The Statesman In Plutarch S Works Volume Ii The Statesman In Plutarch S Greek And Roman Lives

The papers in this volume concentrate on statesmen and statesmanship in Plutarch's Greek and Roman Lives.

This volume presents the second half of the proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of the International Plutarch Society (2002). The selected papers are divided by theme in sections concentrating on statesmen and statesmanship in Plutarch's Greek and Roman Lives. The volume bears witness to the ongoing, wide-ranging interest in Plutarch's biographies.

The papers in this volume concentrate on political, philosophical, and literary aspects of Plutarch's presentation of statesmen and their activities, and on the aftermath of this Plutarchan heritage.

The papers in this volume concentrate on political, philosophical, and literary aspects of Plutarch's presentation of statesmen and their activities, and on the aftermath of this Plutarchan heritage.

This volume of collected essays explores the premise that Plutarch’s work, notwithstanding its amazing thematic multifariousness, constantly pivots on certain ideological pillars which secure its unity and coherence. So, unlike other similar books which, more or less, concentrate on either the Lives or the Moralia or on some particular aspect(s) of Plutarch’s œuvre, the articles of the present volume observe Plutarch at work in both Lives and Moralia, thus bringing forward and illustrating the inner unity of his varied literary production. The subject-matter of the volume is uncommonly wide-ranging and the studies collected here inquire into many important issues of Plutarchean scholarship: the conditions under which Plutarch’s writings were separated into two distinct corpora, his methods of work and the various authorial techniques employed, the interplay between Lives and Moralia, Plutarch and politics, Plutarch and philosophy, literary aspects of Plutarch’s œuvre, Plutarch on women, Plutarch in his epistemological and socio-historical context. In sum, this book brings Plutarchean scholarship to date by revisiting and discussing older and recent problematization concerning Plutarch, in an attempt to further illuminate his personality and work.

In the Parallel Lives Plutarch does not absolve his readers of the need for moral reflection by offering any sort of hard and fast rules for their moral judgement. Rather, he uses strategies to elicit readers’ active engagement with the act of judging. This book, drawing on the insights of recent narrative theories, especially narratology and reader-response criticism, examines Plutarch’s narrative techniques in the Parallel Lives of drawing his readers into the process of moral evaluation and exposing them to the complexities entailed in it. Subjects discussed include Plutarch’s prefatory projection of himself and his readers and the interaction between the two; Plutarch’s presentation of the mental and emotional workings of historical agents, which serves to re-enact the participants’ experience at the time and thus arouse empathy in the readers; Plutarch’s closural strategies and their profound effects on the readers’ moral inquiry; Plutarch’s principles of historical criticism in On the malice of Herodotus in relation to his narrative strategies in the Lives. Through illustrating Plutarch’s narrative technique, this book elucidates Plutarch’s praise-and-blame rhetoric in the Lives as well as his sensibility to the challenges inherent in recounting, reading about, and evaluating the lives of the great men of history.

Plutarch’s Regum et imperatorum apophthegmata (Sayings of Kings and Commanders) holds a peculiar position in his oeuvre. This collection of almost 500 anecdotes of barbarian, Greek, and Roman rulers and generals is introduced by a dedicatory letter to Trajan as a summary of the author’s well-known and widely read Parallel Lives. The work is therefore Plutarch’s only text that explicitly addresses a Roman emperor and is likely to shed light on his biographical technique. Yet the collection has been understudied, because its authenticity has been generally rejected since the nineteenth century. Recent scholarship defends Plutarch's authorship of the text, but some remain sceptical. This book restores its reputation and provides a first full literary analysis of the letter and collection as a genuine work of Plutarch, wherein he attempts to educate his ruler by means of great role models of the past. Plutarch’s thinking about the function of role models (exempla) is not only relevant for Plutarchan research, but also for our knowledge of exemplarity, a key feature both in Greek and Latin literature in the early imperial period in general. Therefore An Opaque Mirror for Trajan is also of interest for literary and historical scholars who study the broader context of ancient literature of the first centuries CE.