romans are now top nation.

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I don't think that's that's right. I think he thinks that at a lot of different levels of society,

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including some comparatively obscure places in the empire, there are going to be people who have to run this joint,

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you know, and they will ultimately find themselves up against some of the same problems, even as Caesar or Alexander the Great.

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And I think the key thing for him is to trace the importance of the past in informing the present and the future.

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It can be the Roman past as well. And it's interesting how important it seems to him to it in particularly the late Roman Republic lives.

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It's very important to him to trace that period in considerable detail.

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Not, I think, because he's hankering for the republic that would be unwise, but because he thinks the republic has lessons to teach the empire.

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And if we think too about him as a biographer, because obviously we're doing ancient history here and we're using him as a source,

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and he makes it very clear, I think at the start of the Alexander biography, he says, I'm not writing history, I'm writing biography.

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So I guess two parts to this. First of all, how should that help us to approach him as a source?

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And secondly, of course, all of the students doing this course will be also reading Suetonius, who is almost a contemporary.

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Pretty much a contemporary. And it might be worth saying, once he talks about biography generally,

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what might be the differences between the two biographers, Plutarch and Suetonius?

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Yes, very happy to do that.

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I think in answer to the first question you mentioned the beginning of the Alexander says, I'm not writing a history, only lives.

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That's a very interesting passage,

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partly because it's actually inconsistent with quite a lot of other passages where he refers to what he does with writing in history.

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And I think it's probably important for us to remember that the generic boundaries in ancient prose are actually very permeable all the way through.

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It's prose never compartmentalised itself in quite the same way as poetry did, partly because the medium,

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the prose is the same in lots of things that we would identify as being different genres.

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Sure. So they never really had a hard and fast line between history and biography.

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And actually, I think in some ways that's true even in modern times, if you think of some people.

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So there are some sort of massive historical biographies of various modern figures that one would be hard pushed to it.

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To say this is completely different from historical writing, it is a historical biography and a very scholarly one too, in some cases.

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So his rhetoric at the beginning of the Alexander, I think, shouldn't perhaps be overpressed.

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But in comparison with Suetonius, I think one does see some very striking differences in technique.

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Suetonius tends to group things his material in a very different way from Plutarch.

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There isn't necessarily a particularly connected narrative.

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It's just the narrative is sporadically connected.

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But you will quite often get a chapter of augustus's jokes or caligula's sexual perversions all grouped together without any sense of chronology.

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Whereas with Plutarch, it's broadly speaking, chronological.

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He will start from the family, the upbringing, the education, where he has material.

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He's very keen to report people's education, and he will go on through the life until they die.

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And then there will be some closure of anecdote, perhaps, as in, for example,

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the Caesar talking about how his assassins fared after his death, something to bring this thing to an end.

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But he doesn't dot around nearly as much as Suetonius

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And he also doesn't focus on salacious detail in the same way.

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And he is, I think,

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much more inclined to see his subjects in relation to other politicians who are

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around the time he's much more likely to see them not as a sort of lone individual,

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but as part of a society. And that's partly clearly because Suetonius writing about emperors who can be rather remote figures.

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And he doesn't so much have to delineate their relationships with with other people around at the time.

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But Plutarch will write perhaps a series of lives that seem to have been prepared together around figures who who have relationships with each other.

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So Aristeides and Cimon, for example, those lives intersect really quite a lot.

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So they do to some extent with the Pericles and to some extent with the Themistocles

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Similar anecdotes come up again and again told from different points of view.

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And you also get that with the late Roman Republican lives, the Pompey, the Brutus, the Caesar and the Antony.

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Again, similar anecdotes come up, but they are repurposed depending on who the actual subject of the life is and what's being focussed on.

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You don't really tend to get that with Suetonius.

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So I think there's a very big contrast between them, and I think it comes back to this business of morality, moral virtue.

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And I think that's something that we ought to point out about Plutarch's obsession with moral virtues.

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This is not just because he was a poker face or something like that. The important thing,

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possibly the most important thing about Plutarch's writing and what holds it all together and this certainly doesn't manifest itself in Suetonius,

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is that Plutarch was a platonist. He was highly educated in philosophy, and he particularly identified himself as a platonist.

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And just explain exactly what you mean by that, because not all of our listeners will will understand.

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But this is someone I believe he has their own sense of objective moral values in the universe.

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But that is someone who is someone who who agrees with promulgates and develops the teachings of Plato,

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one of which is that virtue can be taught, another of which is,

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for example, the immortality of the soul,

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who is generally someone who who believes that there is a level of being which is above and beyond the temporal world.

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So Plutarch is a very serious platonist and imports that into all his writing,

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not just the parallel lives, which only represents about half of his output,

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but less than half actually, but also into all his essays, some of which are on the topics of religion,

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some on science and some on rhetoric and what you might call everyday virtues.

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So not getting angry with people and not being too talkative and generally how to live your life.

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So that philosophy, the philosophy of Plato informs everything he does for you.

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That's very interesting, and that's helpful for our students to bear in mind.

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Absolutely. Well, having mentioned the biographies of Aristides and Kimon and Pericles, let's go then into the period study.

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All of our students will be required to read sections of these three biographies as part of their period study, greek period study reading.

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Now you've mentioned that there's a certain relationship between those biographies.

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I know that the core question that students and teachers will want to know is essentially how reliable is Plutarch?

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Because the way that he tends to be used in that period study is we've got Herodotus and Thucydides 

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each of these, and Plutarch is used either to fill in a few gaps or to add some extra information.

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So in Aristeides we learn more about Aristeides being seen as the good noble leader up in the

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Hellespont area by the Asiatic Greeks when Pausanias is behaving arrogantly in the Kimon.

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We learn about we learn more about the battle of eurymedon and how Kimon had led the Greeks there so successfully.

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Thucydides hardly tells us anything about this very significant battle.

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And then we're going to talk more about the Pericles. We get bits and pieces of Periclean policy.

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As a general rule, though, can we rely on where he's getting this information if he's writing 500 years after the events?

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So that is obviously a big complicating factor. He's a lot later.

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Another complicating factor is that the trouble with ancient authors is they don't do what we want them to do.

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So you said that this doesn't talk about the Pentakonta etia as much as we would about the 50 years, as much as we would like him to.

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It's very irritating. But and Plutarch doesn't always talk about the things we'd like Plutarch spoke about.

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However, on the plus side, Plutarch was extremely well read and had access to lots of texts that we do not have access to.

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And I think one can assume that he was well acquainted with sources contemporary with these cities.

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So I and of course other writers and also with slightly later historians historians such as Ephorus

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course he was then performing the source of exercise on those texts that we perform on Herodotus and Thucydides to deduce.

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In other words, he was trying to weigh them up, decide whether they were accurate and what could be learnt from them.

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He may not always have decided that in the same way as we would make the decision if we had all of those lost texts.

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But he was no fool. And he also, for example, used a lot of ancient comedy, and unusually he used ancient decrees and he did have access to those.

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Whether he was true, the right conclusions from what he was seeing is another question.

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Just as you know, modern historians don't always draw the conclusions from things that they see,

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but he certainly had a great deal more information than we did.

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And so I think where he's not contradicting Thucydides and sometimes even where he is, I think it's worth considering whether.

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He might not be right now. Where he does contradict Thucydides you also have to bear in mind that he may be doing it for a purpose of his own.

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So he it maybe suits his narrative better to have things slightly different.

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And then I'm afraid he will go with what suits his narrative.

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He doesn't, I think, just make things up. But the range of those sources is very great.

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And some of the skills, for example, were gossipy.

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So if there are things that look a little bit racy, a little bit implausible,

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and a little bit like gossip, that could well be kind of chaos, or it could be a comic source.

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And again, ancient comedy tends to be misinterpreted quite a bit because it's very difficult to interpret jokes.

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And how seriously does one take some of the things in Aristophanes and not just, of course Aristophanes, but a lot of lost comedians now,

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or comedians that we only have in fragments like Cretinus or Eupolus and lots

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of other people that Thucydides well knows his texts of those well so.

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I think the problem is that while we can, I think,

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be reasonably sure that he's not irresponsible and one of the ways in which we can be sure of that is to look at,

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for example, Solon, where he says, well,

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some people say that Solon couldn't possibly have met Croesus because it's a chronology, but oh, well, it's a good story.

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But he does, you know, he just put his hand up and say, you know, this might not have happened.

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So he isn't an irresponsible historian, but he has a lot of evidence that we can't independently verify.

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And he's not actually trying to inform us about what happened.

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He's trying to work it into his own narrative in such a way that it makes a telling point.

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I think that's really interesting. And, you know, lots for our students to think about.

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I think the sentence I'd like to hold on to is the idea that if he supplements thucydides without contradicting him, then that's probably acceptable.

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We can we can say that, you know, that seems very likely.

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So the Aristeides passage, for example, on the Kimon passages about.

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Eurymedon, just give us more information about something that he said that he says happens.

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Pericles is very interesting because he gives us different perspectives sometimes on Pericles, his behaviour or different information about it.

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And of course, if our students know anything about Thucydides and Pericles, it's probably that Thucydides rather like Pericles.

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And let's just think about some of the sections for the Pericles biography,

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because the first one, I think that's for the person is Pericles 23 months.

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And this refers to the year four six, when all we're told in Thucydides is that the Spartans invaded or are going to invade.

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They were invading Attica. There was a revolt in Megara from the Athenians.

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It was a revolt in Euboea from the Athenians. And then they withdrew.

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That's all that says. Plutarch adds more information in his Pericles biography and says, Well, actually, Pericles was paying him off.

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He was paying it in ten talents a year, not because he wanted to pay for peace, but because he needed to bide his time before he was ready for war.

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We do learn in the days that the Spartan King, was exiled for taking bribes.

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We're not told by whom. So it does all add up and it doesn't it's it's that's an example of where Plutarch is sort of contradicting Thucydides .

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He's not quite contradicting, but he's going a lot further than Thucydides.

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I think that I think that's right. I also don't think it's necessarily a discreditable story about Pericles.

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It's it's it plays into a long tradition of Spartan kings behaving badly and taking

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bribes and which you hear quite a lot of in all sorts of Hellenistic writers.

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Now, again, I think this may have been a Hellenistic source and it may or may not be true.

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I must say, if it is true, the logistics of it strike one as being pretty formidable.

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Getting the cache of Clistinax

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It must have been a bit of a challenge given that nobody had a bank account, you couldn't just sort of transfer the money.

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So in terms of plausibility, I am not sure whether it rings true, but in terms of Pericles character,

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in terms of the long preparation and the caution and the cunning plan,

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as it were, it doesn't contradict the character because it's all done for Athens and it's done as a sort of wise precaution, not a wise precaution.

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Aspect of it is what's emphasised, not the seedy deal. I think you have to bear in mind two things.

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Firstly, that there are a number of places he could have got the story from, which would be rather less reliable than Plutarch usually is.

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And secondly, you have to bear you have to ask yourself whether it's actually plausible.

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But given that we know that Clistinax was done for taking bribes, it's not impossible.

240
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And it isn't something that Thucydides would have wanted to put in his narrative.

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I think it doesn't. As you say, he doesn't suit it doesn't suit the narrative shape of that part of the work, really.

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Okay. I mean, perhaps it's an exaggeration and perhaps there's a one off bribe or something.

243
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I, you know, there's ways of reading it so that it still fits and is perhaps a bit more plausible.

244
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I'm keen for this to be true. I just think, you know, apparently scheming like this, it just feels like it must be true.

245
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But there we go. Who am I to know? But I think, you know one thing, if we then move it down to two,

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apparently 30 and 31 and I don't think 32 as well as that, it's not technically prescribed.

247
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Which brings us on to the Megarian decree, which again sort of core bits of the syllabus in the period study.

248
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And we get a much fuller and rich analysis of this decree and Pericles' relationship with it in Plutarch than we do in Thucydides.

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And is there a sense here that Plutarch may well be working with Athenian sources,

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which are more anti Pericles than Thucydides and so he gives us a richer context?

251
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Yes, I think I think that's right. And I think that's probably fair enough.

252
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I don't think he simply made up any of this. So I think I think you're right.

253
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He's got a wider range of sources than he had and he's using them.

254
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I think the only thing I would mention is that in the Fabius Maximus, the pair with Pericles

255
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there were a number of points which Fabius gets into difficulties with his own political opponents in Rome.

256
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So he keeps having these irresponsible colleagues foisted onto him, and he behaves frightfully well and ends up getting them out of trouble.

257
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He, I think. Is, you know, he's probably more messed about than the city and Pericles would put up with, if that makes sense.

258
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So I think that using the Athenian sources, which are a bit more anti Pericles,

259
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which which stressed that it wasn't all plain sailing internally any more than it was externally,

260
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is something which makes Pericles career look a little bit more like Fabius Maximus.

261
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So it's something that without wishing to distort it, because I don't.

262
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But it's intrinsically implausible that Pericles didn't face any internal opposition.

263
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Plutarch is going to want to look at sources which show that Pericles had internal opponents,

264
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whereas I think Thucydides wants to suggest that when Pericles was in charge, everything was dandy.

265
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After he died, everything got more messy and nasty and complicated internally.

266
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And that was one reason why eventually they went off to Sicily and that was a very bad thing.

267
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So it's again, it's sort of narrative trajectories.

268
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I think it again that it while the actual details of how many and decrees there actually were remains a terribly complicated problem.

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I do think that the overall sense that Pericles isn't having it all his own way is what's really important about these these chapters,

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that it's difficult for him at times.

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And he's not he's not quite as Olympian as one sometimes thinks.

272
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Yeah. And perhaps it's worth just briefly summarising what we learn there, what Plutarch tells us there.

273
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And it's essentially that why doesn't Pericles want to rescinds the Megarian decree?

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Well, he gives, I think, three different reasons. But he says the most popular and most popularly held at that time.

275
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So he doesn't say, this is necessarily my opinion.

276
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I don't think the most popularly held was that he wanted a war to deflect attention from his own political troubles at home,

277
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and that included the prosecution of Aspasia, prosecution of Phidias and the removal of Anaxagoras I think as well.

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He was a sort of great scholar and I think closely associated with him.

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The charge of having, if anybody have been able to prove that the charge of having stolen the gold from the statue in the temple,

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that would have been an extremely serious matter because it would it could have been as about impiety.

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It could have been even robbing robbing a temple.

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And that would have been just very difficult for him indeed.

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A very serious matter. So I think that's that's absolutely right that they do.

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It's a good one.

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And then, of course, what's interesting is that another proscribed source is that short section of the Akarnians where Dikaiopolis,

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the leading character, is jokingly explaining the origin of the war.

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And in fact, Plutarch himself quotes, this doesn't mean in that section and it's all about women snatching,

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which may well be apparent at the start of the histories.

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But again, essentially, we get the same idea that Pericles enacts or holds fast on the Megarian decree because Aspasia,

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his wife, had been offended and insulted. So it's a it's the personal reason rather than a political reason on behalf of the Athenian state.

291
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So that's interesting because of course, Aristophanes is not 500 years later.

292
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He's about five years later. Yes, absolutely. He's a contemporary source.

293
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I think the other thing to bear in mind is from a Plutarchan point of view,

294
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it's one of the worst things you can do is put your private interests before those of the city.

295
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And there are a number of figures elsewhere in the Athenian lives, most notably Alcibiades,

296
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 who make that big mistake and who get their public and their private lives mixed up.

297
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And they suffer very badly for it, and so do the Athenians.

298
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And it's something that that principle is actually also something that's very important in Thucydides.

299
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It comes out particularly in Thucydides six and seven.

300
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Again, the public and the private getting getting in the way of one another,

301
00:35:30,150 --> 00:35:35,720
letting your private life get in the way of your public life is always a recipe for disaster.

302
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And Plutarch, I think he takes it from his face.

303
00:35:41,390 --> 00:35:48,830
I think it's more likely to be a general sense of what to do, really a general sense of public duty.

304
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But he certainly in many lives lauds those who put the interests of the state before their

305
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own and condemns those who allow that private feelings to interfere with their public lives.

306
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Okay. Well, that's plenty for our students to think about that before we move on to the depths studies

307
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A couple of things. First of all, there are bits of Plutarch that are interesting or useful that actually aren't prescribed,

308
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but I thought it would be nice to just mention them. And they're one of the key things about the Sicilian expedition,

309
00:36:26,150 --> 00:36:30,500
which don't come up in Thucydides which perhaps worth mentioning the arrival of the news,

310
00:36:30,500 --> 00:36:37,160
the lessons of the disaster, the failure of the expedition, and then the return of Athenian survivors afterwards.

311
00:36:37,550 --> 00:36:39,260
Yes, at the end of the Nicias,

312
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there are a couple of famous anecdotes really first date that which which certainly don't feature in Thucydides in the Nicias.

313
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Yes the news comes via a sailor who goes into a barbershop and says, have you heard how the poor man's practically torn apart?

314
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Before that, a more official news version arrives and that saves it.

315
00:37:03,680 --> 00:37:11,810
But it's a strangely convincing little anecdote how news actually must have got around in the ancient world.

316
00:37:11,930 --> 00:37:17,000
Barbershops, big focuses of news, gossip, what have you.

317
00:37:17,360 --> 00:37:23,989
And it's very striking. And it's it's sort of very typically Plutarch in some part but where Thucydides does

318
00:37:23,990 --> 00:37:29,360
this wonderful lapidary epitaph almost for the loss of this Athenian troops.

319
00:37:29,390 --> 00:37:33,680
Then seven Plutarch has this chap who walks into a barber shop.

320
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And the other thing is that they had the troops in the quarries in Syracuse have said to some of them said to have managed to procure

321
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their release by singing choruses of Euripides because Europe is was very popular in Sicily at the time and it is specifically Euripides.

322
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So that is a very nice, kind of very nice story about Athenian soft power.

323
00:38:02,390 --> 00:38:10,310
And I wonder whether that too is what a very typically imperial Greek story.

324
00:38:10,610 --> 00:38:19,400
The Greeks spent a lot of soft power trying to improve the lot of the eastern provinces of the empire.

325
00:38:19,940 --> 00:38:24,800
And that was would have been something I think it would have resonated with Plutarch's Contemporaries.

326
00:38:26,330 --> 00:38:34,700
And then it's also worth saying that although the biographies of Alcibiades and Lysander are not prescribed, again,

327
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they are very useful for informing us about the Ionian War, that that last stage of the Peloponnesian War between 413 and 404.

328
00:38:44,670 --> 00:38:46,820
And so perhaps tell us a little bit about these two as both.

329
00:38:47,930 --> 00:38:59,630
Well, the Alcibiades is perhaps particularly interesting because he's such a flamboyant character and has so many vicissitudes.

330
00:39:00,470 --> 00:39:04,410
He's there's a lot of very interesting imagery used to describe him.

331
00:39:04,430 --> 00:39:10,819
He's described as a chameleon. He can be serious when he needs to be luxurious.

332
00:39:10,820 --> 00:39:18,680
And but when he goes to Sparta, you know, anybody would have thought that he eaten black bean broth or his life and he

333
00:39:18,680 --> 00:39:24,799
fitted right in in a slightly worrying way and in another slightly worrying way.

334
00:39:24,800 --> 00:39:31,160
He seems to be slightly gender fluid worrying in the context of an ancient text in

335
00:39:31,160 --> 00:39:36,860
that he has a fight with a boy when he's little and bites him and the boy says,

336
00:39:36,860 --> 00:39:45,110
You bite like a girl Alcibiades . And he says, No, like a lion, that all these animal images keep coming up.

337
00:39:45,230 --> 00:39:53,990
And then right at the end of his life, when he fights very nobly but is ultimately shot down with arrows,

338
00:39:54,290 --> 00:40:03,590
his then mistress called Tibandra has to dress him in her own clothes because everything's burnt in fire.

339
00:40:04,220 --> 00:40:12,170
And so he's buried wearing her clothes, which is again, very striking, this sort of slightly liminal figure.

340
00:40:12,440 --> 00:40:16,700
And yet he's greatly mourned by the Athenians.

341
00:40:17,640 --> 00:40:24,469
Lysander is again an interesting life, but mostly from the perspective, I think,

342
00:40:24,470 --> 00:40:30,9
of the later parts of it and the failure really of the spartans to capitalise on their victory.

343
00:40:31,580 --> 00:40:40,819
The failure, as Plutarch sees it, to capitalise on that victory against the Athenians and also something that runs through lots of Plutarchan lives.

344
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the feeling that it's all gone wrong when Greeks are fighting each other, they ought to be doing is fighting the Persians.

345
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And so that they when they can't when they can't stop fighting each other, they are at their weakest.

346
00:40:56,180 --> 00:40:59,660
And in many respects, their most deplorable.

347
00:40:59,900 --> 00:41:05,360
And interestingly, when we turn to the Republican lives,

348
00:41:05,780 --> 00:41:12,259
where Plutarch is talking about the Roman Civil Wars, it's again, you shouldn't be fighting yourselves.

349
00:41:12,260 --> 00:41:20,630
each other. You should be fighting external enemies in order to win proper triumphs, proper glory.

350
00:41:21,200 --> 00:41:23,180
So the Lysander, I think,

351
00:41:23,720 --> 00:41:32,630
partly represents an early manifestation of that total inability later to stop fighting each other and fight somebody else instead.

352
00:41:34,170 --> 00:41:42,450
Okay. Thank you very much. Judith Well, I think that probably brings us to the end of our discussion on the period setting.

353
00:41:44,240 --> 00:41:50,059
So let's turn to the depths to these and a proposed split up comes up in many different places.

354
00:41:50,060 --> 00:41:56,750
He comes up in the Sparta depth study, although we might leave that to one side, because I think we've already talked about the Pericles biography there.

355
00:41:57,350 --> 00:42:03,080
And let's start with someone that we've just talked about, Lysander in the Period City,

356
00:42:03,470 --> 00:42:07,880
but of course, the most famous Spartan for you, I think, has to be the Lycurgus

357
00:42:08,540 --> 00:42:15,769
This is very complicated, isn't it? Because did Plutarch even believe that Lycurgus existed?

358
00:42:15,770 --> 00:42:18,920
I think even Herodotus says, I don't know if he was a man or a god. 

359
00:42:20,150 --> 00:42:25,490
I guess it's a similar sort of question with, say, his biography of Theseus.

360
00:42:25,490 --> 00:42:30,920
So many on the Athenians. So does he actually believe in these people and what's going on basically?

361
00:42:31,340 --> 00:42:33,110
Well, I think he certainly believes in them.

362
00:42:33,110 --> 00:42:43,459
And I think he puts Lycurgus in a pair with Numa, the second king of Rome, and I certainly think that he would also believe in Theseus,

363
00:42:43,460 --> 00:42:48,830
but the stories he would regard as on a very different level from the stories about Lycurgus.

364
00:42:49,580 --> 00:42:57,860
And that's partly because Lycurgus is very differently traces in Plato and he is regarded as a real person in Plato.

365
00:42:58,400 --> 00:43:03,020
So I think he would think there was a qualitative difference between the two.

366
00:43:03,530 --> 00:43:12,530
That said, I also think that there's a great deal of extrapolation backwards, as it were, from things he knows about classical Sparta.

367
00:43:13,130 --> 00:43:
The appearance that Sparta makes in texts like the constitution of the

368
00:43:18,170 --> 00:43:24,800
Lakedaimonians and various other political texts describing a political system.

369
00:43:25,730 --> 00:43:34,520
And I think he extrapolates backwards to Lycurgus' ways of thinking about how to set up the Spartan state.

370
00:43:35,240 --> 00:43:41,570
I would say think that what as with the Athenian lives, the Spartan lives are probably prepared together.

371
00:43:41,750 --> 00:43:47,060
And one of the reasons for that is because the latest lost lives tend to refer back to the Lycurgus.

372
00:43:47,540 --> 00:43:51,500
And not just who Lycurgus the person, but actually Lycurgus the life.

373
00:43:52,040 --> 00:44:01,100
So that looks reasonably uncontroversial to suppose that. it's also interesting which Spartans he chooses to write about.

374
00:44:01,760 --> 00:44:07,520
Lycurgus is the programmatic life and I mean that's a fairly obvious choice.

375
00:44:07,520 --> 00:44:11,059
Really interesting this he opposes Lycurgus to

376
00:44:11,060 --> 00:44:23,270
Numa makes both system were also quite philosophical thinkers and he emphasises a lot of Lycurgus his desire to keep money out of Sparta.

377
00:44:23,600 --> 00:44:29,510
So he he makes the he makes them have these obols which are incredibly heavy and which you can't carry around.

378
00:44:30,020 --> 00:44:34,309
Well, unfortunately, later in the Spartan lives,

379
00:44:34,310 --> 00:44:41,360
that obviously goes a bit wrong because there's all sorts of stuff about people taking bribes, people being corrupted and so forth.

380
00:44:41,360 --> 00:44:48,830
So the original pure intention of the Lycurgan reforms is is gradually eroded

381
00:44:48,850 --> 00:44:53,950
until the Spartans begin to look and sound pretty much like everyone else really.

382
00:44:54,620 --> 00:45:
So you have the Lysander and the Aegislaius which are very interlinked.

383
00:45:01,250 --> 00:45:09,050
And again you've got the same kinds of, of situations described from slightly different angles in a very interesting way.

384
00:45:09,350 --> 00:45:17,360
And then you've got the double pair, the Agis and  Cleomenes who are paired with the Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus.

385
00:45:17,690 --> 00:45:23,870
And that comes from a much later period and rather a declining period of Spartan in history.

386
00:45:24,350 --> 00:45:29,960
And through that time you see a lot of change in, in Sparta,

387
00:45:30,350 --> 00:45:41,990
the sense of the Spartans as being sort of honest and and also quite witty and ferociously brave comes and goes in those later lives.

388
00:45:42,440 --> 00:45:50,570
Sometimes they say things which are bad, like Lysander mocking people who don't break their oaths when they need to.

389
00:45:50,960 --> 00:45:55,400
You know, that's that's not a that's that's not a sort of Lycurgan thing to say.

390
00:45:56,090 --> 00:46:04,520
It's a story in a way which suggests a very extraordinary, almost golden age society.

391
00:46:04,520 --> 00:46:14,000
At the beginning in the Lycurgus, which then gets inevitably corrupted and for all its virtues, goes downhill.

392
00:46:14,840 --> 00:46:20,960
And one interesting thing is that at one point he says he wants to write a life of Leonidas.

393
00:46:22,000 --> 00:46:31,330
And in many respects, you would think that if what we will think of when we think of Leonidas, we think of the 300 Spartans and we think of Leonidas

394
00:46:31,660 --> 00:46:38,530
So why isn't there a Leonidas? And I suppose there are a couple of relevant considerations.

395
00:46:38,530 --> 00:46:45,209
Firstly. Is there enough material? Now there's quite a lot of material collected in the same settings on kings and 

396
00:46:45,210 --> 00:46:49,530
commander on Leonidas, actually, so that should have been all right.

397
00:46:49,920 --> 00:46:59,550
But also, is there a pair which Roman are you going to put with the Leonidas?

398
00:47:00,120 --> 00:47:04,350
And it doesn't have to be a source of precise sort of match, but you would think that, you know,

399
00:47:04,390 --> 00:47:10,650
it does need to be someone who who is going to be, as it were, match up to that standard of courage.

400
00:47:10,840 --> 00:47:20,760
And probably it's got to be someone who's killed in battle and it doesn't have to be someone who's killed in exactly the same circumstances.

401
00:47:20,760 --> 00:47:26,160
But, you know, you have to think of someone and maybe, maybe you just couldn't think of anybody.

402
00:47:26,280 --> 00:47:30,180
So perhaps that's why we don't actually have the Leonidas life that he promises us.

403
00:47:31,110 --> 00:47:38,729
I think the other thing about the Spartan lives is that probably no ancient text has

404
00:47:38,730 --> 00:47:43,290
been more pored over by people who are interested in making up their own Spartas,

405
00:47:44,430 --> 00:47:48,930
even more so than the other texts which talk about Sparta,

406
00:47:49,380 --> 00:47:57,630
the sense is that the educative process by which these amazing warriors are trained

407
00:47:58,170 --> 00:48:03,990
has been so important to so many different people that it becomes actually quite,

408
00:48:05,040 --> 00:48:08,130
really very difficult to sort out fact from fiction.

409
00:48:09,600 --> 00:48:13,710
Yeah. And that's unfortunately for our students that's a challenge that they've got to try and do.

410
00:48:14,220 --> 00:48:17,240
I guess a couple of questions I had on the back of what you said there.

411
00:48:17,250 --> 00:48:22,409
The first is that a bit like the Plutarch's relationship to Thucydides in the period study

412
00:48:22,410 --> 00:48:27,750
 is it worth starting with the Xenophon Constitution of the Spartans.

413
00:48:28,620 --> 00:48:33,089
He's contemporary. We know he's a friend of the Spartans. He sort of affects them doesn't he really.

414
00:48:33,090 --> 00:48:41,280
And then spends time in the Peloponnese and then trying to work out what Plutarch adds and how reliable that might be.

415
00:48:41,880 --> 00:48:46,320
And then I think the second thing is, is what about particularly those sayings in the Spartan women?

416
00:48:46,320 --> 00:48:49,440
I mean, they are fantastic aren't they, but where do we go with those?

417
00:48:49,800 --> 00:48:54,360
Well, the interesting things about the saying of the women's and indeed the Spartan section of

418
00:48:54,360 --> 00:48:58,680
the king of kings and commanders is that not all of the settings are reported in Doric,

419
00:48:58,950 --> 00:49:06,210
and that matters because we know that Spartans spoke Doric and it's a different dialect from Attic,

420
00:49:06,480 --> 00:49:11,700
or indeed from what Plutarch wrote, which is a sort of modified attic.

421
00:49:12,640 --> 00:49:18,450
And if you are, as it were, smoothing out the dialectical differences,

422
00:49:19,450 --> 00:49:23,930
that raises the question of whether the whole thing has actually been well made up, really.

423
00:49:24,280 --> 00:49:26,860
On the other hand, some of them are reported in Doric.

424
00:49:27,460 --> 00:49:37,030
Is that because whoever he's getting it from knows that they're meant to be Doric, but has made them up anyway and and so on?

425
00:49:37,060 --> 00:49:42,580
I think I think one can be too sceptical about this kind of thing.

426
00:49:42,910 --> 00:49:53,470
There are some quotations that stick in the mind and which don't have to be made up in order to be remembered.

427
00:49:54,370 --> 00:50:00,340
And it is also true that Plato, again, sort of look much closer to being contemporary,

428
00:50:00,520 --> 00:50:05,560
makes particular points of saying that Spartan speech is like a javelin.

429
00:50:05,750 --> 00:50:13,239
It gets right to the heart of the matter. So that being the case, one doesn't need to assume that it is all.

430
00:50:13,240 --> 00:50:22,000
Fictional, I think. But again, it's really a question of whether they're reported anywhere else that makes them more solid.

431
00:50:22,030 --> 00:50:28,510
Obviously, I mean, Herodotus has got some Spartan women making very important interventions.

432
00:50:29,030 --> 00:50:36,960
I'm thinking particularly of Gorgo, and I don't really see that there's very much reason to to be ultra sceptical about that.

433
00:50:36,970 --> 00:50:40,780
If even if it never happened, it's what people thought happened.

434
00:50:41,320 --> 00:50:50,580
And that to some extent is just as important. As far as the sort of with it or on it, it seems concerned.

435
00:50:50,580 --> 00:50:55,469
Again, I think you could decide that what is what was important about that was that that

436
00:50:55,470 --> 00:51:01,860
was the image that was projected that even if the reality was more complicated,

437
00:51:02,280 --> 00:51:05,790
it was a recognisably Spartan image, which.

438
00:51:06,900 --> 00:51:10,530
Could be emulated by others.

439
00:51:10,860 --> 00:51:15,630
You also get a sense, I think in some of the earlier Roman biographies,

440
00:51:16,080 --> 00:51:26,670
you have the sense that the early Roman Republic is very much responding to Sparta in its self-abnegation sense of duty,

441
00:51:26,910 --> 00:51:40,170
its austerity, its very heavy reliance on martial virtues, and also in its having some remarkably tough women behind those fighting men.

442
00:51:40,560 --> 00:51:46,410
So in the in the Coriolanus, for example, Coriolanus' mother Volumnia,

443
00:51:46,410 --> 00:51:51,900
has this fantastic speech where she tells him to stop attacking Rome, basically.

444
00:51:52,230 --> 00:51:58,530
And that, again, is a speech that there are various different versions of in different historians.

445
00:51:58,860 --> 00:52:03,270
But the incident is vouched for by several different sources.

446
00:52:03,570 --> 00:52:13,370
And the again, the subordination of the private interest to the public good is the constant theme of that.

447
00:52:13,380 --> 00:52:18,900
And that's something that you can see projected in Sparta very firmly as well.

448
00:52:20,440 --> 00:52:27,130
Thank you. And what about the relationship between Plutarch's Lycurgus and Xenophon's constitution of the Spartans?

449
00:52:28,850 --> 00:52:35,899
I think you quite rightly could sentence Constitution of the Spartans is an excellent place to start and methods of checking,

450
00:52:35,900 --> 00:52:39,890
as it were, the Lycurgus against the The Xenophon is a good idea.

451
00:52:40,490 --> 00:52:49,469
I also think that the part that Plutarch is obviously more most interested in is things like the Agoge and the education aspect.

452
00:52:49,470 --> 00:52:56,390
So that that is all part of being a platonist. Now of course, Xenophon is also a platonist, so they're both interested in the same thing.

453
00:52:56,750 --> 00:53:00,110
Xenophon is a follower of Socrates directly,

454
00:53:00,830 --> 00:53:05,720
and you also have to bear in mind that Plutarch is obviously very well read in Xenophon

455
00:53:06,350 --> 00:53:14,030
and obviously I think to be honest there is an awful lot of influence from Xenophon.

456
00:53:14,030 --> 00:53:21,019
On Plutarch. One could write quite a long book about Xenophon's influence on Plutarch.

457
00:53:21,020 --> 00:53:30,590
Actually they have a lot in common as authors and I suspect that they had quite a lot in common as people.

458
00:53:32,240 --> 00:53:35,530
Well, maybe one of our listeners will go on to write that book. Yes.

460
00:53:42,210 --> 00:53:45,980
So you may well find that there's plenty of overlap.

461
00:53:46,910 --> 00:53:56,120
The the only other thing that perhaps one should mention is that Sparta in Plutarch's Day was a place

462
00:53:56,120 --> 00:54:04,880
where people visited and Plutarch himself went and visited it and observed the rites at the temple of Artemis

463
00:54:05,420 --> 00:54:12,740
including the rather nasty to us, rather nasty flogging endurance test.

464
00:54:13,250 --> 00:54:21,530
And he witnessed that in his own day. So there's also, I think, going to be a sense that there's some continuity.

465
00:54:21,890 --> 00:54:31,170
That sense may be misleading. And that's because almost by the Roman times, Sparta was almost turned into sort of tourist theme park,

466
00:54:31,250 --> 00:54:35,700
which is where, you know, come along and see how they did it centuries ago.

467
00:54:35,730 --> 00:54:40,350
And it was probably completely overegged and and over the top.

468
00:54:40,740 --> 00:54:43,110
I think that's right. But occasionally,

469
00:54:43,110 --> 00:54:52,439
Plutarch does like to say things like and this happens even now know particularly in works like the Greek questions which are part of

470
00:54:52,440 --> 00:55:02,070
the Moralia, the moral essays, more fun than they sound and the Greek questions he quite often says and even today we still do this that and the other. 

471
00:55:03,300 --> 00:55:07,500
And of course, that sense of continuity can be very misleading.

472
00:55:07,890 --> 00:55:12,600
It may, in fact, not have been like that right the way back.

473
00:55:12,600 --> 00:55:16,530
But because you do it like that now, that's the way you think it's always been.

474
00:55:17,130 --> 00:55:22,140
I mean, the idea of the analogy that's jumped into my head is if you go to the Colosseum today,

475
00:55:22,500 --> 00:55:27,360
you'll see centurions and things like that walking around and it's almost like saying,

476
00:55:27,360 --> 00:55:30,500
Oh, you know, they've still got Centurions walking around the Colosseum today.

477
00:55:31,170 --> 00:55:33,490
You know, and they have got these types of weapons and the rest of it.

478
00:55:33,540 --> 00:55:40,170
And we wouldn't take that seriously, would we it's a kind of this is what the gladiators we were you know, it's not it's not a good piece of evidence.

479
00:55:40,500 --> 00:55:45,239
And that's that's that's absolutely right. But it's it's at the same time.

480
00:55:45,240 --> 00:55:56,210
It's it can be. Seductive in terms of reasoning about something which is very now very far in the past.

481
00:55:57,500 --> 00:56:00,860
Okay. Well, thank you. Well, let's leave Sparta there.

482
00:56:01,970 --> 00:56:06,050
And come across to the Macedon depth study. Plutarch is

483
00:56:06,320 --> 00:56:13,100
Also really important source here. You know, he just he is like the blu-tac of ancient history, a level basically, he gets everywhere.

484
00:56:14,270 --> 00:56:19,070
So if we if we think about Plutarch's account of the life of Alexander the Great.

485
00:56:20,500 --> 00:56:27,970
What do we know about how he approached them? Well, again, he uses a great many sources that we no longer have,

486
00:56:28,180 --> 00:56:33,640
including Alexander's ephemera, the official diaries written when he was on campaign.

487
00:56:34,540 --> 00:56:36,900
When thinking about Plutarch and Alexander,

488
00:56:36,910 --> 00:56:46,600
it's important to remember not only that he wrote the life and indeed importantly, that he paired Alexander with Caesar.

489
00:56:47,050 --> 00:56:59,080
Julius Caesar, but also that he wrote and this is one of the moral essays he wrote The Fortune or Virtue of Alexander the Great.

490
00:56:59,590 --> 00:57:09,670
Now, that is a rhetorical work, arguing in turn to whether Alexander was more lucky than good or more good than lucky.

491
00:57:10,390 --> 00:57:24,790
And in that essay, Alexander comes out as a sort of mortal ruler, a virtuous prince, a really important and groundbreaking general.

492
00:57:25,090 --> 00:57:34,930
But more than that, someone who, when he became the ruler of a vast empire, exercised restraint in binding the empire together.

493
00:57:35,350 --> 00:57:40,780
And then was cruelly cut off by it, by a bad fate, a malign fate.

494
00:57:41,500 --> 00:57:49,360
But the life is a lot more complicated than that and a lot more interesting.

495
00:57:49,660 --> 00:58:01,040
And in lots of ways. It was very sceptical of Alexander in that everything starts brilliantly up to a point.

496
00:58:02,500 --> 00:58:07,390
He's a remarkable child. He's educated by Aristotle.

497
00:58:07,720 --> 00:58:11,890
And apart from being educated by Socrates or Plato, you couldn't really get better than that.

498
00:58:12,530 --> 00:58:18,310
But as far as Plato's concerned. But of course, he comes from an extremely dysfunctional family.

499
00:58:19,090 --> 00:58:32,320
So a lot of the early anecdotes show that although he is personally brilliant and brilliant, educated and so on, his father and mother's conflict,

500
00:58:33,040 --> 00:58:39,410
his father's outrageous conduct in many respects, which leads to his father being assassinated,

501
00:58:40,000 --> 00:58:44,080
all make his early years really quite contested, quite difficult.

502
00:58:45,410 --> 00:58:53,180
One of the early anecdotes which suggests this is the famous anecdote about Bucephalus.

503
00:58:54,140 --> 00:59:00,890
So they he says, you have to imagine Alexander was a grumpy teenager who really tells us so.

504
00:59:00,890 --> 00:59:08,540
Well, you can just see this 15 year old sort of slouching around on the margins, being knowing everything and being very irritating.

505
00:59:09,170 --> 00:59:14,030
And they turn some people turn up with this horse, but it doesn't want to be ridden.

506
00:59:14,300 --> 00:59:18,260
It doesn't want to be controlled, doesn't want to do what it's meant to do.

507
00:59:18,800 --> 00:59:29,360
So it is fantastic raw material, but it's in it's in a very bad place and it keeps throwing it to rider, keeps overturning its controller.

508
00:59:30,230 --> 00:59:35,540
And it's just pretty obvious that Alexander and the horse, are being quite closely compared.

509
00:59:36,380 --> 00:59:40,940
And then, of course, Alexander grumbles. Oh, yeah, well, that's really stupid.

510
00:59:40,940 --> 00:59:44,360
You're using a really good horse there, and it's just really stupid.

511
00:59:44,810 --> 00:59:51,709
And Philip, it starts out by ignoring him for a while, and then he can't ignore him any longer.

512
00:59:51,710 --> 00:59:57,890
And he says, So you think you're so clever, you get on the horse. And of course Alexander does, and he's worked out.

513
00:59:57,890 --> 01:00:01,670
What's wrong with the books? The sun is in the horse's eyes. It's not a happy Horse.

514
01:00:02,090 --> 01:00:06,260
So he turns its head about to get it into a better frame of mind.

515
01:00:06,500 --> 01:00:11,330
And then he rides it up and down and it's all fantastic. And Philip is absolutely delighted.

516
01:00:12,140 --> 01:00:19,070
But as well as controlling the actual horse, Alexander has to learn to control himself in a way that Philip has never done,

517
01:00:19,340 --> 01:00:27,380
because there's a there's a very complex web of imagery around that which reinforces that lesson.

518
01:00:28,580 --> 01:00:36,770
Now after that, Alexander does some things which put him in a very thin moral light as far as Plutarch's concerned.

519
01:00:36,780 --> 01:00:46,429
So he sacked Thebes and there is a sense ever after that he's pursued by the angry Dioynsus because since Thebes is Dionysus' birthplace

520
01:00:46,430 --> 01:00:54,770
his birth place and there's this sense of revenge of Dionysus, I suspect, which obviously he's militarily incredibly successful.

521
01:00:55,190 --> 01:01:05,960
But there are certain terrible instances where his success has gone to his head and he becomes very angry, uncontrollably angry.

522
01:01:06,740 --> 01:01:15,380
And the most famous for that is the death of Cleitus, which also shows the difficulties in moderating relations,

523
01:01:15,410 --> 01:01:20,570
not particularly actually between Greeks and Persians, between Macedonians and other Greeks.

524
01:01:21,320 --> 01:01:26,810
So it reminds one before he conquered Persia, Alexander conquered the rest of Greece,

525
01:01:27,650 --> 01:01:34,340
and in binding the Greeks together, he alienates a lot of the Macedonians.

526
01:01:35,510 --> 01:01:43,220
And in the end he ends up killing Cleitus in a drunken rage and is overwhelmed with grief as a result.

527
01:01:44,120 --> 01:01:54,860
And in generally in general, he he goes through some very dark moral times before he eventually is forced to turn round,

528
01:01:55,340 --> 01:01:59,450
because he goes as far as India and the Macedonians are fed up and want to go home.

529
01:02:01,580 --> 01:02:07,940
And there are lots of different anecdotes which suggest this is partly a moral decline.

530
01:02:07,940 --> 01:02:12,800
It's not a straightforward moral decline, but it's its moral light and shade.

531
01:02:14,000 --> 01:02:21,200
And when he's in battle, he seems to rise above all this darkness.

532
01:02:21,740 --> 01:02:29,060
But when he's not in battle and he's doing the non battle things in life, he increasingly gets more and more wrong.

533
01:02:29,720 --> 01:02:33,440
Until finally, of course, he comes into battle and dies. 

534
01:02:34,250 --> 01:02:37,580
And that the end the very end of the Alexander is probably missing.

535
01:02:37,910 --> 01:02:44,150
But it looks as though what it's going to stress is the division the break-up of the empire.

536
01:02:44,420 --> 01:02:50,840
The sad parts really not the amazing successes, the ultimate failure.

537
01:02:51,740 --> 01:02:58,670
So it's a completely different picture. It's not, in a way, a historian's picture.

538
01:02:58,670 --> 01:03:03,260
And I think it's important that it's the beginning of the Alexander, where he says in writing,

539
01:03:03,260 --> 01:03:09,440
history only lives as if there was a source of health warning on that particular life.

540
01:03:10,570 --> 01:03:18,340
Of course, there's also the Caesar where you have to bear in mind that Caesar is going to meet a bad end.

541
01:03:19,270 --> 01:03:22,600
He's going to be destroyed by people he trusts.

542
01:03:23,770 --> 01:03:28,690
He's going to, first of all, be made very unpopular by having the wrong friends and not keeping them in line.

543
01:03:29,980 --> 01:03:35,020
And then he's literally going to be stabbed in the back by people who ought to be able to trust.

544
01:03:35,920 --> 01:03:43,160
Well, that doesn't really happen with Alexander, although some of his relationships with his friends are very problematic.

545
01:03:43,880 --> 01:03:50,430
He's more inclined to sort of turn his back on his friends and Caesar's more inclined to indulge his friends too greatly.

546
01:03:51,040 --> 01:03:54,760
So there are lots and lots of tensions between the two lives.

547
01:03:55,120 --> 01:04:03,040
And it's very difficult, I think, to understand what's going on in the Alexander without having a sense of what's going on with Caesar.

548
01:04:04,140 --> 01:04:11,080
Is the link thematically therefore, something like the idea that they were both brilliant military commanders,

549
01:04:11,590 --> 01:04:18,400
but their own personal flaws meant that off the battlefield they contributed to their own downfall.

550
01:04:18,670 --> 01:04:24,860
Yes, I think there is a sense of that. And I also think that there's a sort of geographical parallelism as well.

551
01:04:24,880 --> 01:04:31,610
So Alexander goes east, Caesar goes west and north to gaul and Britain.

552
01:04:31,630 --> 01:04:35,470
They both get perilously close to reaching the end of the world in either direction.

553
01:04:36,040 --> 01:04:40,480
But they do have these difficult lives once they stop conquering people.

554
01:04:41,660 --> 01:04:51,710
It's not an exact parallelism. And there are one or two interesting parts of the Caesar which emphasise that it isn't exact.

555
01:04:52,190 --> 01:04:58,940
So when Caesar reads about Alexander the Great and is absolutely distressed because he hasn't

556
01:04:58,940 --> 01:05:07,490
managed to achieve anything like what Alexander had achieved by the time he was dead at 33,

557
01:05:07,700 --> 01:05:12,799
and he's already older than Alexander when he reads this book and it hasn't got anywhere

558
01:05:12,800 --> 01:05:20,270
close to it and also Caesar is actually much more keen on being the first person that the top,

559
01:05:20,330 --> 01:05:23,330
top man than Alexander is.

560
01:05:23,750 --> 01:05:28,280
Alexander gets mistaken for someone else by the family of Darius.

561
01:05:28,760 --> 01:05:35,040
Famously, they think he's a bit short and unimpressive, so they will kneel down in front of Hephaestion instead.

562
01:05:35,360 --> 01:05:42,530
Alexander just thinks this is quite funny, but Caesar is talking to friends as they pass through some wretched alpine village.

563
01:05:42,530 --> 01:05:47,750
And the friends say, or worse even here they have this political run in.

564
01:05:47,870 --> 01:05:51,580
And he said, I'll tell you one thing, I'd rather be first man here than second in Rome.

565
01:05:52,310 --> 01:05:57,410
And that's again, that's a very different personality trait.

566
01:05:57,740 --> 01:06:04,530
With all his faults, Alexander is not that bothered in a way that perhaps it's just effortless superiority part.

567
01:06:05,510 --> 01:06:14,209
I think in terms of accuracy, again, the stories that are told get a bit more unconventional further east.

568
01:06:14,210 --> 01:06:21,680
 However, when you compare them to later writings about Alexander,

569
01:06:21,680 --> 01:06:29,450
which have him going down on the seabed in a submarine and going up to the heavens in a balloon and things like this,

570
01:06:29,570 --> 01:06:38,300
it's it's all pretty prosaic stuff. One of the most interesting encounters he has with the so-called the Sophists in India,

571
01:06:38,750 --> 01:06:47,120
the naked philosophers who are, you know, pretty, pretty clearly Brahman philosophers or prototype Brahman philosophers.

572
01:06:47,900 --> 01:06:55,100
And the lessons they teach are not at all dissimilar to what he's probably already had from Aristotle,

573
01:06:55,640 --> 01:07:00,140
and he appreciates them and it's a very civilised encounter.

574
01:07:00,380 --> 01:07:03,560
It just moves on. Okay.

575
01:07:03,560 --> 01:07:06,770
So just a couple more questions before we move on from Alexander

576
01:07:07,350 --> 01:07:11,620
The first one is that Plutarch, as you've mentioned, was a priest at Delphi.

577
01:07:12,200 --> 01:07:17,690
And yet there's an incident where Alexander the Great mistreats the Pythia.

578
01:07:18,470 --> 01:07:21,740
Plutarch doesn't seem overly concerned about that. What's going on there?

579
01:07:22,430 --> 01:07:28,540
Well, I think in the context of the life, we need to be a bit more precise about what actually happened.

580
01:07:28,640 --> 01:07:34,400
I mean, he he wants her to give him an oracle, enabling him to go and invade Persia.

581
01:07:35,060 --> 01:07:44,180
And when she seems to be disinclined to do this, he basically shakes her until she says, well, my son, you make your own movements.

582
01:07:44,830 --> 01:07:49,700
That, of course, is the best kind of verbal over the rule that she clearly didn't mean to say it,

583
01:07:49,700 --> 01:08:00,200
but it suggests that he can control the religious establishment to the point where they're just going to do what he says.

584
01:08:01,250 --> 01:08:07,470
And the context of the life. Plutarch doesn't seem to be disapproving of this at all, and no doubt suggests just anyone went out,

585
01:08:07,490 --> 01:08:10,880
went around shaking Pythias he would have thought that was a bad thing.

586
01:08:11,270 --> 01:08:22,040
But in the context of Alexander and his determination to take the war that has been waged in Greece abroad,

587
01:08:22,370 --> 01:08:27,290
to wage it against barbarians, that's a noble as far as Plutarch is concerned,

588
01:08:27,290 --> 01:08:35,780
that's a noble aspiration, because as we discussed previously, Plutarch gets very upset about the Greeks simply fighting each other all the time.

589
01:08:36,260 --> 01:08:45,290
So to take an expedition to Persia and to capture effectively the Persian Empire is not

590
01:08:45,290 --> 01:08:53,559
something he is fundamentally going to disapproval and getting the picture to go along with.

591
01:08:53,560 --> 01:09:01,940
This is, again, not something that on this one occasion is particularly going to disapprove of verbal omens generally.

592
01:09:01,940 --> 01:09:06,050
When that's it, that counts as a verbal omens when she says, you know, you make your own.

593
01:09:06,980 --> 01:09:16,820
Omens are things that Plutarch is very interested in and there are a lot of them that he reports in various different lives.

594
01:09:17,360 --> 01:09:28,220
And that is its link to things like significant things and the importance, for example, that Alexander is called Alexander.

595
01:09:29,120 --> 01:09:37,550
He has to distinguish himself from Alexander Alexandros, who's also known as Paris at Troy.

596
01:09:37,700 --> 01:09:43,340
And the fact that he does so, so very firmly by saying this, this is not me.

597
01:09:43,350 --> 01:09:49,730
I'm not I'm more like Achilles. I'm not like Paris is very important.

598
01:09:50,090 --> 01:09:55,280
So the verbal aspect of it is something that draws the attention.

599
01:09:55,820 --> 01:10:05,480
And I don't think that it's something that Plutarch would regard as in those particular circumstances to be condemned.

600
01:10:07,320 --> 01:10:17,250
Okay. Thank you. And just one other question on this biography, Plutarch mentions that he uses The Royal Diaries in this biography.

601
01:10:17,760 --> 01:10:22,680
Clearly, he thought these were legitimate with historians, do you accept that they were.

602
01:10:23,490 --> 01:10:31,170
Yes, I think so. I believe that. I mean, I you know, it's a question of what what The Royal Diaries were.

603
01:10:31,770 --> 01:10:37,620
It's not the same as Queen Victoria's diaries. It's not sources of the personal reflections on the day.

604
01:10:37,950 --> 01:10:42,150
They're not written by Alexander, but they do record what he did every day.

605
01:10:42,570 --> 01:10:47,160
And I think as far as I'm aware, most people believe that such a.

606
01:10:48,300 --> 01:10:54,140
Probably fairly prosaic record was kept a bit like today's.

607
01:10:54,200 --> 01:11:00,060
It's not, as I say, it's not like Queen Victoria's diary, but it might be a bit like the court circular in the Times.

608
01:11:00,510 --> 01:11:06,870
It says, Well, on this day Alexander did this, Alexander did that, the king did this, the king did that.

609
01:11:07,350 --> 01:11:13,410
It just is a sort of control about what time of year he is, where and what was going on at the time.

610
01:11:14,130 --> 01:11:17,330
So quite a useful source then I think. Very useful source.

611
01:11:17,340 --> 01:11:21,600
And there are lots of other sources that we know he used to do with Alexander's

612
01:11:21,600 --> 01:11:27,090
education and a lot of Hellenistic sources that we don't have any more,

613
01:11:27,810 --> 01:11:32,280
which would also have been very useful. Okay, great.

614
01:11:32,280 --> 01:11:36,180
Well, let's leave the Alexander the Great's biography there.

615
01:11:38,760 --> 01:11:42,270
So if we come across to thinking on the Roman side,

616
01:11:42,300 --> 01:11:49,530
he writes obviously a number of biographies about the fall of the republic, which our students will be dipping into.

617
01:11:49,680 --> 01:11:55,830
That's much closer for him in time. We're talking about, well, less than 200 years into the past.

618
01:11:56,610 --> 01:12:01,860
How does he approach that whole topic? And what can we say about some of the specific biographies that.

619
01:12:03,390 --> 01:12:13,590
Yes, I think these biographies are among his best, which I think partly suggests an abundance of material, but also particular interest in some cases.

620
01:12:14,220 --> 01:12:22,720
In the Antony, for example, he's even got an anecdote about someone his father knew or his grandfather, rather, actually knew.

621
01:12:22,800 --> 01:12:25,870
And in terms of Sulla,

622
01:12:25,950 --> 01:12:34,200
there's there's also an anecdote about the people of Charonea having to carry burdens for the army that gives a sort of almost personal note,

623
01:12:34,650 --> 01:12:43,650
even though it's long before he was born, again, you get the sense that similar anecdotes are being used in very different contexts.

624
01:12:44,370 --> 01:12:47,610
And of course, many of the people involved in.

625
01:12:48,240 --> 01:12:55,710
So we've got the Cicero, we've got the Antony, Cicero and Antony absolutely implacably opposed.

626
01:12:56,250 --> 01:13:05,100
Antony mutilating the body of Cicero after he is dead, obviously that is told in a very different way in the Cicero,

627
01:13:05,640 --> 01:13:10,620
where it's part of the climax to the way it's told in the Antony, which is near the beginning.

628
01:13:10,620 --> 01:13:21,780
And it's not certainly not regarded with anything other than loathing, but it's a much smaller part of Antony's character than it appears in Cicero.

629
01:13:22,900 --> 01:13:27,310
There's also the Brutus, the Pompey and the Caesar.

630
01:13:27,940 --> 01:13:33,610
And these are all lives which have many interconnecting touchpoints.

631
01:13:35,070 --> 01:13:38,580
Interestingly, the Brutus, I think, has a very particular theme,

632
01:13:39,450 --> 01:13:49,440
which is the failure of one person's philosophical education to enable them to bring about a properly philosophical society.

633
01:13:50,130 --> 01:13:55,260
Brutus, in particular, was very interested in philosophy and studied it very deeply.

634
01:13:55,800 --> 01:14:01,920
I mean, many aristocratic Romans did, but Brutus took things extremely seriously.

635
01:14:02,610 --> 01:14:16,380
Brutus' philosophic seriousness is both what ultimately leads him to assassinate Caesar and what makes him die as heroically as he does.

636
01:14:16,710 --> 01:14:21,060
But what it doesn't do is enable him to govern, which is in many respects,

637
01:14:21,060 --> 01:14:29,340
a big disappointment to Plutarch as a Platonist and Plato's most famous work, obviously the Republic How to create a Philosophical State.

638
01:14:30,060 --> 01:14:41,580
The Pompey is a very different story. It's a story of a flawed man who is in many respects brilliant, but whose career ends in disaster.

639
01:14:42,510 --> 01:14:50,520
The Caesar is a story of someone who actually has a lot of natural disadvantages, which he has to overcome.

640
01:14:51,420 --> 01:14:59,460
He's ill, he is not very fit. He's not he's not the sort of splendid warrior like the ideal of Alexander.

641
01:14:59,940 --> 01:15:03,630
He has to be carried around in a litter for quite a lot of his military campaigns.

642
01:15:04,050 --> 01:15:08,970
But what he can do is direct events, direct affairs.

643
01:15:09,390 --> 01:15:12,750
What he can't do, it seems, is control his friends.

644
01:15:13,530 --> 01:15:23,850
And then Antony and this is perhaps the most famous example, a big contradiction, mass of contradictions.

645
01:15:24,210 --> 01:15:29,340
A jolly bloke who cut Cicero's tongue out once, he's dead.

646
01:15:30,420 --> 01:15:35,820
A man who deals brilliantly with his troops because he eats with them.

647
01:15:36,090 --> 01:15:41,580
He likes the same jokes. He's a simple sort really in many respects,

648
01:15:42,060 --> 01:15:54,629
but who becomes completely at the mercy of his emotions and from being master of the known world, undisputed master of the known world?

649
01:15:54,630 --> 01:16:01,800
Really. He loses everything. And these I think these biographies are.

650
01:16:03,210 --> 01:16:08,840
Far more emotionally satisfying than one might expect.

651
01:16:09,620 --> 01:16:16,260
They're far more complicated. And far more sophisticated is.

652
01:16:17,240 --> 01:16:20,810
Then they need to be. Really? And.

653
01:16:21,790 --> 01:16:29,470
It's not an accident that it's these biographies that have given us Shakespearean tragedies.

654
01:16:29,650 --> 01:16:33,550
The Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra.

655
01:16:34,060 --> 01:16:44,170
These are the in a sense, the archetypal Plutarch lives where people of enormous talent nonetheless come to grief.

656
01:16:44,680 --> 01:16:48,400
And I think they are. They are remarkable texts.

657
01:16:48,550 --> 01:16:56,140
And this is one area where I wish that people would read all of them rather than the little bits that have been said.

658
01:16:56,230 --> 01:17:00,970
Because to focus on, you know, a couple of lines here and a couple of lines there,

659
01:17:01,540 --> 01:17:11,920
it really does diminish the overall sweep, the overall excitement of these titanic struggles.

660
01:17:12,820 --> 01:17:23,260
Of course, there's an element of sadness. But to. Chiefly because the rulers are like Greeks fighting each other instead of other people.

661
01:17:23,560 --> 01:17:31,390
They're not imposing their will on the world. They are imposing that will on one another and in crudely direct ways.

662
01:17:32,200 --> 01:17:39,400
It's no longer social struggle between the plebs and the the aristocrats and the patricians.

663
01:17:40,120 --> 01:17:45,630
It is terribly self-destructive. Orgy of killing.

664
01:17:46,080 --> 01:17:50,910
And that is something which I think Plutarch finds very distressing.

665
01:17:52,570 --> 01:17:59,610
And presumably because he is that much closer to events and because we know that period is documented so well,

666
01:17:59,610 --> 01:18:06,450
we got all the Cicero letters ourselves. It keys to reliability historically at this point is.

667
01:18:07,480 --> 01:18:11,770
Gold plated is well within certain limits.

668
01:18:11,890 --> 01:18:16,150
I mean, I think, again, you know, you always have to remember what the pairs are.

669
01:18:16,720 --> 01:18:25,690
You always have to remember the sense in which she's privileging moral virtue as an important explanation of events.

670
01:18:26,200 --> 01:18:32,950
And you also have to bear in mind that while he grew up in the Roman Empire, he's not actually a Roman.

671
01:18:33,910 --> 01:18:39,970
I mean, it's a society that he knows a lot about, but it's not a society of which he's actually a member.

672
01:18:41,380 --> 01:18:50,050
So there are some respects, I think, in which the full import of some institutions isn't quite there.

673
01:18:50,320 --> 01:19:01,780
And you can tell that I think that the language that he uses to describe some institutions so what it means to be a consul in the republic,

674
01:19:02,650 --> 01:19:07,120
what he knows what it means at one level. But the inwardness,

675
01:19:07,150 --> 01:19:16,959
what it means to be a consul is is not necessarily something which he is going to appreciate all of and I think for for some of that appreciation,

676
01:19:16,960 --> 01:19:26,500
probably one needs to go to Livy or an actual Roman historian as opposed to someone who's very slightly looking in from outside.

677
01:19:28,260 --> 01:19:39,240
Okay. And do you have a sense that he is what you might call an overall view of why the republic fell or who is in the right?

678
01:19:39,790 --> 01:19:42,840
You know, would he have been a Cicero man or Caesar man?

679
01:19:43,140 --> 01:19:47,370
Oh, I think I think I think he was undoubtedly more of a Cicero man than a Caesar man. 

680
01:19:48,130 --> 01:19:54,390
At the same time, that's not to say he didn't think Cicero was a bit silly at times.

681
01:19:54,390 --> 01:19:57,390
And b a bit of a failure. The pair of Cicero's.

682
01:19:57,430 --> 01:20:06,480
Demosthenes, who of course, ran away from the Battle of Charonea and Cicero, also a very flawed human being.

683
01:20:07,050 --> 01:20:12,120
And that perhaps is what he's most interested in and in a way Demosthenes

684
01:20:12,150 --> 01:20:18,180
Mcomes out better at the end because he commits suicide rather than fall into Macedonian hands.

685
01:20:18,180 --> 01:20:27,780
And Cicero simply meets his death passively without any attempt to why he has been sort of trying to run away,

686
01:20:27,780 --> 01:20:32,340
but he knows he can't do it and just sticks his neck out to cause his head off.

687
01:20:32,970 --> 01:20:37,950
But Demosthenes actually outwit his enemies at the end of the life.

688
01:20:38,790 --> 01:20:45,209
So in terms of explanations, I think he thinks that ambition and again,

689
01:20:45,210 --> 01:20:51,480
the privileging of the private interest over the public good is what has caused all this.

690
01:20:51,750 --> 01:20:53,970
So he sees a moral cause for it.

691
01:20:54,270 --> 01:21:02,880
And to be perfectly honest, most of the people involved have been guilty of privileging the private over the public at some point.

692
01:21:03,450 --> 01:21:12,060
Most egregiously, I suppose, Caesar. But you can see Antony actually most egregiously

693
01:21:12,780 --> 01:21:19,270
But the sense in which it's everybody's fault, I think, is what comes out of these lives.

694
01:21:19,740 --> 01:21:24,610
They can none of them really put themselves behind the state.

695
01:21:25,140 --> 01:21:37,680
They can't agree. I think the one outstanding feature of all of these biographies is how even people who start out very well decline,

696
01:21:38,460 --> 01:21:44,070
become obsessed with power and won't moderate their ambitions.

697
01:21:44,970 --> 01:21:49,230
And generally, ambition is a big, big problem in the late republican Lives.

698
01:21:49,230 --> 01:21:57,720
 It's very interesting and perhaps tells us why Plutarch is so important to read even today in the 21st century.

699
01:21:57,730 --> 01:22:02,820
Because I think if more people read more Plutarch, the world would be a better place.

700
01:22:03,510 --> 01:22:06,930
Well, I see it as a great recommendation to our listeners.

701
01:22:07,260 --> 01:22:08,360
Judith, this has been wonderful.

702
01:22:08,370 --> 01:22:16,919
What I would like to do, actually, is just finish by thinking a little bit about Plutarch's Influence and in particular his impact on the Renaissance.

703
01:22:16,920 --> 01:22:23,040
And someone called William Shakespeare to talk just a little bit about that, because I think that's a very interesting story as well as.

704
01:22:23,040 --> 01:22:30,840
And so, yes, I think I think it is I mean, Plutarch was continued to be read and admired throughout antiquity.

705
01:22:31,620 --> 01:22:40,379
You then at the rediscovery of of Greek texts, you start getting people translating.

706
01:22:40,380 --> 01:22:47,810
Plutarch's lives into Latin in the 15th century and then in the early 16th century,

707
01:22:47,810 --> 01:22:53,160
you have very important French translation of the Lives by Jacques Amieux. 

708
01:22:54,090 --> 01:23:03,060
And a bit later in the 16th century, you have Sir Thomas North, who is the younger brother of Lord North. 

709
01:23:03,390 --> 01:23:07,860
They picked up a copy of Amieux in France, and he thinks this is good stuff.

710
01:23:08,400 --> 01:23:17,730
And he translates the Lives into English and that goes into many editions because they are very popular.

711
01:23:18,210 --> 01:23:21,840
And I think that they're very popular for a number of different reasons.

712
01:23:22,560 --> 01:23:27,270
They have a lot of very good stories in them. They're very exciting.

713
01:23:27,750 --> 01:23:31,470
North's translation swings along. It's pretty accurate.

714
01:23:31,860 --> 01:23:35,520
I mean, it was extremely accurate. I think he modelled it on Amieux.

715
01:23:35,730 --> 01:23:43,560
But I think you can show that he did look at the Greek as well, at least in places and you know what's not to like really.

716
01:23:44,340 --> 01:23:53,820
I think Shakespeare, you can argue that Shakespeare had already started to read Plutarch a bit earlier than his great plays,

717
01:23:54,210 --> 01:24:05,040
but it's really 1599 and Julius Caesar, where it becomes absolutely clear that he's got a copy of North and he's writing it out.

718
01:24:05,490 --> 01:24:15,810
really in some places. It's so the Julius Caesar is based on partly on the Brutus and partly on Caesar, the last chapters of the Caesar.

719
01:24:16,650 --> 01:24:25,590
He also then a bit later on produces Antony and Cleopatra, which is based on pretty much just the last fifth of the Antony.

720
01:24:26,370 --> 01:24:38,040
He also uses though one chapter of the Antony to write a play called Timon of Athens, and he bases the Coriolanus on Plutarch's Life of Coriolanus.

721
01:24:38,910 --> 01:24:47,220
And there are some other references to ancient heroes in various other Lives, which may one can link back to Plutarch.

722
01:24:47,670 --> 01:24:51,870
Although it's true that most people that I mentioned in more than one author.

723
01:24:52,890 --> 01:24:57,090
But the key thing I think is that in the plays that he bases on Plutarch.

724
01:24:57,630 --> 01:25:03,880
There are very close verbal similarities. At the same time, there are also some really exciting differences.

725
01:25:04,470 --> 01:25:11,640
So the end, the end of the Antony and Cleopatra is just a bit different from the end of the Antony.

726
01:25:12,030 --> 01:25:15,270
They're both in their own different ways, completely effective.

727
01:25:15,510 --> 01:25:20,760
But the real point is that one is a drama and the other is, is a prose text. 

728
01:25:21,330 --> 01:25:27,720
They both make the right choices to maximise the effectiveness of each version.

729
01:25:28,860 --> 01:25:34,679
One of the things I love as well is that the the it's Shakespeare who coins Et tu Brute, isn't it?

730
01:25:34,680 --> 01:25:38,130
Which is this very, very famous phrase, which we still hear today.

731
01:25:38,220 --> 01:25:46,440
You too Brutus. And actually, all we have as an understanding is the Plutarch version, which is in Greek, and apparently he says it in Greek,

732
01:25:46,440 --> 01:25:52,860
which is και τυ τεκνον commonly known as 'ou to my son' or something you might like 'you to child.

733
01:25:52,890 --> 01:25:57,340
Yes, which may not not be a question so much.

734
01:25:57,630 --> 01:26:03,390
And I hope this happens to you, too, kid, but it is very interesting.

735
01:26:03,810 --> 01:26:07,530
Suetonius says he spoke in Latin but doesn't say it to Brutus.

736
01:26:08,280 --> 01:26:13,290
And there are lots and lots of different possibilities why Shakespeare came up with this.

737
01:26:14,220 --> 01:26:17,640
I mean, the Shakespeare actually was probably educated.

738
01:26:17,640 --> 01:26:25,320
It's King Edward the sixth Stratford Grammar School, in which case he would have known actually quite a lot of Greek and Latin.

739
01:26:25,770 --> 01:26:33,480
And I think it's probable that he he was actually pretty well read even in the originals, particularly in Latin.

740
01:26:33,810 --> 01:26:40,230
But in any case, he did have these great translations that he could check back on.

741
01:26:40,710 --> 01:26:49,860
And of course, the subject matter, the decline of greatness, the falling off of lives which begin very well.

742
01:26:50,570 --> 01:26:55,370
It's very suited to the tragic stage. And it's, I think,

743
01:26:55,370 --> 01:27:00,319
very probable that one of the reasons that he took so wholeheartedly to Plutarch is that

744
01:27:00,320 --> 01:27:07,730
Plutarch himself does import into many of these roman Lives the ethos of Greek tragedy.

745
01:27:08,030 --> 01:27:20,360
These are people who are great, but they are flawed and they suffer enormous misfortunes, and they are figured in many respects as tragic heroes.

746
01:27:20,870 --> 01:27:28,310
So it's not actually a particularly big leap for Shakespeare to turn them into actual tragic heroes.

747
01:27:29,940 --> 01:27:34,260
Thank you. Well, Judith, this has been a treasure trove of Plutarch.

748
01:27:34,650 --> 01:27:40,320
We really appreciate your time. There's so much there for our students to work with and to think about.

749
01:27:40,740 --> 01:27:45,270
And I think for me, it's just taking away how rich Plutarch is as a source.

750
01:27:45,660 --> 01:27:54,780
And I would encourage listeners really to try and read a whole biography and get stuck into him because there's loads there and he's good fun as well.

751
01:27:55,650 --> 01:27:58,800
Very, very entertaining. Thank you, Judith.

752
01:27:59,550 --> 01:28:00,810
Thank you very much indeed.