- 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
Paidagôgia pros to theion
Paidagôgia pros to theion
Plutarch’s Numa
- Chapter:
- (p.246) 17 Paidagôgia pros to theion
- Source:
- Plutarch and his Roman Readers
- Author(s):
Philip A. Stadter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
This chapter looks at how Plutarch draws Numa as a philosopher-king who uses religion to awe and control his fierce Roman subjects, creating for a brief moment a land of peace and harmony before the surge of war and continuous expansion which would make Rome a world power. Plutarch argues that the gods love all that is virtuous in man, that a proper attention to the gods is a sign of virtue, and that a pious ruler inspires his people to follow his example and is a source of peace. The many references to Roman religion reinforce Plutarch’s account of the king’s use of religion to tame the Romans. The discussion of the pontifex maximus has direct relevance to Domitian’s reign. Numa’s virtue embodied the principles of Greek, and especially Platonic, philosophy, and could serve as an ideal model, hardly imitable, for Plutarch’s contemporary readers.
Keywords: Plutarch, Parallel Lives, Numa, religion, pontifex, peace, virtue, readers, philosophy, war, Domitian
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
- 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
