Between Heathenism and Christianity · Charles William Super
PLUTARCH AND THE GREECE OF HIS AGE.
Though a man of kind heart and polished manners, judged by the standard of his time, Plutarch was no reformer. Indeed, no reform was possible by means of his didactic method. He does not denounce vigourously the corruptions of his time. He is far from employing the drastic speech of his Roman contemporaries. It is probable that in his secluded home he did not know or even suspect the moral degradation of the world around him; it is certain he had not fathomed it. He knows something of the Jewish religion, and might have known more, had he cared to inform himself. He might have heard Paul’s preaching; and Christianity had gained a firm foothold in Greece before Plutarch’s death. But he was too much of a Greek to take any interest in what had no relation either to Greek religion or tradition. The new faith in virtue of its origin, was foolishness to him. He considered the Hellenic religion good enough for anybody and everybody. It might indeed need purification from some of its grosser elements and exotic excrescences; but more than this was wholly unnecessary.
Nothing that Plutarch says exhibits in a more striking light the humaneness of his disposition than his exhortations to the kind treatment of brutes. He believes that the good man is kind to his beast. He regards it a duty to care for the horse and the dog that have served him well, when they become old and useless. He seems to think that animals are not without a measure of reason and that they have to a limited extent, the power to decide between right and wrong. Though possessed of only a modicum of intelligence, this at least cannot be entirely denied to them, any more than it can be denied to a bad man. A certain measure of reason is the gift of nature; perfect and virtuous reason is the result of practice and instruction. The reasoning powers of many animals are, to an extent, on a level with those of man; they differ not so much in quality as in quantity. It is right, therefore, to use but not to abuse them. Cruelty to animals is evidence of a base heart. Those who treat them harshly usually accentuate their bad traits in their dealings with men.
Our treatment of animals is, therefore, in some sort and often to a considerable extent, an index of how we treat our fellow beings. Plutarch finds the lower animals in some respects more rational than men. They never eat or drink more than enough to satisfy hunger and thirst; nor do they give way to any unnatural or excessive appetites. He is somewhat inclined to condemn the use of animal food; but, at any rate, animals must not be cruelly dealt with to make them more palatable, nor put to death by lingering and inhuman methods. He had in view more particularly some of the practices prevalent in Rome in his day,—practices that were, in truth, horrible in the extreme. It is no wonder that he names them only to condemn them. The extreme modernness of Plutarch in this matter becomes the more strikingly evident when we remember that classical antiquity not only very seldom has a kind word for irrational creatures, but was wont to treat them with extreme harshness. This was particularly the case among the Romans.
Plutarch regards the soul as composed of two parts. One part seeks after truth and light; the other is under the influence of the passions, and liable to error. The first is divine, the second carnal. In so far as a man heeds the monitions of the former he will follow the path of virtue. Practical virtue, virtue in action, is wisdom; vice is error. In order to be virtuous it is only necessary to listen to the voice of reason. Plutarch does not doubt that virtue can be taught. To teach virtue consists largely in making it attractive to the young. Reason does not annihilate the passions; it merely directs them toward a goal that it has marked out. Virtue consists in “the golden mean”—μηδὲν ἄγαν—in doing neither too much nor too little. Bravery is a virtue whose place is between cowardice and rashness. Mildness or kindness is a virtue: its place is between stolidity and cruelty, just as the place of liberality is midway between the extremes, stinginess and prodigality. He adduces a number of proofs to establish the position that the passions are corporeal and the reason supersensuous; in a correct system of pedagogy a proper use is to be made of the latter for controlling and wisely directing the former toward rational ends.
It is in every man’s power to be virtuous under all circumstances, but happiness, or rather good fortune, is dependent upon many things. A virtuous man may enjoy peace of mind at all times, while the largest possessions are of no real value to a bad man. Vice is an anomaly in the constitution of society. Tranquillity of mind, calmness of soul, are not to be sought in a state of inactivity and in retirement. The affirmative of this proposition has led many people into error. Disgusted with the world, they seek peace by withdrawing from its turmoil and hurly-burly, too often only to meet with disappointment. There is not a condition in life from which no consolation can be extracted, and it is the province of reason to discover how this may be done. In what way this is possible he shows by a number of examples from biography. What many persons at first looked upon as misfortunes not unfrequently turned out to be a blessing to themselves and to the world. On the other hand, many persons who were regarded by almost every one as among the most fortunate, were found to have a skeleton in their closet.
When the sage suffers a loss, he does not grieve over it, but places a higher value on what is left to him. No man is so poor, no man has lost so much, but that there remains in his possession something for which he can felicitate himself. Neither is any one so destitute but that he might be still worse off, and the most wretched are certain to meet with others more needy than themselves. On the physical side of our nature we are all subject to what, for want of a better name, may be called _chance_; but this is not true of our moral and intellectual side. It is therefore within our power to secure indestructible and inalienable possessions: insight, love of knowledge, virtue, the consciousness of being and doing right. Not even the fear of death disquiets the good man, for he knows that after his dissolution he shall enter into a better state of existence than this life; the bad man clings to life because of the dread uncertainty before him after death. As a last resource, if a man’s sufferings become too great to be endured, he can make an end of them with his own hand.
To Plutarch, no riches, no purely external possessions, are so conducive to peace of mind and cheerfulness of heart, as a soul that has kept itself free from evil thoughts and acts. For a soul that has held itself aloof from contamination every day is a festival; the world, a temple in which God dwells and which he has adapted to the fulfilment of man’s wants. By the proper use of reason men may control their passions and find satisfaction in the enjoyment of what is within their reach. They may reflect with complacency on the past and look forward to the future with hope. A man’s unhappiness is caused rather by the pains of the soul than those of the body. Diseases of the body are due to its nature, but disease of the soul is man’s own work. Moreover the maladies of the soul are curable, a condition of things that ought to afford us much consolation. Though the sufferings and diseases to which the body is subject take many forms, those that a corrupt heart and a debased soul send forth, as from a perennial fountain, are much more numerous. Again, corporal diseases may be detected by their external symptoms; the maladies of the soul are hidden. They are the more dangerous from the fact that, in most instances, the patient himself is not aware of them. The greatest malady of the soul is the want of reason and good sense, because they disqualify men from recognizing their own baseness and the remedies necessary for a cure. Few persons who are guilty of wrong-doing realize that they have committed transgressions; oftentimes they even think they have acted wisely and judiciously. They call their anger, bravery; their envy and jealousy, emulation; their cowardice, prudence; while it never occurs to them to seek the aid of a philosopher for the diseases of the soul until they are incurable and have become so virulent that they drive the patient to the commission of the most diabolical crimes.
From these premises there follows the inevitable conclusion that the chief end of man is progress in virtue, or, we might better say, in all the virtues, though virtue in reality is but one. Our progress in philosophy is the result of constant and uninterrupted effort. Parallel to this is our progress in virtue; if we relax our efforts for a moment we incur the danger of letting vice get a hold upon us. He who is always in conflict with vice, with his evil passions, may rest assured that he is making progress in virtue. But our love for virtue must partake of the nature of a passion; in it we ought to find our highest gratification, so that if we are interrupted in our pursuit we shall long to return to it. The aim and purpose of our philosophy must be practical, and it is chiefly in our activity as a citizen and a man in all the multiplex relations of life, that we may test our love for it. Yet, the true philosopher is not ostentatious, and it makes little difference to him whether the world recognizes him as such or not. He ought to seek internal satisfaction, not public acknowledgement. Herein Plutarch takes his stand in opposition to many of his countrymen who aspired to the name and title of philosophers, but did little to deserve them. How men of sense regarded them has been pointed out elsewhere.
We may also measure our progress in philosophy, that is, in virtue, by our love of the beautiful and the good; by our attitude towards praise and blame. We ought neither to seek the one nor avoid the other. If we really desire to correct our faults and shortcomings, we will be ready at all times to listen to advice and to heed criticism; nor will we conceal any part of our nature or cover up any of our acts in order to seem what we are not. Nevertheless, when we are firmly convinced that we are in the right, it is our duty to go forward in the course we have marked out for ourselves, no matter what others may think or say. There is no stronger incentive to noble deeds and an upright life than the lives of the great and the good of all ages. It was mainly under the impulse of this belief that Plutarch compiled his parallel biographies. In the nature of the case their value as truthful records is greatly impaired by the standpoint from which they were written; but it is this fact that has given them an attractiveness and a currency such as no other works of their kind have equalled. Plutarch’s Lives have for centuries been the monitors of youth and the solace of the aged. They have been read and admired wherever men have honored courage, fortitude, intrepidity, self-control, patriotism, humaneness—in short, every trait of character that can be classed among the virtues. Greeks and Romans, ancients and moderns, learned and illiterate, rich and poor, have been fascinated by them, and it is on them that their author’s fame chiefly rests. To many persons, in fact to the great majority of readers, Plutarch is known only as the writer of charming biographies; yet these constitute a good deal less than half his extant works.
Plutarch holds that men find the path of virtue and continue to walk in it, by reflection, deliberation, introspection; by a systematic, rigid and continued self-examination—in other words, by a practical application of the methods that philosophy points out. Man is sane and sound only so long as he puts into practice the principles of virtue. So long as he is the slave of his passions he is in need of a physician. Philosophy is the sanitation of the soul; the genuine philosopher is the real physician of the soul. In pursuance of his chosen vocation, Plutarch wrote a number of essays for the purpose of giving instruction upon the best methods of controlling the different passions to which men are subject. Their purport easily becomes evident from a glance at their titles. They show that he has carefully observed and studied men, at least those that constitute the various higher classes and give the prevailing tone to society. Many of these essays are still of interest and well repay perusal. They contain many acute observations and piquant remarks.
For Plutarch the old mythology is sufficient as a basis for a religious belief. Like most of the Greek philosophers who incline toward theism, he maintains that myths are, to a greater or less extent, corruptions of primitive verities. These originated in the popular mind and received artistic form at the hands of the poets. Underlying them all there is truth enough and beauty enough to show the aspiration of the soul after higher things, and they form the basis of a purely theistic belief. Plutarch’s unbounded faith in human reason leads him to believe that it alone is entirely sufficient to enable any and every man to lead a virtuous life. His advice to every one is, in substance: get all the light you can; use the reason you are endowed with by the creator; acquire additional knowledge and wisdom every day; make your inward life an object of daily study and reflection,—if you do these things you will lead a virtuous life. Those persons who have no love for the beautiful and the good, no desire to become virtuous, fail because they neglect to cultivate the reason with which every man is originally endowed. They grope in the darkness cast about them by their own passions, and refuse to follow the lamp that reason holds up before them.
Plutarch’s optimism; his faith in the power of the intellect to make the world better, is especially remarkable in view of the fact that his countrymen, notwithstanding their general intelligence, notwithstanding the large number of great men in almost every department of knowledge born in Greek lands, in spite of the fact that Greece was the native hearth of philosophy, had for centuries been retrograding morally, intellectually and politically. So hard is it to divorce most men from a theory to which they have attached themselves. His mistake arose from his seeing all men in the mirror of his own thoughts. He believed that the whole human race could be influenced by the motives that influenced himself, and that all could, if they wished, be constantly engaged in the search for light and wisdom in the way he sought them. This radical error he inherited from his master, Plato, and it is strange that he did not detect it. He seems never to have suspected that he might be mistaken. Plutarch’s religion is wholly without enthusiasm and his morality has in it not a tinge of emotion. Do right always, because by such a course of life you will enjoy the largest measure of mundane happiness that can fall to the lot of a mortal, and be a benefactor to all who come within the circle of your influence. Make the best of every situation in which you may be placed. Do not take too seriously the hindrances to a virtuous life that you may find in your way, because you can remove them if you will. No matter what your station in life, do not expect your path to be always a smooth one. If you keep these things in mind you will probably live long,—you are sure to live happily.
Plutarch’s views regarding the education of women are far in advance of his age. He follows his master, Plato, in vindicating for them the same virtues that belong to men. His treatise often designated The Virtues of Women is chiefly a record of heroic deeds that have been performed by the so-called weaker sex. He admits that the worth or efficiency of women is not necessarily of the same quality as that of men, but he contends that its ethical value is equal and its intrinsic merit in no wise inferior. The woman who has performed a noble deed is entitled to just as much credit as a a man. He takes issue with Thucydides for saying that the best woman is the one of whom least is said either for good or evil. He also takes issue with the thoroughly Greek sentiment, though perhaps more pronounced in Athens than elsewhere, that woman is at most little else than a plaything and a convenience for man; and that her highest function is to bear legitimate male children. According to Plutarch the wife is to be the equal partner in the management of the household. When it is well conducted she deserves equal commendation with the husband.
He would open a wider sphere for women; train them intellectually, and awaken in them an interest in the larger affairs of life. Consistently with these views, Plutarch assigned to his wife an honorable place in his household. She received guests in her husband’s absence; sat at table with him and interested herself in public as well as private affairs. While this was in contravention of the custom of his day, it was in harmony with a faintly discernible trend of public opinion, probably the result of Roman influence. That the innovation made slow progress is plain not only from the later history of Greece but also from Greek social usages in our own day. When we take cognizance of the unhappy state of his country we are inclined to wonder at Plutarch’s uniform serenity of mind. He never indulges in satire or sneer, while many of his contemporaries did both. But we must remember that his philosophy had, above and beyond everything else, a practical purpose, and that in a rather material sense. Men’s misfortunes are their own fault and therefore preventible; or they are not their own fault and therefore unavoidable. In either case nothing is gained by grieving over them.
It will be evident from a perusal of the De Sera that optimism is the basis of Plutarch’s philosophy. Men can do right if they will, and if they do right they can not fail to be happy. There is a superintending Providence that in the end rectifies all wrong and injustice. He seems to hold with Goethe that “Every sin is punished here below,” though the punishment does not end in this life. Retribution is not delayed until after death; it visits the sinner in this world. Or if he is so fortunate as to end his days in peace, so far as mortals can see, he entails a curse upon his descendants. The iniquities of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation. But the punishment of the wicked does not end with this life. The soul bears the imprint of its crimes after it has left the body. That God sometimes permits a wicked man to end his days in peace but that He has fastened a curse on his offspring, is a prominent article in the creed of many of the older Greek writers. It is often referred to by Herodotus. So firmly convinced is he that all wrong-doing must be atoned for that when he finds an instance where the law does not appear to hold good he confesses himself at a loss to account for the failure of its operation. Not only individuals but nations as well must expiate crimes committed and wrongs done by their representatives in an official capacity. And there is no doubt that the influence of this belief was most wholesome. Much of what Plutarch says on this point is probably fanciful, especially when he appeals to the testimony of history; but what he records is in keeping with his philosophy and has therefore a strong personal interest. Moreover, he furnishes us with some interesting testimony as to the prevalence of a belief in rewards and punishments among men outside the pale of Christianity.
Plutarch’s ideal of duty is a high one. The fulfilment of some duty is incumbent upon every man so long as he lives. It is as imperative in old age as in early life. When a man is quit of his obligations to his children, he owes a service to his country and to his fellow citizens in a narrower sense. From this service, only the impairment of his facilities or death may release him. As every man is born into the state, and as, in a certain sense, he is a man only in so far as he discharges his obligations to the state, he has no choice in the matter. Herein lies a duty from which there is no possible escape. But the mere holding of an office is not the only or even the chief test of the good citizen. His duties in a private capacity are no less important, and if less conspicuous are equally far reaching. The good citizen is the philosopher in his true sphere: good citizenship is philosophy in action—applied philosophy. It is only in actual life that the philosopher can put his theories to the test. The form of government is a matter of minor importance. Plutarch regards monarchy, as on the whole, the best, but he is not radical. In this he agrees with the majority of Greek philosophers, most of whom were generally more or less dissatisfied with the turbulent Athenian democracy. That monarchy is best where the head of the state is what Plutarch would have him be, a philosopher. But even the most absolute monarch should not regard himself above law; he is to be its executor. Moreover, it is his duty not only to obey cheerfully the written law that binds prince and people alike, but also that unwritten law that reason has implanted in the soul of every man of sound mind. Rulers are in a sense the servants of God whose duty it is to apportion rewards and punishments according to their deserts, to all that are under their authority.
After all, man’s first and chief duty is to himself. His quest for light, for knowledge, for truth is never to be intermitted. He is to take his bearings, as it were, frequently, in order to see what progress he is making. If his aims are noble, his purposes right, and his motives pure, he will not only make daily progress in virtue, but when he is called to leave this world he can depart in peace because he will have the consciousness that it is the better for his having lived in it. Having thus given a short sketch of Plutarch as a man and a citizen let us proceed to examine briefly the times in which he lived as supplementary to what has already been said under this general head in treating of Seneca. What had Roman rule done for his country? What was the social and economic condition of Greece and Greek lands in the first century of the Christian era? Unfortunately our information on these points is exceedingly scanty. In fact, political economy is a recent science; in ancient times the lot of the poor was little taken note of. It was everywhere a hard one, and the care of the indigent, so much insisted on in the New Testament, is almost the first sign of an awakening in this respect. But it did not originate with the government; that had other ends in view. That the Roman policy toward the proletariat in the imperial capital only made matters worse, is well known. When we remember how much has been done in recent years by legislation in every civilized country for the amelioration of the condition of the lowest classes and how much still remains to be done, we can picture to ourselves the state of society where all this was omitted.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.