1. PLUTARCH[75]

Plutarch, born at Chaeronea in Boeotia, about 45 or 50 a.d., flourished in the last quarter of the first and the earliest quarter of the second century. He came of good stock, which he is not reluctant to talk about. Indeed, his habit of introducing or quoting his father, his grandfather, and even his great grandfather, gives us glimpses of a home in which the prescribed pieties of family life were warmly cherished; and some of the references imply an atmosphere of simplicity, urbanity, and culture.

The lad was sent to Athens to complete his education under Ammonius, an eminent philosopher of that generation, though in Carlyle’s phrase, ‘now dim to us,’ who also took part in what little administrative work was still intrusted to provincials, and more than once held the distinguished position of strategos. Thus, as in childhood Plutarch was trained in the best domestic traditions of elder Greece, so now he had before his eyes an example of such active citizenship as survived in the changed condition of things.

The same spirit of reverence for the past presided over his routine of study. His works afterwards show a wide familiarity with the earlier literature and philosophy of his country, and the foundations of this must have been laid in his student days. It was still in accordance with accepted precedents and his own reminiscent tastes, that when he set out on his travels, he should first, as so many of his predecessors were reported to have done, betake himself to the storied land of Egypt. We know that this must have been after 66 a.d., for in that year, when Nero made his progress through Greece, Plutarch tells us that he was still the pupil of Ammonius. We know, further, that he must have visited Alexandria, for he mentions that in his grandfather’s opinion his father gave too large a banquet to celebrate their homecoming from that city. But he does not inform us how much of Egypt he saw, or how long was his stay, or in what way he employed himself. It is only a probable conjecture at most that his treatise on Isis and Osiris may be one of the fruits of this expedition.

Of another and later journey that took him to Italy, there is more to be said. Plutarch at an early age, whether before or after the Egyptian tour, had already been employed in public affairs. He tells us:

I remember my selfe, that when I was but of yoong yeres I was sent with another in embassage to the Proconsul: and in that my companion staid about I wot not what behind, I went alone and did that which we had in commission to do together. After my returne when I was to give an account unto the State, and to report the effect of my charge and message back again, my father arose, and taking me apart, willed me in no wise to speak in the singular number and say, I departed or went, but, We departed; item not I said (or quoth I) but We said; and in the whole narration of the rest to joine alwaies my companion as if he had been associated and at one hand with me in that which I did alone.[76]

Such courtesy conciliates good will, and he was subsequently sent ‘on public business’ to Rome. This must have been before 90 a.d., when Rusticus, whom Plutarch mentions that he met, was condemned to death, and when the philosophers were expelled from the city; and was probably some time after 74 a.d., the date of their previous expulsion, when, moreover, Plutarch was too young to be charged with matters so weighty as to need settlement in the capital. But it is not certain whether this was his only visit to Italy, and whether he made it in the reign of Vespasian or of Domitian. His story of a performing dog that took part in an exhibition in presence of Vespasian, has been thought to have the verisimilitude of a witnessed scene, and has been used to support the former supposition: his description of the sumptuousness of Domitian’s buildings makes a similar impression, and has been used to support the latter. All this must remain doubtful, but some things are certain: that his business was so engrossing, and those who came to him for instruction were so numerous, that he had little time for the study of the Latin language; that he delivered lectures, some of which were the first drafts of essays subsequently included in the Moralia; that he had as his acquaintances or auditors several of the most distinguished men in Rome, among them Mestrius Florus, a table companion of Vespasian, Sosius Senecio, the correspondent of Pliny, and that Arulenus Rusticus afterwards put to death by Domitian, who on one occasion would not interrupt a lecture of Plutarch’s to read a letter from the Emperor; that he traversed Italy as far north as Ravenna, where he saw the bust of Marius, and even as Bedriacum, where he inspected the battlefields of 69 a.d.

But though Plutarch loved travel and sight-seeing, and though he was fully alive to the advantages of a great city, with its instructive society and its collections of books, his heart was in his native place, and he returned to settle there. “I my selfe,” he says, “dwelle in a poore little towne, and yet doe remayne there willingly, least it should become lesse.”[77] And in point of fact he seems henceforth only to have left it for short excursions to various parts of Greece. One of these exhibits him in a characteristic and amiable light. Apparently soon after his marriage a dispute had broken out between the parents of the newly wedded pair, and Plutarch in his conciliatory way took his wife, as we should say, ‘on a pilgrimage,’ to the shrine at Thespiae on Mount Helicon to offer a sacrifice to Love.[78] This is in keeping with all the express utterances and all the unconscious revelations he makes of his feeling for the sacredness of the family tie. He was one of those whose soul rings true to the claims of kith and kin. He thanks Fortune as a chief favour for the comradeship of his brother Timon, and delights to show off the idiosyncrasies of his brother Lamprias. We do not know when his marriage took place, but if Plutarch acted on his avowed principles, it must have been when he was still a young man, and it was a very happy one. As we should expect; for of all the affections it is wedded love that he dwells on most fully, and few have spoken more nobly and sincerely of it than he. Again and again he gives the point of view, which is often said to have been attained by the Modern World only by the combined assistance of Germanic character and Christian religion. Thus he says of a virtuous attachment:

But looke what person soever love setleth upon in mariage, so as he be inspired once therewith, at the very first, like as it is in Platoes Common-wealth, he will not have these words in his mouth, Mine and Thine; for simply all goods are not common among all friends, but only those who being severed apart in body, conjoine and colliquate as it were perforce their soules together, neither willing nor believing that they should be twaine but one: and afterward by true pudicitie and reverence one unto the other, whereof wedlock hath most need.... In true love there is so much continency, modesty, loyalty and faithfulnesse, that though otherwhile it touche a wanton and lascivious minde, yet it diverteth it from other lovers, and by cutting off all malapert boldnesse, by taking downe and debasing insolent pride and untaught stubornesse, it placeth in lieu thereof modest bashfulnesse, silence, and taciturnity; it adorneth it with decent gesture and seemly countenance, making it for ever after obedient to one lover onely.... For like as at Rome, when there was a Lord Dictatour once chosen, all other officers of state and magistrates valed bonnet, were presently deposed, and laied downe their ensignes of authority; even so those over whom love hath gotten the mastery and rule, incontinently are quit freed and delivered from all other lords and rulers, no otherwise than such as are devoted to the service of some religious place.[79]

His wife bore him at least five children, of whom three died in childhood, the eldest son, “the lovely Chaeron,” and then their little daughter, born after her four brothers, and called by her mother’s name, Timoxena. The letter of comfort which Plutarch, who was absent at Tanagra, sent home after the death took place, is good to read. There is perhaps here and there a touch that suggests the professional moralist and rhetorician: as when he recounts a fable of Aesop’s to enforce his advice; or bids his wife not to dwell on her griefs rather than her blessings, like “those Criticks who collect and gather together all the lame and defective verses of Homer, which are but few in number; and in the meane time passe over an infinite sort of others which were by him most excellently made”; or warns her to look to her health because, if “the bodie be evill entreated and not regarded with good diet and choice keeping, it becometh dry, rough and hard, in such sort as from it there breathe no sweet and comfortable exhalations unto the soule, but all smoakie and bitter vapors of dolour griefe and sadnesse annoy her.” These were the toll Plutarch paid to his age and to his training. But the tender feeling for his wife’s grief, and the confidence in her dignified endurance of it are very beautiful and human. And his descriptions of the child’s sweet nature, which he does not leave general, but after his wont lights up with special reminiscences, and which, he insists, they must not lose from mind or turn to bitterness but cherish as an abiding joy, strike the note that is still perhaps most comforting to mourners. After telling over her other winsome and gracious ways, he recalls:

And then there is the confident expectation of immortality to mitigate the present pang of severance.

But Plutarch and his wife had other consolations as well. Two sons, Aristobulus and a younger Plutarch, lived to be men, and to them he dedicated a treatise on the Timaeus. We know that one of them at least married and had a son in his father’s lifetime. Beyond his domestic circle Plutarch had a large number of friends in Chaeronea and elsewhere, including such distinguished names as Favorinus the philosopher and Serapion the poet; and being, in Dr. Johnson’s phrase, an eminently “clubbable man,” he was often host and guest at banquets, fragments of the talk at which he has preserved in his Symposiacs. Almost the only rigorous line in his portrait is contributed by Aulus Gellius, his later contemporary, and the friend of their common friend Favorinus. Gellius[83] represents the philosopher Taurus as telling about “Plutarchus noster”—a phrase that shows the attachment men felt for him—a story of which Dryden gives the following free and amplified but very racy translation:

Plutarch had a certain slave, a saucy stubborn kind of fellow; in a word one of these pragmatical servants who never make a fault but they give a reason for it. His justifications one time would not serve his turn, but his master commanded that he should be stripped and that the law should be laid on his back. He no sooner felt the smart but he muttered that he was unjustly punished, and that he had done nothing to deserve the scourge. At last he began to bawl out louder; and leaving off his groaning, his sighs, and his lamentations, to argue the matter with more show of reason: and, as under such a master he must needs have gained a smattering of learning, he cried out that Plutarch was not the philosopher he pretended himself to be; that he had heard him waging war against all the passions, and maintaining that anger was unbecoming a wise man; nay, that he had written a particular treatise in commendation of clemency; that therefore he contradicted his precepts by his practices, since, abandoning himself over to his choler, he exercised such inhuman cruelty on the body of his fellow-creature. “How is this, Mr. Varlet?” (answered Plutarch). “By what signs and tokens can you prove that I am in passion? Is it by my countenance, my voice, the colour of my face, by my words or by my gestures that you have discovered this my fury? I am not of opinion that my eyes sparkle, that I foam at the mouth, that I gnash my teeth, or that my voice is more vehement, or that my colour is either more pale or more red than at other times; that I either shake or stamp with madness; that I say or do anything unbecoming a philosopher. These, if you know them not, are the symptoms of a man in rage. In the meantime,” (turning to the officer who scourged him) “while he and I dispute this matter, mind your business on his back.”

This story, as we have seen, comes from one who was in a position to get authentic information about Plutarch, and it may very well be true; but it should be corrected, or at least supplemented, by his own utterances in regard to his servants. “Sometimes,” he says, “I use to get angry with my slaves, but at last I saw that it was better to spoil them by indulgence, than to injure myself by rage in the effort to amend them.” And more emphatically:

As for me I coulde never finde in my hart to sell my drawght Oxe that hadde plowed my lande a longe time, because he coulde plowe no longer for age; and much lesse my slave to sell him for a litle money, out of the contrie where he had dwelt a long time, to plucke him from his olde trade of life wherewith he was best acquainted, and then specially, when he shalbe as unprofitable for the buyer as also for the seller.[84]

Plutarch was thus fully alive to the social and domestic amenities of life, and to his responsibilities as householder, but he did not for them overlook other claims. He became priest of Apollo in Delphi, and for many years fulfilled the priestly functions, taking part in the sacrifices, processions and dances even as an old man; for philosopher as he was, his very philosophy supplied him with various contrivances for conformity with the ancient cult, and he probably had no more difficulty about it than a modern Hegelian has with the Thirty-nine Articles. His deeper religious needs would be satisfied by the Mysteries, in which he and his wife were initiated.

He was equally assiduous in public duties, which he did not despise for the pettiness to which under the Roman domination they had shrunk. In his view even the remnants of self-government are to be jealously guarded and loyally employed, though they may concern merely parochial and municipal affairs, and for them vigilant training and discipline are required.

Surely impossible it is that they should ever have their part of any great roial and magnificall joy, such as indeed causeth magnanimitie and hautinesse of courage, bringeth glorious honour abroad or tranquillitie of spirit at home, who have made choice of a close and private life within doors, never showing themselves in the world nor medling with publicke affaires of common weale; a life, I say, sequestered from all offices of humanitie, far removed from any instinct of honour or desire to gratifie others, thereby to deserve thankes or winne favour: for the soul, I may tell you, is no base and small thing; it is not vile and illiberal, extending her desires onely to that which is good to be eaten, as doe these poulpes[85] or pour cuttle fishes which stretch their cleies as far as to their meat and no farther: for such appetites as these are most quickly cut off with satietie and filled in a moment. But when the motives and desires of the minde tending to vertue and honestie, to honour and contentment of conscience are once growen to their vigour and perfection, they have not for their limit, the length and tearme onely of one man’s life; but surely the desire of honour and the affection to profit the societie of men, comprehending all aeternitie, striveth still to goe forward in such actions and beneficiall deedes as yield infinite pleasures that cannot be expressed.[86]

He was true to his principles. He not only officiated as Archon of Chaeronea, but, “gracing the lowliest act in doing it,” was willing to discharge the functions of a more subordinate post, which some thought beneath his dignity.

Mine answer is to such as reprove me, when they find me in proper person present, at the measuring and counting of bricks and tiles, or to see the stones, sand and lime laid downe, which is brought into the citie: “It is not for myselfe that I builde, but for the citie and commonwealth.”[87]

He was thus faithful over a few things; tradition made him ruler over many things. It is related that Trajan granted him consular rank and directed the governor of Achaia to avail himself of his advice. This was embellished by the report that he had been Trajan’s preceptor; and in the Middle Ages a letter very magisterial in tone was fabricated from him to his imperial pupil. It was even said that in his old age Hadrian had made him governor of Greece.

There is a poetic justification for such legends. The government of Trajan and Hadrian was felt to be such that the precepts of philosophy might very fittingly have inspired it, and that the philosopher might very well have been the administrator of their policy. And indeed it is perhaps no fable that Plutarch had something to do with the better régime that was commencing; for his nephew Sextus of Chaeronea, who may have inherited something of his uncle’s spirit, was an honoured teacher of Marcus Aurelius, and influenced his pupil by his example no less than by his teaching. The social renovation which was then in progress should be remembered in estimating Plutarch’s career. Gibbon says: “If a man were called to fix the period in the History of the World, during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.” Probably this statement would need to be, if not greatly qualified, at least greatly amplified, before it commanded universal assent, but, as it stands, there is a truth in it which anyone can perceive. There was peace throughout a great portion of the world; there was good government within the Empire; there was a rejuvenescence of antique culture, literature, and conduct. Indeed, the upward tendency begins with the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, and even the thwarting influence of Domitian’s principate would be felt in Rome rather than in the provinces. It was in this time of “reaction against corruption” that Plutarch flourished, and his later life especially fell well within that Indian summer of classical civilisation that Gibbon celebrates. The tradition that he survived till the accession of Antonine may be incorrect, but he certainly enjoyed eight years of Trajan’s government, and, by Eusebius’ statement, was still alive in the third year of Hadrian’s reign. It is to his latter days that his Lives as a whole are assigned, partly on account of the casual reference to contemporary events that some of them contain.

Plutarch’s character, circumstances, and career in a world which was reaching its close, well fitted him for the work that he did. This Greek citizen of the Roman Empire had cultivated his mind by study and travel, and had assimilated the wisdom of wide experience and pregnant memories which Antiquity had amassed in earlier times and to which this interval of revival was heir. Benevolent and dutiful, temperate and devout, with a deep sense of his public obligations and the ethos of his race, he sympathised with the best principles that had moulded the life of olden days, and that were emerging to direct the life of the present. And he combined his amplitude of traditional lore and enthusiasm for traditional virtue in a way that made him more than an antiquary or a moralist. The explorer and practitioner of antique ideas, in a sense he was their artist as well.

His treatment and style already suggest the manifold influences that went to form his mind. One of his charms lies in his quotations, which he culls, or rather which spring up of their own accord, from his reading of the most various authors of the most different times. He is at home in Greek literature, and likes to clinch his argument with a saying from the poets, for he seems to find that their words put his thought better than he could himself. But this affects his original expression. Dryden writes:

Being conversant in so great a variety of authors, and collecting from all of them what he thought most excellent, out of the confusion or rather mixture of their styles he formed his own, which partaking of each was yet none of them, but a compound of them all:—like the Corinthian metal which had in it gold and brass and silver, and yet was a species in itself.

There may be a suggestion of the curious mosaic-worker in his procedure, something of artifice, or at least of conscious art; and indeed his treatises are not free from a rhetorical and sometimes declamatory strain.[88] That in so far is what Courier means when he says that Plutarch writes in the style of a sophistes; but it was inseparable from his composite culture and academic training, and it does not interfere with his sincerity and directness.

His philosophy makes a similar impression. He is an eclectic or syncretist, and has learned from many of the mighty teachers of bygone times. Plato is his chief authority, but Plato’s doctrines are consciously modified in an Aristotelian sense, while nevertheless those aspects of them are made prominent which were afterwards elaborated by Neo-Platonism strictly so-called. But Plutarch, though he has the good word of Neo-Platonic thinkers, is not himself to be reckoned of their company. He is comparatively untouched by their mysticism, borrowed freely from the Theosophy of the East, and he stands in closer lineal relation to the antique Greek spirit than some, like Philo, who precede him in time. He was so indifferent to the Semitic habit of mind that, despite his almost omnivorous curiosity, he never thought it worth while to instruct himself in the exact nature of Judaism or its difference from the Syrian cult, far less to spend on Christianity so much as a passing glance. He approaches Neo-Platonism most nearly in certain religious imaginings which, as he himself recognised, have affinity with beliefs which prevailed in Persia and Egypt; but even so, he hardly ceases to be national, for these were the two countries with which in days of yore Greece had the most important historic connections. And moreover, his interest in such surmises is not, in the first place, a speculative one, but springs from the hope of his finding some explanation of and comfort for the trials and difficulties of actual life. For on the whole he differs from Plato chiefly in his subordination of theory to practice. This compels him to accept loans from the very schools that he most criticises, the Stoics, the Sceptics, the Epicureans themselves. It is his preoccupation with conduct, rather than eclectic debility, that makes him averse to any one-sided scheme, and inclined to supplement it with manifold additions. But as in his style, so in his thought, he blends the heterogeneous elements to his own purpose, and fixes on them the stamp of his own mind. It is not without reason that his various treatises are included under the common title of Moralia. He may dilate on the worship of Isis and Osiris, or The Face appearing within the Roundle of the Moone; he may discuss Whether creatures be more wise, they of the land or those of the water; What signifieth this word Ei engraven over the Dore of Appolloes Temple in the City of Delphi, and various other recondite matters; but the prevailing impression is ethical, and he is at his best when he is discoursing expressly on some moral theme, on Unseemly and Naughty Bashfulnesse, or Brotherly Love, or Tranquillitie and Contentment of Mind, or the Pluralitie of Friends, or the question Whether this common Mot be well said ‘Live Hidden.’ There is the background of serious study and philosophic knowledge, but against it is detached the figure of the sagacious and practical teacher, who wishes to make his readers better men and better women, but never forgets his urbanity and culture in his admonitions, and drives them home with pointed anecdote and apt quotation. And the substance of his teaching, though so sane and experimental that it is sometimes described as obvious and trite, has a generous, ideal, and even chivalrous strain, when he touches on such subjects as love, or devotion, or the claims of virtue; and his sympathy goes out spontaneously to noble words or deeds or minds.

It is an easy step from the famous Moralia to the still more famous Parallel Lives. “All history,” says Dryden, in reference to the latter, “is only the precepts of moral philosophy reduced into examples.” This, at least, is no bad description of Plutarch’s point of view; and his methods do not greatly differ in the series of essays and in the series of biographies. In the essays he did not let himself be unduly hampered by the etiquette of the Moral Treatise, but expatiated at will among Collections and Recollections, and embroidered his abstract argument with the stories that he delights to tell. As historian, on the other hand, he is not tied down to historical narration and exposition, but indulges his moralising bent to the full. He is on the lookout for edification, and is seldom at a loss for a peg to hang a lecture on. And these discourses of his, though the material is sometimes the sober drab of the decent bourgeois, are always fine in texture, and relieved by the quaintness of the cut and the ingenuity of the garnishing: nor are they the less interesting that they do not belong to the regulation historical outfit. Such improving digressions, indeed, are among Plutarch’s charms. “I am always pleased,” says Dryden, “when I see him and his imitator Montaigne when they strike a little out of the common road; for we are sure to be the better for their wandering. The best quarry does not always lie on the open field, and who would not be content to follow a good huntsman over hedges and ditches, when he knows the game will reward his pains.”[89]

Proceeding in this way it is not to be expected that Plutarch should compose his Lives with much care for dexterous design. Just as in his philosophy he has no rigidly consequent system of doctrine, so in his biographies he has no orderly or well-digested plan. The excellences that arise from a definite and vigorous conception of the whole are not those at which he aims. He would proceed very much at haphazard, were it not for the chronological clue; which, for the rest, he is very willing to abandon if a tempting by-path presents itself, or if he thinks of something for which he must retrace his steps. Yet, no more than in his metaphysics is he without an instinctive method of his own. The house is finished, and with all its irregularities it is good to dwell in; the journey is ended, and there has been no monotony on the devious track. There is this advantage indeed in his procedure over that of more systematic biographers, that it offers hospitality to all the suggestions that crowd for admission. None is rejected because it is out of place and insignificant. Gossip and allotria of every kind that do not make out their claims at first sight, and that the more ambitious historian would exclude as trivial, find an entry if they can show a far-off connection with the subject. And, lo and behold, they often turn out to be the most instructive of all.

But Plutarch welcomes them without scrutinising them very austerely. He submits their credentials to no stringent test. He is no severe critic of their authenticity. He takes them where he finds them, just as he picks up philosophic ideas from all quarters, even from the detested Epicureans, without condemning them on account of their suspicious source: it is enough for him if they adapt themselves to his use. Nor does he educe from them all that they involve. He does not even confront them with each other, to examine whether opposite hints about his heroes may not lead to fuller and subtler conceptions of them. This is the point of the charge brought against him by St. Évremond, that he might have carried his analysis further and penetrated more deeply into human nature. St. Évremond notes how different a man is from himself, the same person being just and unjust, merciful and cruel; “which qualities,” proceeds the critic, “seeming to belie each other in him, [Plutarch] attributes these inconsistencies to foreign causes. He could never ... reconcile contrarieties in the same subject.” He never tried to do so. He collects a number of vivid traits, which, like a number of minute lines, set forth the likeness to his own mind, but he is ordinarily as far from interrogating and combining his impressions as he is from subjecting them to any punctilious test. He exhibits characters in the particular aspects and manifestations which history or hearsay has presented, and is content with the general sense of verisimilitude that these successive indications, credited or accredited, have left behind. But he stops there, and does not study his manifold data to construct from them a consistent complex individuality in its oneness and difference. And if this is true of him as biographer, it is still truer of him as historian. He touches on all sorts of historical subjects—war, policy, administration, government; and he has abundance of acute and just remarks on them all. But it is not in these that his chief interest lies, and it is not over them that he holds his torch. This does not mean that he fails to perceive the main drift of things or to appreciate the importance of statecraft. Mr. Wyndham, defending him against those who have “denied him any political insight,” very justly shows that, despite “the paucity of his political pronouncements,” he has a “political bent.” His choice of heroes, in the final arrangement to which they lent themselves, proves that he has an eye for the general course of Greek and Roman history, for the impotence into which the city state is sunk by rivalry with neighbours in the one case, for its transmutation into an Empire on the other: “The tragedy of Athens, the drama of Rome,” says Mr. Wyndham, “these are the historic poles of the Parallel Lives.” And Plutarch has a political ideal: the “need of authority and the obligation of the few to maintain it—by a ‘natural grace’ springing on the one hand from courage combined with forbearance, and leading, on the other, to harmony between the rulers and the ruled—is the text, which, given out in the Lycurgus, is illustrated throughout the Parallel Lives.” So much indeed we had a right to expect from the thoughtful patriot and experienced magistrate of Chaeronea. The salient outlines of the story of Greece and Rome could hardly remain hidden from a clear-sighted man with Plutarch’s knowledge of the past: the relations of governor and governed had not only engaged him practically, but had suggested to him one of his most pithy essays, Praecepta gerendae Reipublicae, a title which Philemon Holland paraphrases in stricter accordance with the contents, Instructions for them that manage Affaires of State. But this does not carry us very far. Shakespeare in his English Histories shows at least as much political discernment and political instinct. He brings out the general lesson of the wars of Lancaster and York, and in Henry V. gives his conception of the ideal ruler. But no one would say that this series shows a conspicuous genius for political research or political history. The same thing is true, and in a greater degree, of Plutarch. He is public-spirited, but he is not a publicist. He has not much concern or understanding for particular measures and movements and problems, however critical they may be. It is impossible to challenge the justice of Archbishop Trench’s verdict, either in its general scope or in its particular instances, when he says:

One who already knows the times of Marius and Sulla will obtain a vast amount of instruction from his several Lives of these, will clothe with flesh and blood what would else, in some parts, have been the mere skeleton of a story; but I am bold to say no one would understand those times from him. The suppression of the Catilinarian Conspiracy was the most notable event in the life of Cicero; but one rises from Plutarch’s Life with only the faintest impression of what that conspiracy, a sort of anticipation of the French Commune, and having objects social rather than political, meant. Or take his Lives of the Gracchi. Admirable in many respects as these are, greatly as we are debtors to him here for important facts, whereof otherwise we should have been totally ignorant, few, I think, would affirm that he at all plants them in a position for understanding that vast revolution effected, with the still vaster revolution attempted by them, and for ever connected with their names.

In Plutarch the historian, as well as the biographer, is subordinate to the ethical teacher who wishes to enforce lessons that may be useful to men in the management of their lives. He gathers his material for its “fine moral effects,” not for “purposes of research.”[90]

Plutarch, then, had already composed many disquisitions to commend his humane and righteous ideas, and it was partly in the same didactic spirit that he seems to have written his Parallel Lives. At the beginning of the Life of Pericles he says:

Vertue is of this power, that she allureth a mans minde presently to use her, and maketh him very desirous in his harte to followe her: and doth not frame his manners that beholdeth her by any imitation but by the only understanding and knowledge of vertuous deedes, which sodainely bringeth unto him a resolute desire to doe the like. And this is the reason why methought I should continew still to write on the lives of noble men.

And similar statements occur again and again. They clearly show the aim that he consciously had in view. The new generation was to be admonished and renovated by the examples of the leading spirits who had flourished in former times. And since he was addressing the whole civilised world, he took his examples both from Roman and from Grecian History, and arranged his persons in pairs, each pair supplying the matter for one book. Thus he couples Theseus and Romulus, Alcibiades and Coriolanus, Alexander and Caesar, Dion and Brutus, Demetrius and Antony. Such parallelism is a little far-fetched, and though some of the detailed comparisons with which it is justified, are not from Plutarch’s hand, and belong to a later time, it of itself betrays a certain fondness for symmetry and antithesis, a leaning towards artifice and rhetoric which, as we have seen, the author owed to his environment. He wishes in an eloquent way to inculcate his lessons, and is perhaps, for the same reason, somewhat prone to exaggerate the greatness of the past, and show it in an idealised light. But this is by no means the pose of the histrionic revivalist. It corresponds to an authentic sentiment in his own nature, which loved to linger amid the glooms and glories of tradition, and pay vows at the shrine of the Great Departed. “The cradle of war and statecraft,” says Mr. Wyndham, “was become a memory dear to him, and ever evolved by his personal contact with the triumphs of Rome. From this contrast flowed his inspiration for the Parallel Lives—his desire as a man to draw the noble Grecians, long since dead, a little nearer to the noon-day of the living; his delight as an artist in setting the noble Romans, whose names were in every mouth, a little further into the twilight of more ancient Romance.”

But this transfiguration of the recent and resurrection of the remoter past, in which Mr. Wyndham rightly sees something “romantic,” does not lay Plutarch open to the charge of vagueness or unreality. He was saved from such vices by his interest in human nature and suggestive ana and picturesque incidents on the one hand, and by his deference for political history and civil society on the other.

He loved marked individualities: no two of his heroes are alike, and each, though in a varying degree, has an unmistakable physiognomy of his own. There is no sameness in his gallery of biographies, and even the legends of demigods yield figures of firm outline that resist the touch. This is largely due to his joy in details, and the imperious demand his imagination makes for them. In his Life of Alexander he uses words which very truly describe his own method, words which Boswell[91] was afterwards to quote in justification of his own similar procedure.

The noblest deedes doe not alwayes shew men’s vertues and vices, but often times a light occasion, a word, or some sporte, makes men’s natural dispositions and manners appear more plaine, then the famous battells wonne wherein are slaine tenne thousande men, or the great armies, or cities wonne by siege or assault. For like as painters or drawers of pictures, which make no accompt of other parts of the bodie, do take the resemblaunces of the face and favor of the countenance, in the which consisteth the judgement of their maners and disposition; even so they must give us leave to seeke out the signes and tokens of the minde only, and thereby shewe the life of either of them, referring you unto others to wryte the warres, battells and other great thinges they did.[92]

So he likes to give the familiar traits and emphasise the suggestive nothings that best discover character. But his purpose is almost always to discover character, and, so far as his principal persons are concerned, to discover great character. Though so assiduous in sharking up their mannerisms, foibles, and oddities, their tricks of gait or speech or costume, he is not like the Man with the Muck Rake, and is not piling together the rubbish of tittle-tattle just because he has a soul for nothing higher. Still less does he take the valet’s view of the hero, and hold that he is no hero at all because he can be seen in undress or in relations that show his common human nature. Reverence for greatness is the point from which he starts, reverence for greatness is the star that guides his course, and his reverence is so entire, that on the one hand he welcomes all that will help him to restore the great one in his speech and habit as he lived, and on the other, he assumes that the greatness must pervade the whole life, and that flashes of glory will be refracted from the daily talk and walk. Like Carlyle, though in a more naïf and simple way, he is a hero-worshipper; like Carlyle he believes that the hero will not lose but gain by the record of his minutest traits, and that these will only throw new light on his essential heroism. In the object he proposed to himself he has succeeded well. “Plutarch,” says Rousseau, almost reproducing the biographer’s own words, “has inimitable dexterity in painting great men in little things, and he is so happy in his selection, that often a phrase, a simile, a gesture suffices him to set forth a hero. That is the true art of portraiture. The physiognomy does not display itself in the main lines, nor the characters in great actions; it is in trifles that the temperament discloses itself.” An interesting testimony; for Rousseau, when he sets up as character-painter, belongs to a very different school.

It is not otherwise with his narratives of actions or his descriptions of scenes, if action or scene really interest him; and there is little of intrinsic value, comic or tragic, vivacious or stately, familiar or weird, that does not interest him. Under his quick successive strokes, some of them so light that at first they evade notice, some of them so simple that at first they seem commonplace, the situation becomes visible and luminous. He knows how to choose the accessories and what to do with them. When our attention is awakened, we ask ourselves how he has produced the effect by means apparently so insignificant; and we cannot answer. Here he may have selected a hint from his authorities, there he may derive another from the mental vision he himself has evoked, but in either case the result is equally wonderful. Whether from his tact in reporting or his energy in imagining, he contrives to make us view the occurrence as a fact, and a fact that is like itself and like nothing else.

But again Plutarch was saved from wanton and empty phantasms by his political bias. He was not a politician or a statesman or an historian of politics or institutions, but he was a citizen with a citizen’s respect for the State. “For himself,” to quote Mr. Wyndham once more, “he was painting individual character, and he sought it among men bearing a personal stamp. But he never sought it in a private person, or a comedian, nor even in a poet or a master of the Fine Arts.” He confines himself to public men, as we should call them, and never fails to recollect that they played their part on the public stage. And this not only gave a robustness of touch and breadth of stroke to his delineations; the connection with well-known and certified events preserved him from the worst licenses to which the romantic and rhetorical temper is liable. Courier, indeed, says of him that he was “capable of making Pompey win the battle of Pharsalia, if it would have rounded his sentence ever so little.” But though he may be credulous of details and manipulate his copy, and with a light heart make one statement at one time and a different one at another, the sort of liberty Courier attributes to him is precisely the one he does not take. Facts are stubborn things, and the great outstanding facts he is careful to observe: they bring a good deal else in their train.

2. AMYOT[93]

A book like the Parallel Lives was bound to achieve a great popularity at the Renaissance. That it was full of instruction and served for warning and example commended it to a generation that was but too inclined to prize the didactic in literature. Its long list of worthies included not a few of the names that were being held up as the greatest in human history, and these celebrities were exhibited not aloft on their official pedestals, but, however impressive and imposing the mise-en-scène might be, as men among men in the private and personal passages of their lives. And yet they were not private persons but historical magnates, the founders or leaders of world-renowned states: and as such they were particularly congenial to an age in which many of the best minds—More and Buchanan, L’Hôpital and La Boëtie, Brand and Hutten—were awakening to the antique idea of civic and political manhood, and finding few unalloyed examples of it in the feudalised West. It was not enough that Plutarch was made more accessible in the Latin form. He deserved a vernacular dress, and after various tentative experiments this was first satisfactorily, in truth, admirably, supplied by Bishop Amyot in France.

Jacques Amyot was born in October, 1513, in Melun, the little town on the Seine, some thirty miles to the south-east of Paris. His parents were very poor, but at any rate from his earliest years he was within the sweep of the dialect of the Île de France, and had no patois to unlearn when he afterwards appeared as a literary man. Perhaps to this is due some of the purity and correctness which the most fastidious were afterwards to celebrate in his style. These influences would be confirmed when as a lad he proceeded to Paris to pursue his studies. His instructors in Greek were—first, Evagrius, in the college of Cardinal Lemoine, and afterwards, Thusan and Danès, who, at the instance of Budaeus, had just been appointed lecteurs royaux in Ancient Philosophy and Literature. Stories are told of the privations that he endured in the pursuit of scholarship, how his mother sent him every week a loaf by the watermen of the Seine, how he read his books by the light of the fire, and the like; but similar circumstances are related of others, and, to quote Sainte Beuve, are in some sort “the legend of the heroic age of erudition.” It is better authenticated that he supported himself by becoming the domestic attendant of richer students till he graduated as Master of Arts at the age of nineteen. Then his position began to improve. He became tutor in important households, to the nephews of the Royal Reader, and to the children of the Royal Secretary. Through such patrons his ability and knowledge were made known to the King’s sister, Marguérite de Valois, the beneficent patroness of literature and learning. He had proceeded to Bourges, it is said, to study law, but by her influence was appointed to discharge the more congenial functions of Reader in the Greek and Latin Languages, and was soon promoted to the full professorship. The University of Bourges was at the time the youngest in France save that of Bordeaux, having been founded less than three-quarters of a century before in 1463, when the Renaissance was advancing from conquest to conquest in Italy, and when Medievalism was moribund even in France. The new institution would have few traditions to oppose to the new spirit, and there was scope for a missionary of the New Learning. For some ten or twelve years Amyot remained in his post, lecturing two hours daily, in the morning on Latin, in the afternoon on Greek. No doubt such instruction would be elementary in a way; but even so, it was a laborious life, for in those days the classical teacher had few of the facilities that his modern colleague enjoys. It was, however, a good preparation for Amyot’s peculiar mission, and he even found time to make his first experiments in the sphere that was to be his own. By 1546 he had completed a translation of the Aethiopica of Heliodorus, the famous Greek romance that deals with the loves and adventures of Theagenes and Chariclea. Amyot afterwards, on the authority of a manuscript which he discovered in the Vatican, identified the author with a Bishop of Tricca who lived in the end of the fourth century, and of whom a late tradition asserted that when commanded by the provincial synod either to burn his youthful effusion or resign his bishopric, he chose the latter alternative. “Heliodorus,” says Montaigne, when discussing parental love, “ayma mieulx perdre la dignité, le proufit, la devotion d’une prelature si venerable, que de perdre sa fille, fille qui dure encores bien gentille, mais à l’aventure pourtant un peu curieusement et mollement goderonnee pour fille ecclesiastique et sacerdotale, et de trop amoureuse façon.”[94] In the case of the young French professor it had happier and opposite consequences, for it procured him from the king the Abbey of Bellozane. This gift, one of the last that Francis bestowed for the encouragement of letters, was partly earned, too, by a version of some of Plutarch’s Lives, which Amyot presented to his royal patron and had executed at his command.

With an income secured Amyot was now in a position to free himself from the drudgery of class work, and follow his natural bent. In those days not all the printed editions of the classics were very satisfactory, and some works of the authors in whom he was most interested still existed only in manuscript or were known only by name. He set out for Italy in the hope of discovering the missing Lives of Plutarch and of obtaining better texts than had hitherto been within his reach, and seems to have remained abroad for some years. For a moment he becomes a conspicuous figure in an uncongenial scene. In May, 1551, the Council of Trent had been reopened, but Charles delayed the transaction of business till the following September. The Italian prelates, impatient and indignant, were hoping for French help against the emperor, but instead of the French Bishops there came only a letter from the “French King addressed to ‘the Convention’ which he would not dignify with the name of a council. The King said he had not been consulted about their meeting. He regarded them as a private synod got up for their own purposes by the Pope and the Emperor and he would have nothing to do with them.”[95] It was Amyot who was commissioned with the delivery and communication of the ungracious message. Probably the selection of the simple Abbé was intended less as an honour to him than as an insult to the assemblage. At any rate it was no very important part that he had to play, but it was one which made him very uncomfortable. He writes: “Je filois le plus doux que je pouvois, me sentant si mal et assez pour me faire mettre en prison, si j’eusse un peu trop avant parle.” He was not even named in the letter, and had not so much as seen it before he was called to read it aloud, so that he complains he never saw a matter so badly managed, “si mal cousu,” but he delivered the contents with emphasis and elocution. “Je croy qu’il n’y eust personne en toute la compagnie qui en perdist un seul mot, s’il n’estoit bien sourd, de sorte que si ma commission ne gisoit qu’a présenter les lettres du roy, et à faire lecture de la proposition, je pense y avoir amplement satisfait.”

But his real interests lay elsewhere, and he brought back from Italy what would indemnify him for his troubles as envoy and please him more than the honour of such a charge. In his researches he had made some veritable finds, among them a new manuscript of Heliodorus, and Books XI. to XVII. of Diodorus Siculus’ Bibliotheca Historica, only the two last of which had hitherto been known at all. His treatment of this discovery is characteristic,[96] both of his classical enthusiasm and his limitations as a classical scholar. He did not, as the specialist of that and perhaps of any age would have done, edit and publish the original text, but contented himself with giving to the world a French translation. But the Historic Library has neither the allurement of a Greek romance nor the edification of Plutarch’s Lives; and in this version, which for the rest is said to be poor, Amyot for once appealed to the popular interest in vain.

The Diodorus Siculus appeared in 1554, and in the same year Henry II. appointed Amyot preceptor to his two sons, the Dukes of Orleans and Anjou, who afterwards became respectively Charles IX. and Henry III. As his pupils were very young their tuition cannot have occupied a great deal of his time, and he was able to pursue his activity as translator. In 1559, besides a revised edition of Theagenes and Chariclea, there appeared anonymously a rendering, probably made at an earlier date, of the Daphnis and Chloe, a romance even more “curieusement et mollement goderonnee pour fille ecclesiastique et sacerdotale” than its companion. But it is with his own name and a dedication to the King that Amyot published almost at the same date his greatest work, the complete translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. If his Heliodorus gave him his first step on the ladder of church preferment, his Plutarch was a stronger claim to higher promotion. Henry II., indeed, died before the end of the year, but the accession of Amyot’s elder pupil in 1560, after the short intercalary reign of Francis II., was propitious to his fortunes, for the new king, besides bestowing on him other substantial favours, almost immediately named him Grand Almoner of France.

Amyot was an indefatigable but deliberate worker. Fifteen years had elapsed between his first appearance as translator and the issue of his masterpiece. Thirteen more were to elapse before he had new material ready for the press. The interval in both cases was filled up with preparation, with learned labour, with the leisurely prosecution of his plan. A revised edition of the Lives appeared in 1565 and a third in 1567, and all the time he was pushing on a version of Plutarch’s Moralia. Meanwhile in 1570 Charles gave him the bishopric of Auxerre; and without being required to disown the two literary daughters of his vivacious prime, “somewhat curiously and voluptuously frounced and of too amorous fashion” though they might be, he had yet to devote himself rather more seriously to his profession than he hitherto seems to have done. He set about it in his usual steady circumspect way. He composed sermons, first, it is said, writing them in Latin and then turning them into French; he attended faithfully to the administration of his diocese; he applied himself to the study of theological doctrine, and is said to have learned the Summa of St. Thomas Aquinas by heart.[97] These occupations have left their trace on his next work, which was ready by 1572. Not only are Plutarch’s moral treatises perfectly consonant in tone with Amyot’s episcopal office, but the preface is touched with a breath of religious unction, of which his previous performances show no trace. Perhaps the flavour is a little too pronounced when in his grateful dedication to his royal master he declares: “The Lord has lodged in you singular goodness of nature.” The substantive needs all the help that can be wrung from the adjective, when used of Charles IX. in the year of St. Bartholomew. But Amyot, though the exhibiter of “Plutarch’s men,” was essentially a private student, and was besides bound by ties of intimacy and obligation to his former pupil, who had certainly done well by him. Nor was the younger brother behindhand in his acknowledgments. Charles died before two years were out (for Amyot had a way of dedicating books to kings who deceased soon after), and was lamented by Amyot in a simple and heartfelt Latin elegy. But his regrets were quite disinterested, for when Henry III. succeeded in 1574, he showed himself as kind a master, and in 1578 decreed that the Grand Almoner should also be Commander of the Order of the Holy Ghost without being required to give proofs of nobility.

Invested with ample revenues and manifold dignities, Amyot for the next eleven years lived a busy and simple life, varying the routine of his administrative duties with music, of which he was a lover and a practitioner; with translations, never published and now lost, from the Greek tragedians, who had attracted him as professor, and from St. Athanasius, who appealed to him as bishop; above all, with the revision of his Plutarch, for which he never ceased to collect new readings. Then came disasters, largely owing to his reputation for partiality and complaisance. When the Duke and the Cardinal of Guise were assassinated in 1589, he was accused by the Leaguers of having approved the crime and of having granted absolution to the King. This he denied; but his Chapter and diocesans rose against him, the populace sacked his residence, and he had to fly from Auxerre. Nor were his woes merely personal. On August 3rd the House of Valois, to which he was so much beholden, became extinct with the murder of Henry III.; and however worthless the victim may have been, Amyot cannot have been unaffected by old associations of familiarity and gratitude. Six days later he writes that he is “the most afflicted, desolate and destitute poor priest I suppose, in France.” His private distress was not of long duration. He made peace with the Leaguers, denounced the “politicians” for supporting Henry IV., returned to his see, resumed his episcopal duties, though he was divested of his Grand Almonership, and was able to leave the large fortune of two hundred thousand crowns. But he did not survive to see the establishment of the new dynasty or the triumph of Catholicism, for he died almost eighty years old in February, 1593, and only in the following June was Henry IV. reconciled to the Church. Perhaps had he foreseen this consummation Amyot would have found some comfort in the thought that a third pupil, a truer and greater one than those who were no more, would reign in their stead, and repair the damage their vice and folly had caused. “Glory to God!” writes Henry of Navarre to his wife, “you could have sent me no more pleasant message than the news of the zest for reading which has taken you. Plutarch always attracts me with a fresh novelty. To love him is to love me, for he was for long the instructor of my early years. My good mother, to whom I owe everything, and who had so great a desire to watch over my right attitude and was wont to say that she did not wish to see in her son a distinguished dunce, put this book in my hands when I was all but an infant at the breast. It has been, as it were, my conscience, and has prescribed in my ear many fair virtues and excellent maxims for my behaviour and for the management of my affairs.”[98]

Amyot has exerted a far-reaching influence on the literature of his own country and of Europe. Though as a translator he might seem to have no more than a secondary claim, French historians of letters have dwelt on his work at a length and with a care that are usually conceded only to the achievements of creative imagination or intellectual discovery. And the reason is that his aptitude for his task amounts to real genius, which he has improved by assiduous research, so that in his treatment, the ancillary craft, as it is usually considered, rises to the rank of a free liberal art. He has the insight to divine what stimulus and information the age requires; the knowledge to command the sources that will supply them; the skill to manipulate his native idiom for the new demands, and suit his expression, so far as may be, both to his subject and to his audience. Among the great masters of translation he occupies a foremost place.

Of spontaneous and initiative power he had but little. He cannot stand alone. For Henry II. he wrote a Projet de l’Eloquence Royal, but it was not printed till long after his death; and of this and his other original prose his biographer, Roulliard, avows that the style is strangely cumbersome and laggard (estrangement pesant et traisnassier). Even in his prefaces to Plutarch he is only good when he catches fire from his enthusiasm for his author. Just as his misgivings at the Council of Trent, his commendations of his royal patrons, his concessions to his enemies of the League, suggest a defect in independent force of character, so the writings in which he must rely on himself show a defect in independent force of intellect.

Nor is he a specialist in scholarship. Already in 1635, when he had been less than a century in his grave, Bachet de Méziriac, expert in all departments of learning, exposed his shortcomings in a Discourse on Translation, which was delivered before the Academy. His critic describes him as “a promising pupil in rhetoric with a mediocre knowledge of Greek, and some slight tincture of Polite Letters”; and asserts that there are more than two thousand passages in which he has perverted the sense of his author. Even in 1580-81, during Amyot’s lifetime, Montaigne was forced to admit in discussion with certain learned men at Rome that he was less accurate than his admirers had imagined. He was certainly as far as possible from being a Zunftgelehrter. His peculiar attitude is exactly indicated by his treatment of the missing books of Diodorus which it was his good fortune to light upon. He is not specially interested in his discovery, and has no thought of giving the original documents to the world. At the same time he has such a reverence for antiquity that he must do something about them. So with an eye to his chosen constituency, his own countrymen, he executes his vernacular version.

For of his own countrymen he always thought first. They are his audience, and he has their needs in his mind. And that is why he made Plutarch the study of his life. His romances are mere experiments for his pastime and equipment:[99] his Diodorus is a task prescribed by accident and vocation: but his Plutarch is a labour of love and of patriotism. It was knowledge of antiquity for which the age clamoured and of which it stood in need; and who else could give such a summary and encyclopaedia of Classical Life as the polyhistor of Chaeronea, who interested himself in everything, from details of household management to the government of states, from ancestral superstitions to the speculations of philosophers, from after-dinner conversation to the direction of campaigns; but brought them all into vital relation with human nature and human conduct? Plutarch appealed to the popular instinct of the time and to the popular instinct in Amyot’s own breast. It is his large applicability “distill’d through all the needful uses of our lives” and “fit for any conference one can use” that, for example, arouses the enthusiasm of Montaigne. After mentioning that when he writes he willingly dispenses with the companionship or recollection of books, he adds:

But it is with more difficulty that I can get rid of Plutarch: he is so universal and so full that on all occasions and whatever out-of-the-way subject you have taken up, he thrusts himself into your business, and holds out to you a hand lavish and inexhaustible in treasures and ornaments. I am vexed at his being so much exposed to the plunder of those who resort to him. I can’t have the slightest dealings with him myself, but I snatch a leg or a wing.[100]

And again:

I am above all grateful to [Amyot] for having had the insight to pick out and choose a book so worthy and so seasonable, to make a present of it to his country. We dunces should have been lost, if this book had not raised us out of the mire. Thanks to it we now dare to speak and write. With it the ladies can lecture the school-masters. It is our breviary.[101]

“In all kinds Plutarch is my man,” he says elsewhere. And indeed it is obvious, even though he had not told us, that Plutarch with Seneca supplies his favourite reading, to which he perpetually recurs. “I have not,” he writes, “systematically acquainted myself with any solid books except Plutarch and Seneca, from whom I draw like the Danaides, filling and pouring out continually.”[102] To the latter he could go for himself; for the Greek he had to depend on Amyot. For combined profit and pleasure, he says, “the books that serve me are Plutarch, since he is French, and Seneca.”[103] But it is to the former that he seems to give the palm.

Seneca is full of smart and witty sayings, Plutarch of things: the former kindles you more and excites you, the latter satisfies you more and requites you better; he guides us while the other drives us.[104]

It is indeed impossible to imagine Montaigne without Plutarch, to whom he has a striking resemblance both in his free-and-easy homilies and in his pregnant touches. It is these things on which he dwells.

There are in Plutarch many dissertations at full length well worth knowing, for in my opinion he is the master-craftsman in that trade; but there are a thousand that he has merely indicated; he only points out the track we are to take if we like, and confines himself sometimes to touching the quick of a subject. We must drag (the expositions) thence and put them in the market place.... It is a dissertation in itself to see him select a trivial act in the life of a man, or a word that does not seem to have such import.[105]

But Montaigne did not stand alone in his admiration. He himself, as we have seen, bears witness to the widespread popularity of Amyot’s Plutarch and the general practice of rifling its treasures. Indeed, Plutarch was seen to be so congenial to the age, that frequent attempts had been made before Amyot to place him within the reach of a larger circle than the little band of Greek scholars. In 1470, e.g. a number of Italians had co-operated in a Latin version of the Lives, published at Rome by Campani, and this was followed by several partial translations in French.[106] But the latter were immediately superseded, and even the former had its authority shaken, by Amyot’s achievement.

This was due partly to its greater intelligence and faithfulness, partly to its excellent style.

In regard to the first, it should be remembered that the criticism of Amyot’s learning must be very carefully qualified. Scholarship is a progressive science, and it is always easy for the successor to point out errors in the precursor, as Méziriac did in Amyot. Of course, however, the popular expositor was not a Budaeus or Scaliger, and the savants whom Montaigne met in Rome were doubtless justified in their strictures. Still the zeal that he showed and the trouble that he took in searching for good texts, in conferring them with the printed books and in consulting learned men about his conjectural emendations,[107] would suggest that he had the root of the matter in him, and there is evidence that expert opinion in his own days was favourable to his claims.[108]

At the time when he was translating the Lives into French two scholars of high reputation were, independently of each other, translating them into Latin. Xylander’s versions appeared in 1560, those of Cruserius were ready in the same year, but were not published till 1564. They still hold their place and enjoy consideration. Now, they both make their compliments to Amyot. Xylander, indeed, has only a second-hand acquaintance with his publication, but even that he has found valuable:

After I had already finished the greater part of the work, the Lives of Plutarch written by Amyot in the French language made their appearance. And since I heard from those who are skilled in that tongue, a privilege which I do not possess, that he had devoted remarkable pains to the book and used many good MSS., assisted by the courtesy of friends, I corrected several passages about which I was in doubt, and in not a few my conjecture was established by the concurrence of that translator.[109]

Cruserius, again, in his prefatory Epistle to the Reader, warmly commends the merits of Xylander and Amyot, but refers with scarcely veiled disparagement to the older Latin rendering, which nevertheless enjoyed general acceptance as the number of editions proves, and was considered the standard authority.

If indeed (he writes) I must not here say that I by myself have both more faithfully and more elegantly interpreted Plutarch’s Lives, the translation of which into Latin a great number of Italians formerly undertook without much success; this at least I may say positively and justly that I think I have done this.[110]

On the other hand “Amiotus” has been a help to him. When he had already polished and corrected his own version, he came across this very tasteful rendering in Brussels six months after it had appeared. “This man’s scholarship and industry gave me some light on several passages.”[111] It is well then to bear in mind, when Amyot’s competency is questioned, that by their own statement he cleared up things for specialists like Xylander and Cruserius. And this is all the more striking, that Cruserius, whom his preface shows to be very generous in his acknowledgments, has no word of recognition for his Italian predecessors even though Filelfo was among their number.[112] But his Epistle proceeds: “To whom (i.e. to Amyot) I will give this testimony that nowadays it is impossible that anyone should render Plutarch so elegantly in the Latin tongue, as he renders him in his own.”[113] And this praise of Amyot’s style leads us to the next point.