- Title Pages
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Friends or Patrons?
- 2 Plutarch’s <i>Lives</i> and Their Roman Readers
- 3 Revisiting Plutarch’s Lives of the Caesars
- 4 Plutarch
- 5 Plutarch and Apollo of Delphi
- 6 Drinking, <i>Table Talk</i>, and Plutarch’s Contemporaries
- 7 Leading the Party, Leading the City
- 8 Before Pen Touched Paper
- 9 Plutarch’s Latin Reading
- 10 Plutarchan Prosopography
- 11 Plutarch and Trajanic Ideology
- 12 The Justice of Trajan in Pliny <i>Epistles</i> 10 and Plutarch
- 13 Plutarch’s Alexandrias
- 14 The Philosopher’s Ambition
- 15 Plutarch’s Lives
- 16 The Rhetoric of Virtue in Plutarch’s <i>Lives</i>
- 17 Paidagôgia pros to theion
- 18 Paradoxical Paradigms
- 19 Competition and its Costs
- 20 Parallels in Three Dimensions
- 21 Cato the Younger in the English Enlightenment
- 22 Alexander Hamilton’s Notes on Plutarch in His Paybook
- 23 Should we Imitate Plutarch’s Heroes?
- Bibliography
- Index of Plutarchan Passages
- Index of non-Plutarchan Passages
- Index of Names
- Index of Topics
The Philosopher’s Ambition
The Philosopher’s Ambition
Plutarch, Arrian, and Marcus Aurelius
- Chapter:
- (p.199) 14 The Philosopher’s Ambition
- Source:
- Plutarch and his Roman Readers
- Author(s):
Philip A. Stadter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
This chapter singles out three men from the second century AD who exalted the ideal of the philosopher ruler, and who themselves were honoured as philosophers: Plutarch, Arrian, and Marcus Aurelius. Their ambitions clearly combined the abstract and the practical, a desire to do what was right and noble and to be honoured for doing so. Yet that pursuit of honour, that philotimia, gave birth to inner tensions and contradictory desires that tended to destabilize their philosophic world-view. In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius shows that he was troubled by a desire for fame which he knew to be useless, and by the emptiness of death: he longed for a guarantee that the gods would bless him after death and his fame would continue. Arrian too was driven by a desire for glory, while hoping to benefit others. Plutarch’s ambition was to accept Plato’s challenge and educate the political elite, from which he too hoped to win honour.
Keywords: Plutarch, Arrian, Marcus Aurelius, philosopher, ambition, philotimia, honour, leader, Meditations
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- Title Pages
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Friends or Patrons?
- 2 Plutarch’s <i>Lives</i> and Their Roman Readers
- 3 Revisiting Plutarch’s Lives of the Caesars
- 4 Plutarch
- 5 Plutarch and Apollo of Delphi
- 6 Drinking, <i>Table Talk</i>, and Plutarch’s Contemporaries
- 7 Leading the Party, Leading the City
- 8 Before Pen Touched Paper
- 9 Plutarch’s Latin Reading
- 10 Plutarchan Prosopography
- 11 Plutarch and Trajanic Ideology
- 12 The Justice of Trajan in Pliny <i>Epistles</i> 10 and Plutarch
- 13 Plutarch’s Alexandrias
- 14 The Philosopher’s Ambition
- 15 Plutarch’s Lives
- 16 The Rhetoric of Virtue in Plutarch’s <i>Lives</i>
- 17 Paidagôgia pros to theion
- 18 Paradoxical Paradigms
- 19 Competition and its Costs
- 20 Parallels in Three Dimensions
- 21 Cato the Younger in the English Enlightenment
- 22 Alexander Hamilton’s Notes on Plutarch in His Paybook
- 23 Should we Imitate Plutarch’s Heroes?
- Bibliography
- Index of Plutarchan Passages
- Index of non-Plutarchan Passages
- Index of Names
- Index of Topics
