The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire. Glover Terrot Reaveley

---

Скачать книгу

---

who bore his ancestor's name and still enjoyed the honours granted to him and his posterity at Magnesia.[279] Ammonius, whom he honoured and quoted throughout life, was a Platonist[280] much interested in Mathematics.[281] He was a serious and kindly teacher with a wide range of interests, not all speculative. Plutarch records a discussion of dancing by "the good Ammonius."[282] He was thrice "General" at Athens,[283] and had at any rate once the experience of an excited mob shouting for him in the street, while he supped with his friends indoors.

      Plutarch had many interests in Athens, in its literature, its philosophy and its ancient history – in its relics, too, for he speaks of memorials of Phocion and Demosthenes still extant. But he lingers especially over the wonders of Pericles and Phidias, "still fresh and new and untouched by time, as if a spirit of eternal youth, a soul that was ageless, were in the work of the artist."[284] Athens was a conservative place, on the whole, and a great resort for strangers. The Athenian love of talk is noticed by Luke with a touch of satire, and Dio Chrysostom admitted that the Athenians fell short of the glory of their city and their ancestors.[285] Yet men loved Athens.[286] Aulus Gellius in memory of his years there, called his book of collections Attic Nights, and here and there he speaks of student life – "It was from Ægina to Piræus that some of us who were fellow-students, Greeks and Romans, were crossing in the same ship. It was night. The sea was calm. It was summertime and the sky was clear and still. So we were sitting on the poop, all of us together, with our eyes upon the shining stars," and fell to talking about their names.[287]

      His travels

      When his student days were over, Plutarch saw something of the world. He alludes to a visit to Alexandria,[288] but, though he was interested in Egyptian religion, as we shall see, he does not speak of travels in the country. He must have known European Greece well, but he had little knowledge, it seems, of Asia Minor and little interest in it. He went once on official business for his city to the pro-consul of Illyricum – and had a useful lesson from his father who told him to say "We" in his report, though his appointed colleague had failed to go with him.[289] He twice went to Italy in the reigns of Vespasian and Domitian, and he seems to have stayed for some time in Rome, making friends in high places and giving lectures. Of the great Latin writers of his day he mentions none, nor is he mentioned by them. But he tells with pride how once Arulenus Rusticus had a letter from Domitian brought him by a soldier in the middle of one of these lectures and kept it unopened till the end.[290] The lectures were given in Greek. He confesses to his friend Sossius Senecio that, owing to the pressure of political business and the number of people who came about him for philosophy, when he was in Rome, it was late indeed in life that he attempted to learn Latin; and when he read Latin, it was the general sense of a passage that helped him to the meaning of the words. The niceties of the language he could not attempt, he says, though it would have been a graceful and pleasant thing for one of more leisure and fewer years.[291] That this confession is a true one is shown by the scanty use he makes of Roman books in his biographies, by his want of acquaintance with Latin literature, poetry and philosophy, and by blunders in detail noted by his critics. Sine patris is a poor attempt at Latin grammar for a man of his learning, and in his life of Lucullus he has turned the streets of Rome into villages through inattention to the various meanings of vicus.[292]

      But, as he says, he was a citizen of a small town, and he did not wish to make it smaller,[293] and he went back to Chæronea and obscurity. A city he held to be an organism like a living being,[294] and he never cared for a man on whom the claims of his city sat loosely – as they did on the Stoics.[295] The world was full of Greek philosophers and rhetoricians, lecturing and declaiming, to their great profit and glory, but Plutarch was content to stay at home, to be magistrate and priest. If men laughed to see him inspecting the measurement of tiles and the carrying of cement and stones – "it is not for myself, I say, that I am doing this but for my native-place."[296] This was when he was Telearch – an office once held by Epameinondas, as he liked to remember. Pliny's letters show that this official inspection of municipal building operations by honest and capable men was terribly needed. But Plutarch rose to higher dignities, and as Archon Eponymos he had to preside over feasts and sacrifices.[297] He was also a Boeotarch. The Roman Empire did not leave much political activity even to the free cities, but Plutarch loyally accepted the new era as from God, and found in it many blessings of peace and quiet, and some opportunities still of serving his city. He held a priesthood at Delphi, with some charge over the oracle and a stewardship at the Pythian games. He loved Delphi, and its shrine and antiquities,[298] and made the temple the scene of some of his best dialogues. "The kind Apollo (ho phílos)," he says, "seems to heal the questions of life, and to resolve them, by the rules he gives to those who ask; but the questions of thought he himself suggests to the philosophic temperament, waking in the soul an appetite that will lead it to truth."[299]

      He does not seem to have gained much public renown, but he did not seek it. The fame in his day was for the men of rhetoric, and he was a man of letters. If he gave his time to municipal duties, he must have spent the greater part of his days in reading and writing. He says that a biographer needs a great many books and that as a rule many of them will not be readily accessible – to have the abundance he requires, he ought really to be in some "famous city where learning is loved and men are many"; though, he is careful to say, a man may be happy and upright in a town that is "inglorious and humble."[300] He must have read very widely, and he probably made good use of his stay in Rome. In philosophy and literature it is quite probable that he used hand-books of extracts, though this must not imply that he did not go to the original works of the greater writers. But his main interest lay in memoirs and travels. He had an instinct for all that was characteristic, or curious, or out-of-the-way; and all sorts of casual references show how such things attached themselves to his memory. Discursive in his reading, as most men of letters seem to be, with a quick eye for the animated scene, the striking figure, the strange occurrence, he read, one feels, for enjoyment – he would add, no doubt, for his own moral profit; indeed he says that he began his Biographies for the advantage of others and found them to be much to his own.[301] He was of course an inveterate moralist; but unlike others of the class, he never forgets the things that have given him pleasure. They crowd his pages in genial reminiscence and apt allusion. There is always the quiet and leisurely air of one who has seen and has enjoyed, and sees and enjoys again as he writes. It is this that has made his Biographies live. They may at times exasperate the modern historian, for he is not very systematic – delightful writers rarely are. He rambles as he likes and avowedly passes the great things by and treasures the little and characteristic. "I am not writing histories but lives," he says, "and it is not necessarily in the famous action that a man's excellence or failure is revealed. But some little thing – a word or a jest – may often show character better than a battle with its ten thousand slain."[302]

      But, after all, it is the characteristic rather than the character that interests him. He is not among the greatest who have drawn men, for he lacks the mind and patience to go far below the surface to find the key to the whole nature. When he has shown us one side of the hero, he will present another and a very different one, and leave us to reconcile

---

Скачать книгу