The Conflict of Religions in the Early Roman Empire

Not though man's wisdom scale the heights of thought —

but it is a common home and an established foundation for all piety; and if in one point its stable and traditional character (tò bébainon autês kaì nenomismenon) be shaken and disturbed, it will be undermined and no one will trust it… If you demand proof about each of the ancient gods, laying hands on everything sacred and bringing your sophistry to play on every altar, you will leave nothing free from quibble and cross-examination (oudèn asykophánteton oud abasániston)… Others will say that Aphrodite is desire and Hermes reason, the Muses crafts and Athene thought. Do you see, then, the abyss of atheism that lies at our feet, if we resolve each of the gods into a passion or a force or a virtue?'"[[263 - Amatorius, 13, 756 A, D; 757 B. The quotation is from Euripides, Bacchæ, 203.]]

Such an utterance is unmistakeable – it means a conservative re-action, and in another place we find its justification in religious emotion. "Nothing gives us more joy than what we see and do ourselves in divine service, when we carry the emblems, or join in the sacred dance, or stand by at the sacrifice or initiation… It is when the soul most believes and perceives that the god is present, that she most puts from her pain and fear and anxiety, and gives herself up to joy, yes, even as far as intoxication and laughter and merriment… In sacred processions and sacrifices not only the old man and the old woman, nor the poor and lowly,

The thick-legged drudge that sways her at the mill,

but and household slaves and hirelings are uplifted by joy and triumph. Rich men and kings have always their own banquets and feasts – but the feasts in the temples and at initiations, when men seem to touch the divine most nearly in their thought, with honour and worship, have a pleasure and a charm far more exceeding. And in this no man shares who has renounced belief in Providence. For it is not abundance of wine, nor the roasting of meat, that gives the joy in the festivals, but also a good hope, and a belief that the god is present and gracious, and accepts what is being done with a friendly mind."[[264 - Non suaviter, 21, 1101 E-1102 A.]]

Continuity of religion

One of Chateaubriand's critics says that his plea could be advanced on behalf of any religion; and Plutarch had already made it on behalf of his own. He looks past the Stoics, and he finds in memory and association arguments that outweigh anything they can say. The Spermaticos Logos was a mere Être Suprème – a sublime conception perhaps, but it had no appeal to emotion, it waked no memories, it touched no chord of personal association. We live so largely by instinct, memory and association, that anything that threatens them seems to strike at our life,

So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

Some such thought is native to every heart, and the man who does not cling to his own past seems wanting in something essentially human. The gods were part of the past of the ancient world, and if Reason took them away, what was left? There was so much, too, that Reason could not grasp; so much to be learnt in ritual and in mystery that to the merely thinking mind had no meaning, – that must be received. Reason was invoked so lightly, and applied so carelessly and harshly, that it could take no account of the tender things of the heart. Reason destroyed but did not create, questioned without answering, and left life without sanction or communion. It was too often a mere affair of cleverness. It had its use and place, no doubt, in correcting extravagances of belief, but it was by no means the sole authority in man's life, and its function was essentially to be the handmaid of religion. "We must take Reason from philosophy to be our mystagogue and then in holy reverence consider each several word and act of worship."[[265 - de Iside, 68, 378 A.]]

Plutarch is our representative man in this revival of religion, and some survey of his life and environment will enable us to enter more fully into his thought, and through him to understand better the beginnings of a great religious movement, of which students too often have lost sight.

For centuries the great men of Greek letters were natives of every region of the eastern Mediterranean except Greece, and Plutarch stands alone in later literature a Hellen of the motherland – Greek by blood, birth, home and instinct, proud of his race and his land, of their history, their art and their literature. When we speak of the influence of the past, it is well to remember to how great a past this man looked back, and from what a present. Long years of faction and war, as he himself says, had depopulated Greece, and the whole land could hardly furnish now the three thousand hoplites that four centuries before Megara alone had sent to Platæa. In regions where oracles of note had been, they were no more; their existence would but have emphasized the solitude – what good would an oracle be at Tegyra, or about Ptoum, where in a day's journey you might perhaps come on a solitary shepherd?[[266 - de def. orac. 8, 414 A.]] It was not only that wars and faction fights had wasted the life of the Greek people, but with the opening of the far East by Alexander, and the development of the West under Roman rule, Commerce had shifted its centres, and the Greeks had left their old homes for new regions. Still keen on money, philosophy and art, they thronged Alexandria, Antioch and Rome, and a thousand other cities. The Petrie papyri have revealed a new feature of this emigration, for the wills of the settlers often mention the names of their wives, and these were Greek women and not Egyptian, as the names of their fathers and homes prove.[[267 - Mahaffy, Silver Age of Greek World, p. 45.]] Julius Cæsar had restored Corinth a century after Mummius destroyed it, and Athens was still as she had been and was to be for centuries, the resort of every one who loved philosophy and literature.[[268 - Horace is the best known of Athenian students. The delightful letters of Synesius show the hold Athens still retained upon a very changed world in 400 A.D.]] These were the two cities of Greece; the rest were reminders of what had been. In one of these forsaken places Plutarch was born, and there he was content to live and die, a citizen and a magistrate of Chæronea in Boeotia.

His family circle

His family was an old one, long associated with Chæronea. From childhood his life was rooted in the past by the most natural and delightful of all connexions. His great-grandfather, Nicarchus, used to tell how his fellow-citizens were commandeered to carry wheat on their own backs down to Anticyra for Antony's fleet – and were quickened up with the whip as they went; and "then when they had taken one consignment so, and the second was already done up into loads and ready, the news came that Antony was defeated, and that saved the city; for at once Antony's agents and soldiers fled, and they divided the grain among themselves."[[269 - Life of Antony, 68.]] The grandfather, Lamprias, lived long and saw the grandson a grown man. He appears often in Plutarch's Table Talk– a bright old man and a lively talker – like incense, he said, he was best when warmed up.[[270 - Symp. i, 5, 1.]] He thought poorly of the Jews for not eating pork – a most righteous dish, he said.[[271 - Symp. iv, 4, 4.]] He had tales of his own about Antony, picked up long ago from one Philotas, who had been a medical student in Alexandria and a friend of one of the royal cooks, and eventually medical attendant to a son of Antony's by Fulvia.[[272 - v. Ant. 28.]] Plutarch's father was a quiet, sensible man, who maintained the practice of sacrificing,[[273 - Symp. iii, 7, 1.]] kept good horses,[[274 - Symp. ii, 8, 1.]] knew his Homer, and had something of his son's curious interest in odd problems. It is perhaps an accident that Plutarch never mentions his name, but, though he often speaks of him, it is always of "my father" or "our father" – the lifelong and instinctive habit. There were also two brothers. The witty and amiable Lamprias loved laughter and was an expert in dancing – a useful man to put things right when the dance went with more spirit than music.[[275 - Symp. viii, 6, 5, hubristès òn kaì philogelôs physei. Symp. ix, 15, 1.]] Of Timon we hear less, but Plutarch sets Timon's goodness of heart among the very best gifts Fortune has sent him.[[276 - de fraterno amore, 16, 487 E. Volkmann, Plutarch, i, 24, suggests he was the Timon whose wife Pliny defended on one occasion, Epp. i, 5, 5.]] He emphasizes the bond that brothers have in the family sacrifices, ancestral rites, the common home and the common grave.[[277 - de frat. am. 7, 481 D.]] That Plutarch always had friends, men of kindly nature and intelligence, and some of them eminent, is not surprising. Other human relationships, to be mentioned hereafter, completed his circle. He was born, and grew up, and lived, in a network of love and sympathy, the record of which is in all his books.

Plutarch was born about the year 50 A.D., and, when Nero went on tour through Greece in 66 A.D., he was a student at Athens under Ammonius.[[278 - de E. 1, 385 B.]] He recalls that among his fellow-students was a descendant of Themistocles, who bore his ancestor's name and still enjoyed the honours granted to him and his posterity at Magnesia.[[279 - v. Them. 32, end.]] Ammonius, whom he honoured and quoted throughout life, was a Platonist[[280 - Zeller, Eclectics, 334.]] much interested in Mathematics.[[281 - de E. 17, 391 E. Imagine the joys of a Euclid, says Plutarch, in non suaviter, 11, 1093 E.]] 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 - Symp. ix, 15.]] He was thrice "General" at Athens,[[283 - Symp. viii, 3, I.]] 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 - Pericles 13.]] 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 - Dio Chr. Rhodiaca, Or. 31, 117.]] Yet men loved Athens.[[286 - Cf. the Nigrinus.]] 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 - Gellius, N.A. ii, 21, 1, vos opici, says Gellius to his friends – Philistines.]]

His travels

When his student days were over, Plutarch saw something of the world. He alludes to a visit to Alexandria,[[288 - Symp. v, 5, 1.]] 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 - Polit. præc. 20, 816 D.]] 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 - de curiositate, 15.]] 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 - Demosthenes, 2.]] 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 - See Volkmann, i, 35, 36; Rom. Qu. 103; Lucullus, 37, end.]]

But, as he says, he was a citizen of a small town, and he did not wish to make it smaller,[[293 - Demosthenes, 2.]] and he went back to Chæronea and obscurity. A city he held to be an organism like a living being,[[294 - de sera, 15, 559 A.]] and he never cared for a man on whom the claims of his city sat loosely – as they did on the Stoics.[[295 - de Stoic. rep. 2, 1033 B, C.]] 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 - Pol. Præc. 15, 811 C.]] 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 - Symp. ii, 10, 1; vi, 8, 1.]] 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 - Reference to Polemo's hand-book to them, Symp. v, 2, 675 B.]] 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 - de E. 384 F.]]

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 - Demosthenes, 2; and 1.]] 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 - Timoleon, pref.]] 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 - Alexander, 1.]]

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 them if we can. The contradictions remain contradictions, and he wanders pleasantly on. The Lives of Pericles and Themistocles, for instance, are little more than mere collectanea from sources widely discrepant, and often quite worthless. Of the mind of Pericles he had little conception; he gathered up and pleasantly told what he had read in books. He had too little of the critical instinct and took things too easily to weigh what he quoted.

Above all, despite his "political" energy and enthusiasm, it was impossible, for a Greek of his day to have the political insight that only comes from life in a living state. How could the Telearch of Chæronea under the Roman Empire understand Pericles? Archbishop Trench contrasts his enthusiasm about the gift of liberty to Greece by Flamininus with the reflection of Wordsworth that it is a thing

which is not to be given
By all the blended powers of Earth and Heaven.

Plutarch really did not know what liberty is; Wordsworth on the other hand had taken part in the French Revolution, and watched with keen and sympathetic eyes the march of events throughout a most living epoch. It is worth noting that indirectly Plutarch contributed to the disasters of that epoch, for his Lycurgus had enormous influence with Rousseau and his followers who took it for history. Here was a man who made laws and constitutions in his own head and imposed them upon his fellow-countrymen. So Plutarch wrote and believed, and so read and believed thinking Frenchmen of the eighteenth century, like himself subjects of a despotism and without political experience.

Besides Biographies he wrote moral treatises – some based on lectures, others on conversation, others again little better than note-books – pleasant and readable books, if the reader will forgive a certain want of humour, and a tendency to ramble, and will surrender his mind to the long and leisurely sentences, for Plutarch is not to be hurried. Everything he wrote had some moral or religious aim. He was a believer, in days of doubt and perplexity. The Epicurean was heard at Delphi. Even in the second century, when the great, religious revival was in full swing, Lucian wrote and found readers. Men brought their difficulties to Plutarch and he went to meet them – ever glad to do something for the ancestral faith. Nor was he less ready to discuss – or record discussions of – questions much less serious. Was the hen or the egg first? Does a varied diet or a single dish help the digestion more? Why is fresh water better than salt for washing clothes? Which of Aphrodite's hands did Diomed wound?

It is always the same man, genial, garrulous, moral and sensible. There are no theatricalities in his style – he is not a rhetorician even on paper.[[303 - de tranqu. animi, i, 464 F, ouk akroáseôs héneka therôménês kalligraphían– a profession often made, but in Plutarch's case true enough as a rule.]] He discards the tricks of the school, adoxography, epigram and, as a rule, paradox. His simplicity is his charm. He is really interested in his subject whatever it is; and he believes in its power of interesting other men, too much to think it worth while to trick it out with extraneous prettinesses. Yet after he has discussed his theme, with excursions into its literary antecedents and its moral suggestions, we are not perhaps much nearer an explanation of the fact in question,[[304 - See, e. g., variety of possible explanations of the E at Delphi, in tract upon it.]] nor always quite sure that it is a fact. Everything interests him, but he is in no hurry to get at the bottom of anything; just as in the Lives he is occupied with everything except the depths of his hero's personality. It remains that in his various works he has given us an unexampled pageant of antiquity over a wide reach of time and many lands, and always bright with the colour of life – the work of a lover of men. "I can hardly do without Plutarch," wrote Montaigne; "he is so universal and so full, that upon all occasions, and what extravagant subject soever you take in hand, he will still intrude himself into your business, and holds out to you a liberal and not to be exhausted hand of riches and embellishments." What Shakespeare thought of him is written in three great plays.[[305 - Stapfer, Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity (tr.), p. 299. "It may be safely said he followed Plutarch far more closely than he did even the old English chroniclers."]]

His wife and children

But so far nothing has been said of Plutarch's own home. The lot of the wife of a great preacher or moralist is not commonly envied; and the tracts which Plutarch wrote upon historic women and their virtues, and on the duties of married life, on diet and on the education of the young, suggest that Timoxena must have lived in an atmosphere of high moral elevation, with a wise saw and an ancient instance for every occurrence of the day. But it is clear that he loved her, and his affection for their four little boys must have been as plain to her as to his readers – and his joy when, after long waiting, at last a little girl was born. "You had longed for a daughter after four sons," he writes to her, "and I was glad when she came and I could give her your name." The little Timoxena lived for two years, and the letter of consolation which Plutarch wrote her mother tells the story of her short life. "She had by nature wonderful good temper and gentleness. So responsive to affection, so generous was she that it was a pleasure to see her tenderness. For she used to bid her nurse give the breast to other children and not to them only, but even to toys and other things in which she took delight. She was so loving that she wished everything that gave her pleasure to share in the best of what she had. I do not see, my dear wife, why things such as these, which gave us so much happiness while she lived, should give us pain and trouble now when we think of them."[[306 - Cons. ad Ux. 2-3, 608 C, D.]] He reminds her of the mysteries of Dionysus of which they were both initiates. In language that recalls Wordsworth's great Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, he suggests that old age dulls our impressions of the soul's former life, and that their little one is gone from them, before she had time to fall in love with life on earth. "And the truth about this is to be seen in the ancient use and wont of our fathers," who did not observe the ordinary sad rites of burial for little children, "as if they felt it not right in the case of those who have passed to a better and diviner lot and place… And since to disbelieve them is harder than to believe, let us comply with the laws in outward things, and let what is within be yet more stainless, pure and holy."[[307 - Cons. ad Ux. 11, 612 A, B. Cf. non suaviter, 26, 1104 C, on the loss of a child or a parent.]]

Two of the sons had previously died – the eldest Soclaros, and the fourth, "our beautiful Chæron" – the name is that of the traditional founder of Chæronea. The other two, Autobulus and Plutarch grew up. Some of these names appear in the Table Talk, while others of his works were written at the suggestion of his sons.

His slaves

From the family we pass to the slaves, and here, as we should expect, Plutarch is an advocate of gentleness. In the tract On Restraining Anger a high and humane character is drawn in Fundanus, who had successfully mastered a naturally passionate temper. It has been thought that Plutarch was drawing his own portrait over his friend's name. A naïve tendency to idealise his own virtues he certainly shares with other moralists. Fundanus urges that, while all the passions need care and practice if they are to be overcome, anger is the failure to which we are most liable in the case of our slaves. Our authority over them sets us in a slippery place; temper here has nothing to check it, for here we are irresponsible and that is a position of danger. A man's wife and his friends are too apt to call gentleness to the slaves mere easy-going slackness (atonían kaì rhathumían). "I used to be provoked by such criticism myself against my slaves. I was told they were going to pieces for want of correction. Later on I realized that, first of all, it is better to let them grow worse through my forbearance than by bitterness and anger to pervert oneself for the reformation of others. And, further, I saw that many of them, through not being punished, began to be ashamed of being bad, and that forgiveness was more apt than punishment to be the beginning of a change in them – and indeed that they would serve some men more readily for a silent nod than they would others for blows and brandings. So I persuaded myself that reasoning does better than temper."[[308 - de coh. ira. 11, 459 C; cf. Progress in Virtue, 80 B, 81 C, on epieíkeia and praotês as signs of moral progress.]] It will be remarked that Fundanus, or his recording friend, does not here take the Stoic position that the slave is as much a son of God as the master,[[309 - Cf. Sen. Ep. 47; Clem. Alex. Pæd. iii, 92.]] nor does he spare the slave for the slave's sake but to overcome his own temper. So much for theory; but men's conduct does not always square with their theories, and in life we see men guilty of kind-heartedness and large-mindedness not at all to be reconciled with the theories which they profess, when they remember them.

It is curious that one of the few stories of Plutarch that come from outside sources should concern this very tract and the punishment of a slave. Gellius heard it from the philosopher Taurus after one of his classes. Plutarch, Taurus said, had a worthless slave and ordered him a flogging. The man loudly protested he had done no wrong, and at last, under the stimulus of the lash, taunted his master with inconsistency – what about the fine book on controlling Anger? he was angry enough now. "Then Plutarch, slowly and gently" asked what signs of anger he showed in voice or colour or word? "My eyes, I think, are not fierce; nor my face flushed; I am not shouting aloud; there is no foam on my lip, no red in my cheek; I am saying nothing to be ashamed of; nothing to regret; I am not excited nor gesticulating. All these, perhaps you are unaware, are the signs of anger."[[310 - A curious parallel to this in Tert. de Patientia, 15, where Tertullian draws the portrait of Patience – perhaps from life, as Dean Robinson suggests – after Perpetua the martyr.]] Then turning to the man who was flogging the slave, he said, "In the meantime, while I and he are debating, you go on with your business."[[311 - Gellius, N.A. i, 26.]] The story is generally accepted, and it is certainly characteristic. The philosopher, feeling his pulse, as it were, to make sure that he is not angry, while his slave is being lashed, is an interesting and suggestive picture, which it is well to remember.

How long Plutarch lived we do not know. He refers to events of the year 104 or 105, and in his Solon he speaks of Athens and Plato each having an unfinished masterpiece, so that he cannot have known of the intention of the Emperor Hadrian to finish the temple of Zeus Olympics.[[312 - Solon, 32.]] All that this need imply is that the Solon was written before 125 A.D. As to his death, it is certainly interesting when we recall how full of dreams and portents his Biographies are, to learn from Artemidorus' great work on the Interpretation of Dreams (written some forty years later) that Plutarch, when ill, dreamed that he was ascending to heaven, supported by Hermes. Next day he was told that this meant great happiness. "Shortly after he died, and this was what his dream and the interpretation meant. For ascent to heaven means destruction to a sick man, and the great happiness is a sign of death."[[313 - Artemidorus, Oneirocritica, iv, 72. On this author see chapter vii.]] Plutarch might well have accepted this himself.

Such was Plutarch's life – the life of a quiet and simple-minded Greek gentleman, spent amid scenes where the past predominated over the present, —nullum sine nomine saxum, where Antiquity claimed him for her own by every right that it has ever had upon man. The land of his fathers, the literature, the art, the philosophy, the faith, and the reproduction of the good old life in the pleasant household[[314 - See non suaviter, 17, 1098 D, on the unspeakably rich joy of such a life of friendly relations with gods and men.]] – everything conspired to make him what he was. We now come to his significance in the story of the conflict of religions in the Roman Empire.

Plutarch not a philosopher

A good deal has been written about Plutarch's philosophy. His works are full of references to philosophy and philosophers, and he leaves us in no doubt as to his counting himself a disciple of Plato; his commentaries on Platonic doctrines give him a place in the long series of Plato's expositors. But no one would expect a writer of the first century to be a man of one allegiance, and Plutarch modifies the teaching of Plato with elements from elsewhere. It has then been debated whether he should, or should not, be called an Eclectic, but not very profitably. The essential thing to note is that he is not properly a philosopher at all, much as the statement would have astonished him.[[315 - Progress in Virtue, 4, 77 C, Love of Philosophy compared to a lover's passion, to "hunger and thirst."]] His real interest is elsewhere; and while he, like the Greeks of his day, read and talked Philosophy interminably, as men in later ages have read and talked Theology, it was not with the philosophic spirit. Philosophy is not the mistress – rather, he avows, the servant of something else; and that means that it is not Philosophy. His test of philosophic thought and doctrine was availability for the moral and religious life – a test which may or may not be sound, as it is applied. But Plutarch was an avowed moralist, didactic in every fibre; and everything he wrote betrays the essential failure of the practical man and the moralist – impatience, the short view. From his experience of human life in its manifold relations of love and friendship, he came to the conclusion that "the ancient faith of our fathers suffices." It is also plain that he was afraid of life without religion. So far as a man of his training would – a man familiar with the history of philosophy, but without patience or depth enough to be clear in his own mind, he associated truth with his religion; at all events it was "sufficient," for this he had found in his course through the world. Definite upon this one central point, he approached philosophy, but not with the true philosopher's purpose of examining his experience, in accordance with the Platonic suggestion[[316 - Plato, Apology, 38 A, ho dè anexétastos bíos ou biôtos anthrópô.]]; rather, with the more practical aim of profiting by every serviceable thought or maxim which he could find. And he certainly profited. If he started with preconceptions, which he intended to keep, he enlarged and purified them – in a sense, we may say, he adorned and enriched them. For whereever he found a moving or suggestive idea, a high thought, he adopted it and found it a place in his mind, though without inquiring too closely whether it had any right to be there. In the end, it is very questionable whether the sum of his ideas will hold together at all, if we go beyond the quick test of a rather unexamined experience. We have already seen how he protested against too curious examination. "There is no philosophy possible," wrote John Stuart Mill, "where fear of consequences is a stronger principle than love of truth."

But to such criticisms a reply is sometimes suggested, which is best made in the well-known words of Pascal – "the heart has its reasons which the reason does not know."[[317 - Pensées, Art. xxiv, 5.]] The experience which led Plutarch to his conclusion was real and sound. There is an evidential value in a good father, in wife and children – even in a telearchy with its tiles and cement – which is apt to be under-estimated. For with such elements in life are linked passions and emotions, which are deeply bound up with human nature, and rule us as instincts – blind reasons of the heart. Like all other things they require study and criticism if they are not to mislead, and those who most follow them are sometimes the worst judges of their real significance. On the other hand the danger of emotion, instinct and intuition as guides to truth is emphasized enough, – it was emphasized by the Stoics; and a contribution is made to human progress, when the value of these guides to truth is re-asserted, even to the extent of obvious exaggeration, by some one, who, like Plutarch, has had a life rich in various human experience. It remains however, in Plutarch's case as in all such cases, the fundamental question, whether the supposed testimony of instinct and intuition is confirmed. If it is not confirmed, it may be taken to have been misunderstood.

Keeping the whole life of this man in view, and realizing its soundness, its sweetness and its worth, we must see what he made of the spiritual environment of man's life in general – laying stress on what in his system, or his attempt at a system, is most significant, and postponing criticism. It should be said once for all that a general statement of Plutarch's views cannot be quite faithful, for he was a man of many and wandering thoughts, and also something of an Academic; and whatever he affirmed was with qualifications, which in a short summary must be understood rather than repeated.

The knowledge of God

Our knowledge of God and of things divine comes to us, according to Plutarch, from various sources. There is the consensus of mankind. "Of all customs first and greatest is belief in gods. Lycurgus, Numa, Ion and Deucalion, alike sanctified men, by prayers and oaths and divinations and oracles bringing them into touch with the divine in their hopes and fears. You might find communities without walls, without letters, without kings, without houses, without money, with no need of coinage, without acquaintance with theatres and gymnasia; but a community without holy rite, without a god, that uses not prayer nor oath, nor divination, nor sacrifice to win good or avert evil – no man ever saw nor will see… This is what holds all society together and is the foundation and buttress of all law."[[318 - Adv. Coloten (foe Epicurean), 31, 1125 D, E. For this argument from consensus, see Seneca, Ep. 117, 6, Multum dare solemus præsumptioni omnium hominum et apud nos veritatis argumentum est aliquid omnibus videri: tanquam deos esse inter alia hoc colligimus, quod omnibus insita de dis opinio est, nee ulla gens usquam est adeo extra leges moresque projecta ut non aliquos deos credat. This consensus rests (with the Stoics) on the common preconceptions of the mind, which are natural. For ridicule of the doctrine of consensus, see Lucian, Zeus Tragædus, 42.]]

This evidence from the consensus of mankind is brought to a higher point in the body of myth inherited from the past, and in custom and law – and is so far confirmed by reason. But we can go further and appeal to the highest and best minds of antiquity, who in their own highest moments of inspiration confirmed the common view. "In the matter of belief in gods, and in general, our guides and teachers have been the poets and the lawgivers, and, thirdly, the philosophers – all alike laying down that there are gods, though differing among themselves as to the number of the gods and their order, their nature and function. Those of the philosophers are free from pain and death; toil they know not, and are clean escaped the roaring surge of Acheron."[[319 - Amatorius, 18, 763 C. Cf. view of Celsus ap. Orig. c. Cels. vii, 41.]] "It is likely that the word of ancient poets and philosophers is true," he says.[[320 - Consol. ad Apoll. 34, 120 B.]] Plutarch was a lover of poetry and of literature, and he attributed to them a value as evidence to truth, which is little intelligible to men who have not the same passion.[[321 - Quomodo Poetas, 1, 15 E, F, poetry a preliminary study to philosophy, prophilosophêtéon toîs poiémasin.]] Still the appeal to the poets in this connexion was very commonly made.

But men are not only dependent on the tradition of their fathers and the inspiration of poets and philosophers, much as they should, and do, love and honour these. The gods make themselves felt in many ways. There was abundant evidence of this in many established cases of theolepsy, enthusiasm (éntheos) and possession. Again there were the oracles, in which it was clear that gods communicated with men and revealed truths not otherwise to be gained – a clear demonstration of the spiritual. Men were "in anguish and fear lest Delphi should lose its glory of three thousand years," but Delphi has not failed; for "the language of the Pythian priestess, like the right line of the Mathematicians – the shortest between two points, makes neither declension nor winding, has neither double meaning nor ambiguity, but goes straight to the truth. Though hard to believe and much tested, she has never up to now been convicted of error, – on the contrary she has filled the shrine with offerings and gifts from barbarians and Greeks, and adorned it with the beautiful buildings of the Amphictyons."[[322 - de Pyth. orac. 29, 408 F. Cf. the pagan's speech in Minucius Felix, 7, 6, pleni et mixti deo vates futura præcerpunt … etiam per guietem deos videmus…]] The revival of Delphi in Plutarch's day, "in so short a time," was not man's doing – but "the God came here and inspired the oracle with his divinity." And Delphi was not the only oracle. The Stoics perhaps had pointed the way here with their teaching on divination, but as it stands the argument (such as it is) is said to be Plutarch's own.[[323 - So Volkmann, Plutarch, ii, 290 n. Cf. a passage of Celsus, Orig. c. Cels. viii, 45.]] Lastly in this connexion, the mysteries offered evidence, but here he is reticent. "As to the mysteries, in which we may receive the greatest manifestations and illuminations of the truth concerning dæmons – like Herodotus, I say, 'Be it unspoken.'"[[324 - de def. or. 14, 417 C, empháseis and diapháseis.]]

Absolute being

Philosophy, poetry, tradition, oracles and mysteries[[325 - Tertullian sums up the pagan line of argument and adds a telling criticism in his book adversus Nationes, ii, 1: adversus hæc igitur nobis negotium est, adversus institutiones maiorum, auctoritates receptorum, leges dominantium, argumentationes prudentium, adversus vetustatem consuetudinem necessitatem, adversus exempla prodigia miracula, quæ omnia adulterinam istam divinitatem corroboraverint… Maior in huiusmodi penes vos auctoritas litterarum quam rerum est.]] bring Plutarch to belief in gods. "There are not Greek gods and barbarian, southern or northern; but just as sun, moon, sky, earth and sea are common to all men and have many names, so likewise it is one Reason that makes all these things a cosmos; it is one Providence that cares for them, with ancillary powers appointed to all things; while in different people, different honours and names are given to them as customs vary. Some use hallowed symbols that are faint, others symbols more clear, as they guide their thought to the divine."[[326 - de Iside, 67, 377 F-378 A]] This one ultimate Reason is described by Plutarch in terms borrowed from all the great teachers who had spoken to the Greeks of God. The Demiurge, the One and Absolute, the World-Soul and the rest all contribute features.[[327 - Oakesmith, Religion of Plutarch, p. 88 – a book which I have found of great use.]]

"We," he says, "have really no share in Being, but every mortal nature, set between becoming and perishing, offers but a show and a seeming of itself, dim and insecure"; and he quotes the famous saying of Heraclitus that it is impossible to descend into the same river twice, and develops the idea of change in the individual. "No one remains, nor is he one, but we become many as matter now gathers and now slips away about one phantasm and a common form (or impress)… Sense through ignorance of Being is deceived into thinking that the appearance is. What then indeed is Being? The eternal, free from becoming, free from perishing, for which no time brings change… It is even impious to say 'Was' or 'Will be' of Being; for these are the varyings and passings and changings of that which by nature cannot abide in Being. But God is, we must say, and that not in time, but in the æon that knows no motion, time or variation, where is neither former nor latter, future nor past, older nor younger; but God is one, and with one Now he has filled Always, and is alone therein the one that Is."[[328 - de E. 18-20. Cf. Clem. Alex. Protr. 84. The true To-day of God is eternity. Also Tert. ad Natt. ii, 6, on the axiom of no change in God.]]