- 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
Should we Imitate Plutarch’s Heroes?
Should we Imitate Plutarch’s Heroes?
- Chapter:
- (p.331) 23 Should we Imitate Plutarch’s Heroes?
- Source:
- Plutarch and his Roman Readers
- Author(s):
Philip A. Stadter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
The final chapter reviews Plutarch’s reporting of good and bad traits and decisions in the Lives. The Lives work with two basic principles of Plutarchan psychology: first, every person can improve by conscious effort, and second, no human is perfect. Examples from the lives of Pericles, Sulla, and Numa show the variety of human behaviour. Pericles has many strengths coupled with some weaknesses; Sulla is a great military commander, but is ruthlessly ambitious and often cruel; Numa presents an ideal of personal justice and devotion to the gods, but cannot pass on his virtues to the next generation. They demonstrate that if we first carefully evaluate the choices and behaviours of Plutarch heroes and the consequences which follow upon them, then thoughtfully choose what to imitate and what to avoid in political leadership, we may still both respond to Plutarch’s hopes for his own contemporary readers, Greek and Roman, and serve ourselves well.
Keywords: Plutarch, Pericles, Sulla, Numa, reader, contemporary, morals, leadership, politics, Parallel Lives
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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
