User:Ifly6/Parallel Lives (issues)
Reliability
[edit]Negative views of the historical reliability of Plutarch's narratives and anecdotes conveyed in Parallel Lives became widespread after the mid-19th century.[1][2][3] The Parallel Lives were mainly written for moralistic purposes – examples of the lives and principles of great men – rather than for conveyance of a factual historical narrative.[4] This meant that Plutarch's willingness to criticise and interrogate his sources was proportional to whether doing so would serve the purpose of that narrative.[5] That the Lives are one of the main sources for large portions of ancient history and contain references to now lost sources on which he relied, however, means that modern historians cannot but use them.[6]
His ability to evaluate evidence, for example, with reference to epigraphic evidence or author bias is substantial.[7] However, such evaluations are not always consistent in the Lives: when Plutarch wanted to emphasise Antony's immorality he readily availed himself to slanderous invectives from Cicero, even after rejecting the reliability of invective in another Life; anecdotal stories about Quintus Sertorius seeking out a magical Atlantic island or Antony's hatred of Octavian developing from board games are reproduced with little comment. Similarly, Plutarch accepts miracles surrounding the foundation of Rome on the basis only that Rome's success in his day showed that Rome must have been founded with divine succour.[8]
Events are also hidden or reordered to promote certain narratives: Antony's time in Gaul with Caesar is ignored in service of painting Antony as passive; events early in Caesar's civil war retold in the Lives of Caesar, Pompey, Antony, and Cato are all described inconsistently to further each biography's narrative even though they were written at largely the same time.[9][10] Events are also moved around in various Lives to streamline descriptions and make them easier to describe even if they did not occur in the order Plutarch presented.[11] More problematically, Plutarch fabricates details when sources are sources were feeble: he added details in the Life of Coriolanus,[12] and similarly embellished the story of Publius Clodius Pulcher's at the Bona Dea (62 BC) in the Life of Caesar with "picturesque details absent" from that of Cicero.[13]
While Plutarch, in his essay On Herodotus' malice criticised Herodotus for failing to live up to certain gentlemanly expectations for historical writing that were prevalent in ancient times, Plutarch commits many of the same sins for historical personages he disliked. While he criticised Herodotus' use of assertion without evidence, failure to give benefits of the doubt, and preterition (bringing up unsavoury details just to dismiss them), there are multiple examples of such passages in Plutarch's Lives of Antony, Cleon, Sulla, and Marius.[14]
References
[edit]- ^ Hurst, Isobel (2019). "Plutarch and the Victorians". In Xenophontos, Sophia; Oikonomopoulou, Katerina (eds.). Brill's Companion to the reception of Plutarch. Brill. pp. 563–572. ISBN 978-90-04-40944-6. Retrieved 2024-08-04.
To scholars he was an enjoyable but unreliable historian... decline of Plutarch's reputation in the 19th century... as [his] inaccuracies and secondhand knowledge were attacked by [historians of ancient history]... regarded as a 'corrupt and misleading collector of other sources'
- ^ Titchener, Frances B; Zadorojnyi, Alexei V, eds. (2023). "Introduction". Cambridge Companion to Plutarch. Cambridge University Press. p. 7. ISBN 978-0-521-76622-7.
The downturn [in Plutarch's popularity and reputation] happened around the middle of the nineteenth century, when scholars of antiquity stopped seeing [him] as a reliable informant, while for the wider reading public his moralism... felt increasingly alien and outdated
- ^ McGushin, Patrick (1993). Ancient History Resources for Teachers. 23 (23): 167ff.
Plutarch was inaccurate and unreliable in his historical work, Parallel Lives...
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: untitled periodical (link) - ^ Schettino 2014, p. 417.
- ^ Pelling 2002, p. 148. "Plutarch is quite good at historical argumentation when he wants to be ... When his mind is not fundamentally concentrated on the history, his standards of criticism tend to relax ... When he comes to discuss less 'historical' areas or people [anecdotes and legendary characters (eg Romulus)]... he can be much less critical [and] perpetrate much more precarious arguments".
- ^ Schettino 2014, pp. 418–19.
- ^ Pelling 2002, pp. 144, praising Plutarch's use of epigraphic evidence that a monument is anachronistic to justify belief that Aristides did not come from wealth, 145–46, approving of Plutarch's discounting of invectives as evidence.
- ^ Pelling 2002, pp. 148–49.
- ^ Pelling 2002, pp. 154–55.
- ^ Eg Pelling 1980, p. 128, discussing Plutarch's transposition of Cato's proposal to send Caesar to the Germans in chains from the correct place in 55 BC – in Caes., 22.4–5, – to the wrong place (49 BC) in Cat. min., 51.
- ^ Eg Pelling 1980, p. 128, describing two cases:
- Pomp. places the embarrassing episode with Caesar and Lucius Caecilius Metellus in front of the treasury before Caesar pursues Pompey to Brundisium. Caes. places it – correctly – after that pursuit, since it is following Caesar's journey in more detail.
- Caes. condenses Caesar's youthful travels in the Greek East to a single trip – contra Suetonius – to make it appear that lessons in the Greek East developed Caesar's rhetorical skills, something not implied by the actual ordering.
- ^ Pelling 1980, p. 129, citing Russell, D A (1963). "Plutarch's Life of Coriolanus". Journal of Roman Studies. 53: 21–28. doi:10.2307/298361. ISSN 0075-4358. JSTOR 298361.
- ^ Pelling 1980, p. 129. "[A]lso visible [is] the expansion [emphasis in original] of inadequate material, normally by the fabrication of circumstantial detail".
- ^ Pelling 2002, pp. 150–51. Further examples discussed in Chrysanthou, Chrysanthos S (2020). "Plutarch and the "malicious" historian". Illinois Classical Studies. 45 (1): 49–79. ISSN 2328-5265.
Bibliography
[edit]- Pelling, C. B. R. (1980). "Plutarch's adaptation of his source-material". Journal of Hellenic Studies. 100: 127–140. doi:10.2307/630736. ISSN 0075-4269. JSTOR 630736. Republished as Pelling 2002, Ch. 4.
- Pelling, Christopher (2002). Plutarch and history: eighteen studies. Classical Press of Wales. ISBN 978-1-905125-53-1. JSTOR j.ctvvnbp5.
- Schettino, Maria Teresa (2014). "The Use of Historical Sources". In Beck, Mark (ed.). A companion to Plutarch. Wiley. pp. 417–36. doi:10.1002/9781118316450. ISBN 978-1-4051-9431-0.