693 



PLUTARCHUS. 



PLUTARCHUS. 



891 



In the following June however he was elevated to the post of lord chief- 

 justice of the common pleas in Ireland, and created a peer of the United 

 Kingdom. He held the chief-justiceship for three years, and resigned 

 it at the downfal of the Wellington administration. His judicial career 

 was not marked by any great brilliancy or success, which indeed there 

 were no remarkable or stirring events to call forth. But it was other- 

 wise in the English House of Lords, where he sat by the Duke of 

 Wellington, at his Grace's especial request, to advise with him at every 

 step of the Roman Catholic Emancipation Bill, of which he 'took 

 charge ' in its passage through the Upper House. 



With the passing of this measure the political career of Lord 

 Plunkett may be said to have closed, though he was appointed Lord 

 Chancellor of Ireland by the ministry of Earl Grey at the close of 

 1830. This post he occupied for eleven years, with the brief interval 

 of a few months in 1834-35, during which the seals were held by Sir 

 Edward Sugden (now Lord St. Leonards). He ultimately only 

 resigned the chancellorship a few months before the removal of the 

 Liberal administration of Lord Melbourne from office in 1841, when 

 he was induced to resign in order to make way for Lord Campbell. 

 During his later years Lord Plunkett had almost wholly retired from 

 political life, aud indeed for several years before his death he had not 

 come over to England to take his seat in the House of Lords, but 

 spent his declining days in the enjoyment of the society of his family 

 and private friends, at his country villa near Bray, where he died on 

 the 4th of January 1854. His eldest son, now second Lord Plunkett, 

 is also Bishop of Tuatn. 



On the whole, nature was bountiful to Lord Plunkett, and accident 

 favoured him at almost every step of his long and brilliant career. He 

 was sixty-six years of age when he took his seat in the Irish Court of 

 Chancery, and it coull scarcely be expected that as chancellor he could 

 add much to his previous fame. His reputation shot upwards from a 

 narrow ground-work. His speeches were at once few and famous; 

 they excited the unqualified applause of his contemporaries, and his 

 name is still foremost among the orators of the 19th century. But 

 the great principles of legislation, which men seek and find in the 

 speeches of Pitt and Burke, are seldom met with in the startling 

 orations of Lord Plunkett. He could hardly be called a statesman 

 scarcely even a sound or experienced practical politician ; and there 

 were abler judges and more learned men than himself among his 

 brethren on the Irish bench, though probably there were none of 

 equal powers of native eloquence. 



PLUTARCHUS was a native of Chsoronea in Bcootia, The time of 

 his birth is uncertain, and can only be approximately ascertained from 

 the circumstance stated by himself, that he studied philosophy under 

 Ammonius at Delphi, at the time when Nero was making his progress 

 through Greece, which was in the twelfth year of the emperor's reign, 

 or A.D. 63. The family of Plutarch was one of some consideration in 

 Chicronea, and had held the chief offices in that city. He has not 

 mentioned hU father's name in his extant works. He had two 

 brothers, Timon and Lamprias, to whom he was much attached. 

 When a young man, he was sent with another person on a mission to 

 the proconsul of the province ; his companion wax from some cause 

 left behind, aud Plutarch executed the business himself. 



It has sometimes been asserted that Plutarch visited Egypt, but 

 there is no authority for this assertion, and such a conclusion cannot 

 be drawn, aa it sometimes has been, from such slender premises as are 

 furnished by the fact of his writing an essay on Isis and Osiris. 

 Plutarch visited Italy and Koine, perhaps more than once, and he 

 spent some time there, as appears from his own writings (' Life of 

 Demosthenes,' c. 2) ; but be did not learn the Latin language in Italy, 

 according to his own account, and the reason that he gives for not 

 then learning it is a curious one : " he had so many public commis- 

 sions, and so many people came to him to receive his instruction in 

 philosophy." " It was therefore," he adds, " not till a late period in 

 life that I began to read the Latin writers." It appears clearly 

 enough from his own writings that he never thoroughly mastered the 

 Latin language, and was very imperfectly acquainted with the ancient 

 institutions which formed the groundwork of the Roman polity and 

 the Roman character. It has been conjectured with reasonable proba- 

 bility that his moral writings contain much of the matter which he 

 delivered in his public lectures in Italy. He wrote his ' Life of 

 Demosthenes ' at Chacrom a, after he had visited Rome ; but whether 

 he wrote any of his Lives during his long residence in Rome is uncer- 

 tain. It may bo that they are the work of bis old age, and that all of 

 them were written or finished in his native city. 



It is generally said that Plutarch was the preceptor of Trajan, and 

 raised by him to the consular rank ; but these facts rest on the 

 assertion of Suidas (nxouropxos), and on an extant letter addressed 

 to Trajan, which is attributed to Plutarch. But the letter to Trajan, 

 which is attributed to Plutarch, bears conclusive internal testimony 

 of being a fabrication. Besides this, it only exists in Latin, and in the 

 ' Pulicraticus' of John of Salisbury; the Greek original has never 

 been produced, and it is not known where John found this letter. 

 Plutarch seems to have enjoyed considerable distinction at Rome, 

 and his lectures, which of course were delivered in the Greek lan- 

 guage, were attended by most of those who affected philosophy. His 

 lecture* were given as early as the reign of Domitian, or perhaps even 

 in the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, aa we learn from a curious anec- 



dote of his own (?rep! iro\iwpa7 l uo<rw'j)?, c. 15) ; and he enjoyed the 

 friendship of several distinguished Romans, as Arulenus Rusticus, 

 whom Domitian put to death (Tacit., 'Agr.,' 2), and Sossius Senecio, 

 a man of consular rank, whom he addresses in the introduction to the 

 Life of Theseus, and elsewhere in his writings. Among his contem- 

 poraries at Rome were Persius, Lucan, the younger Pliny, Martial, 

 Quiutilian, and others, but none of them have made any mention of 

 Plutarch, though he must have been known to them. Sossius Senecio, 

 one of his intimate friends, was also a friend of the younger Pliny, 

 who addresses him in his Letters. He retired to Chocronea in the 

 decline of his life, where he appears to have lived in comfort. He 

 faithfully discharged various magisterial offices in his native town, 

 and he had also the honour and emoluments of a priesthood. 



Plutarch had a wife, Timoxena, to whom he was tenderly attached, 

 and four sons, aud a daughter, Timoxena. Two of his sons died before 

 him, and he lost his daughter while an infant. It was on the occasion 

 of this child's death that he wrote that affectionate letter of consola- 

 tion, full of good sense, in which he has perpetuated the virtues and 

 fortitude of a most exemplary wife and mother. The time and cir- 

 cumstances of Plutarch's death are unknown, and indeed the events 

 of his life, as will appear from this sketch, are imperfectly ascertained ; 

 but the character of the man is as familiar to us from his own writings 

 as if we possessed the most elaborate biography of him. 



The great work of Plutarch is his ' Parallel Lives ' (Bioi napaAArjAoi), 

 which contains the biography of forty-six distinguished Greeks and 

 Romans, besides the Lives of Artaxerxes Mneinou, Aratus, Galba, 

 Otho, and Homer, which last is probably not by him. The forty-six 

 Lives are arranged in pairs or sets, each of which contains a Greek 

 and a Roman, and the two lives in each pair are followed by a com- 

 parison of the characters of the two persons. These Lives are 

 Theseus and Romulus, Lycurgus and Numn, Solon and Valerius Pub- 

 licola, Themistocles and Camillus, Pericles and Fabius Maximus, 

 Alcibiades and Coriolanus, Timoleon and -tEmilius Paulus, Pelopidas 

 and Marcellus, Aristides and Cato Major, Philopcemeu and Flamininus, 

 Pyrrhus and Marius, Lysander and Sulla, Cimon aud Lucullus, Kiciaa 

 and Crassus, Eumenes and Sertorius, Agesilaus and Pompcius, Alexander 

 the Great and Julius Ctesar, Phocion and Cato Minor, Agis and Cleo- 

 menes and the two Gracchi, Demosthenes and Cicero, Demetrius 

 Poliorcetee and M. Antonius, Dion and M. .Brutus. The biographies 

 of Epamiuondas, Scipio, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, 

 Vitellius, Hesiod, Pindar, Crates the Cynic, Diophantus, Aristomeues, 

 and the poet Aratus, are lost. 



Plutarch's son Lamprias made a list of his father's works, which is 

 partly preserved, and printed in the'BibliothecaGraeca' of Fabricius. 



In the department of biography, Plutarch is the only writer of 

 antiquity who has established a lasting reputation. Tho plan of his 

 biographies is briefly explained by himself in the introduction to the 

 ' Life of Alexander the Great,' where jie makes an apology for the 

 brevity with which he is compelled to treat of the numerous events in 

 the lives of Alexander and Caesar. '' For," he says, " I do not write 

 histories, but lives ; nor do the most conspicuous acts of necessity 

 exhibit a man's virtue or his vice, but oftentimes some slight circum- 

 stance, a word or a jest, shows a man's character better than battles 

 with the slaughter of tens of thousands, and the greatest arrays of 

 armies and sieges of cities. Now, as painters produce a likeness by a 

 representation of the countenance and the expression of the eyes, 

 without troubling themselves about the other parts of the body, so I 

 must be allowed to look rather into the signs of a man's character, 

 and thus give a portrait of his life, leaving others to describe great 

 events and battles." The object then of Plutarch in hh biographies 

 was a moral end, and the exhibition of the principal events of a man's 

 life was subordinate to this his main design; and though he may not 

 always have adhered to the principle which he laid down, it cannot be 

 denied that his view of what biography should be is much more exact 

 than that of most persons who have attempted this style of composition. 

 The life of a statesman or of a general, when written with the view of 

 giving a complete history of all the public events in which he was 

 engaged, is not biography, but history. This extract from Plutarch 

 will also in some measure be an apology for the want of historical 

 order observable in many of the lives. Though altogether deficient in 

 that critical sagacity which discerns truth from falsehood, and disen- 

 tangles the intricacies of confused and conflicting statements, Plutaich 

 has preserved in his ' Lives ' a vast number of facts which would 

 otherwise have been unknown to us. He was a great reader, aud must 

 have had access to large libraries. It is said that he quotes two 

 hundred and fifty writers, a great part of whose works are now 

 entirely lost. 



There are two purposes for which the ' Lives ' of Plutarch may be 

 read. We may read them for the pleasure of the perusal, which arises 

 from a conviction of the integrity of the writer, and his graphic repre- 

 sentations, his benevoleat disposition, and the moral end which he 

 always keeps before him. We may also read them for the purpose of 

 a critical investigation into the facts which he has recorded, and for 

 the purpose of supplying from him the defects of other ancient 

 authorities. With this latter object we must institute a searching 

 inquiry into the authorities for the several lives, which vary greatly 

 in value ; and above all we must be careful in reading his lives of the 

 Romans not to be misled by any notions that he had formed of the 



