The moral influence which Plutarch exerts over posterity is of a very peculiar kind. He has not, like Aristotle, laid down the law to an entire world for nearly two thousand years. He has not been deemed so perfect a master of style as Virgil or Cicero, who were the models, first of the Benedictines, and then of the prose writers and poets of the humanitarian school. His reputation pales by the side of the brilliant fame which the resurrected Plato enjoyed during the fifteenth century; and yet he has done what all these immortals, whose authority far surpasses in extent and duration that of his biographies, have failed to do. Among the revived ancient authors none has surpassed Plutarch in inspiring the moderns with the same keen appreciation of the classic characteristics, with the same love and enthusiasm for whatever is really or supposedly great in antiquity; and none has therefore contributed so much to the revelation of what we understand by the purely human in man's nature.

From the days of Macchiavelli and Charles V. down to the present, we rarely fail to meet with the name of Plutarch among those writers who have made an abiding impression on the youthful minds of prominent statesmen and warriors. In turning over the leaves of the biographies of our modern great, we are constantly reminded of the words which Schiller puts into the mouth of Carl Moor: "When I read of the great men in my Plutarch, I loath our ink-staining age." This sentiment has found an echo in every civilized land, and especially in France.

The first French translation of Plutarch's Parallels was welcomed by Montaigne with expressions of the liveliest joy. "We would have been swallowed up in ignorance," exclaims he, (essay ii. 4,) "if this book had not extricated us from the slough; thanks to Plutarch, we now dare to speak and write." Rabelais refreshes his soul with the Moralia. "There is," writes the translator Amyot to King Charles IX., "no better work next to holy writ." The "perennially young" Plutarch is the "breviary," the "conscience" of the century, and he remains until the beginning of the most modern time—as Madame Roland calls him—"the pasture of great souls," and the "fellow-companion of warriors." CondÉ had him read out aloud in his tent, and in the historical part of the books for a camp library which Napoleon Bonaparte ordered from the citoyen J. B. Soy, "homme de lettres," March, 1798, Plutarch stands first, and Tacitus, Thucydides, and Frederick II. last.

The home of Plutarch's admirers is, as we have already observed, France. Like all Latin races, the French delight to revel in pictures of ancient greatness; their historical imagination is governed by fantastic ideals of antiquity, especially of ancient Rome, and the fountain from which they drew, mediately and immediately, their inspiration, is Plutarch's Lives. Hence the exaggerated estimate of Plutarch's historical merits, against which modern criticism begins to protest with much vigor, is greatest in that country. Indeed, the principle upon which Plutarch has selected his historical authorities, and the manner in which he has used them, are decidedly open to objection. They are not chosen according to their scientific or critical value, but according to their wealth of picturesque detail and psychologically remarkable characteristics. He follows a leading author, whose name he usually omits to state, and whose testimony he only compares with that of other writers when there is a conflict of authorities. The text is never cited. He reproduces the sense, but with that latitude which is natural to an imaginative mind endowed in an unusual degree with the gift of realizing the past. In the choice of his subject matter he follows the instincts of a historical portrait-painter. To describe campaigns, to analyze great political changes, is not his province. His acquaintance with the political and military systems of the ancient Greeks and Romans is very superficial, and he seems to care little for a more intimate knowledge of them. His main purpose is not the study of history, but that of the personal career of interesting individuals. "It is not histories we write," Plutarch tells us himself in his introduction to the life of Alexander the Great; "but life-pictures;" and for these, he maintains, some small trait, some apt expression, be it only a witticism, is often more available than the greatest military deeds, the most bloody victories, or the most splendid conquests.

In making this distinction, which Plutarch repeatedly acknowledges to be a rule with him, he forgets that he violates the natural connection, inasmuch as all historical personages are part and parcel of the time they live in; he forgets also that, thus treated, historical characters degenerate into ordinary mortals. But Plutarch does not aspire to the dignity of a historian; he simply claims to "paint souls;" and those readers who ignore this distinction have never comprehended him.

Some of the works which Plutarch was still able to consult are lost, and we depend, therefore, upon him for light on certain important periods of history. This has led many to regard him as a historical authority, to consider his biographical narratives as the main object of his writings, and to skip the moralizing comparisons of the parallel biographies which show that these portraits are to him nothing more than a means of illustrating his peculiar ethics by examples. This point is of great importance; for it proves the only view from which the literary character of Plutarch can be justly estimated.

Not only his narratives, but the judgments which he bases upon them, and the views of the world from which they spring, have left their mark on posterity, and this to an extent surprising even to the initiated. And here it behooves us to exercise still greater caution, a still greater distrust, than we entertain for his statements of fact. Plutarch stands as far removed from the times of the heroes upon whom he passes judgment, as we are from the characters of the Crusades. The full effects of this remoteness can only be estimated by those who have made Plutarch's age and the moral condition reflected in his non-historical writings their special study. "Plutarch's biographies," remarks a French scholar of this class, "are an explanatory appendix to his Moralia; both equally reflected a Greek provincialist's views of the world under the empire; the views of one who sought to console himself for the degradation and emptiness of the present by a romantic idealization of the real and imaginary grandeur of a former age." Plutarch is an out-and-out romancist, and to this must be mainly ascribed the influence he wields over a certain order of minds. The historical errors which we are so slowly correcting are due to this discovery. To show how little Plutarch was fit to play the part of interpreter to a period which had already become remote antiquity in his day, we need only cast a single glance at the times in which he lived.

From Plutarch's own writings we glean nothing that is authentic in regard to his life. Rich as they no doubt are in interesting contributions to the moral and intellectual history of his times, they are barren as regards every thing relating to the author's biography. In truth, the biographer of the ancients is himself without a biography. We know, in the main, that he was born in ChÆronea, about the time of Nero's visit to the Delphic temple; that he studied at Athens under the philosopher Ammonius; that he visited Greece, Egypt, and Italy as a peripatetic scholar. After having taught many years at Rome, he finally returned to his native place and commenced that prolific literary activity which he displayed in nearly all departments of ancient knowledge. In these labors the indefatigable student was rather assisted than retarded by his various public duties, first on the urban police, then as archon, and lastly as the high-priest of the Delphic Apollo.

The story that Plutarch was once the teacher of Trajan, and that the latter appointed him governor of Hellas and Illyricum, first told by Symkellas and Suidas, then repeated by John of Salisbury and the scholars of the Renaissance, is a silly Byzantine fable. The latter portion of Plutarch's life, as we learn from his confessions, passed in a retirement entirely inconsistent with the Byzantine story. The world within whose bounds the archon of ChÆronea and priest of Apollo lived was a contracted one, and only romance could gild such an existence with the halo of departed glory.

Plutarch may be said to have done wonders. At a time when the old love of country and state had long died out, he, the philosopher, determinedly opposed the petty, baneless cosmopolitanism of his day. In a world which had long lost its ancient faith, and in which the Gospel of Christ had not yet attained the ascendency, the priest of the Delphic oracle battled undismayed for the old gods and against the anarchy of the renegade schools of philosophy. In both cases he is, however, himself, and more than he seems aware or is willing to concede, tainted by the prevailing scepticism, and it is this, in consequence, which colors his own views of the world with what we call romanticism.

Let us follow Plutarch for a moment on those two battle-fields of his polemics, and observe the distinctive features of the Moralia.

The warm appreciation which he displays for every thing that is great in humanity or history is surprising when we remember the incredible hollowness of the surroundings amidst which his heroes were drawn, and the society in which he lived, not as a soured misanthrope, but as a stirring official. The petty ChÆronea was hardly the place to prepare the mind for the reception of great thoughts. The population of the municipality, though active and bustling, lived far from the great world. It had its share of orators, sophists, lecturers; it had party divisions to quicken the heart to love and hate; it had games to excite the passions and to stimulate ambition. But what were the questions which the people quarrelled about with all the readiness and vehemence proverbial of the Hellenic race? They were mainly where the best baths might be found; which party was most likely to triumph at the next dog or cock-fight; what kind of man the new official from Rome, or the next travelling sophist, would turn out to be; how such a one had made his fortune, or how Ismenodora, the wealthy widow, could have espoused an obscure man? These were the principal topics which the ChÆroneans of Plutarch's day discussed when they went to sleep at night, and resumed again on waking in the morning. And yet how dearly Plutarch loved this small, petty fatherland! How happy he appears to be that it should enjoy the golden peace which at last fell upon the world after the empire had put an end to the terrible civil wars! Under the iron rule of Rome all provinces once more breathed freely. Whatever imperialism meant at the capital, in the provinces it was still popular; and even under Domitian, as Suetonius assures us, the moderation and justice of the CÆsars was the theme of general praise. In contemporary Hellas, in the province of Achaia, the people appreciated these blessings, though they felt most painfully the loss of their former power and renown. Even the monuments of their ancient glory, which attracted annually crowds of strangers, became so many tombstones full of bitter memories, and the explanations of the garrulous guides must have sounded like reproaches in the ears of the degenerate race.

The policy which imperial Rome pursued toward the land from which she had received in the palmy days of her transition to a more refined culture the most admired models in science and art, and from which she obtained in the following centuries the best instructors, the most learned writers, and the most desirable nurses, was a strange compound of severe brutality and flattering caresses. When the great Germanicus, accompanied by a single lictor, reverentially entered the sacred precincts of Athens, and graciously listened to the vaunts of the rhetoricians on the splendor and glory of Greece, and when immediately afterward the brutal Piso descended on the city like a thunderbolt to remind the frightened provincials in a bullying manner that they were no longer Athenians, but the sweepings of nations, (conluvies nationum, Tac. Annal. iii. 54,) then this people learnt by abrupt changes how they stood in the regard of the Romans.

When the Greeks became the subjects of Rome, they were but too speedily taught what she meant by the "liberation of the oppressed." All the accustomed safeguards of the law were suspended at one sweep. No marriage contract, no negotiation, no purchase, no sale, between city and city, village and village, was binding unless ratified by special act of grace from Rome. All sources of prosperity, all public and private rights, passed into Roman hands. Nothing remained to the Greeks save the memory of their former prestige, and the old rivalry between the tribes and cities, which invariably burst out afresh whenever the emperor or one of his lieutenants favored one more than the other. So humiliating and painful were the results of this state of things, that even such a zealous local patriot as Plutarch advises the people, in his pocket oracle for embryo statesmen, to forget the unfortunate words Marathon, PlatÆa, and Eurymedon. And yet the same Plutarch is so thoroughly Boeotian, that he cannot prevail on himself to forgive the "father of history" the malicious candor with which he relates the bad conduct of the Thebans in the Persian war.

ChÆronea, the home of Plutarch, ranked among the most favored cities of the empire, being a municipium, or free city, under the protectorate of Rome, but governed in accordance with its ancient laws by officers elected by the people. Plutarch gives us a very interesting picture of the local administration. His political precepts, and his treatise on the part which it behooves an old man to play in the state, thoroughly enlighten us on all these points. The municipal officers, though merely honorary and unsalaried, were as much an object of contention as in former days when they were lucrative. The candidates were often obliged to make extraordinary exertions for popular support; they erected public edifices; endowed schools and temples; built libraries, aqueducts, baths; distributed bread, money, and cakes; got up games and feasts, and many wealthy men were thus ruined by their ambition. The benefits secured by public office were exemption from local taxation, precedence at the theatres and games, the erection of busts, statues, inscriptions, and pictures; and, after the expiration of office, perhaps promotion in the imperial service.

In addition to the expenses incident to such a canvass, the candidates, if not of low extraction and mean spirit, had to give up many prejudices which must have greatly hurt the pride of every true Greek. Plutarch fully explains in his political precepts what a patriot might expect in those days on entering the public service.

"Whatever position," he tells his young countrymen, "you may attain, never forget that the time is past when a statesman can say to himself with Pericles on putting on the chlamys, Remember that thou presidest over a free people, over Hellenes, or Athenians. Rather remember that though thou hast subjects, thou thyself art a subject. Thou rulest over a conquered people, under imperial lieutenants. Thou must therefore wear thy chlamys modestly; thou must keep an eye on the judgment seat of the proconsul, and never lose sight of the sandals above thy crown. Thou must act like the player, who assumes the attitudes prescribed in his part, and, turning his ear toward the prompter, makes no mien, motion, or sound but such as he is ordered."

Even the officials of this free city were therefore only puppets, whose functions presented no temptation to the ambitious. All that was left to the local government were the inferior market and street police, the care of the local security and order, and a partial participation in the apportionment of the imperial taxes. But while there was nothing to stimulate the ambition of the ChÆroneans, the system had a tendency to promote sycophancy. The subordinate officials entirely ceased to think and act independently, and applied to the emperor in person for directions on the veriest trifles, especially when the ruler seemed inclined to encourage this spirit of subserviency. Such an emperor was Trajan, admired by Pliny for his untiring activity, which led him to meddle with every thing. He took up his pen to defend the exchange of two soldiers, to decree the removal of a dead man's ashes, and to assign an athlete's reward. Pliny, his lieutenant, ruled Bithynia like an automaton. In Prusa, Nicodemia, Nicea, not a man, not a sesterce, not a stone, was suffered to change its place without the imperial sanction. The selection of a surveyor was made a question of state. The emperor seems finally to have found the work too much for him; for he writes on one occasion to his lieutenant: "Thou art on the spot, must know the situation, and shouldst determine accordingly." In the correspondence of these two men can be traced the corruption which gradually seized and overwhelmed rulers and ruled in the Roman empire on the inclined plane of a rapidly spreading super-civilization.

It is greatly to the honor of Plutarch that he condemns this mischievous tendency. He does not find fault with it for the political reasons which would lead us to oppose a paralyzing centralization, but for the sake of the manly dignity, the moral self-respect, which should never be forgotten. "Let it suffice," exclaims he, "that our limbs are fettered; it is unnecessary to place our necks also in the halter."

We perceive here in the honest archon of ChÆronea still something of the sturdy spirit of ancient Hellas. Not in vain had he read the history of his ancestors; in spite of the unpropitious times, he still holds what survives of their virtues worthy of preservation; and it is gratifying to find a man of this stamp serving an ungrateful public, while the conceited philosophers of his day regarded politics a contamination. Nor was it without a good influence upon the literary labors of Plutarch that he did not boast, with Lucan, to know "no state or country," but was content to contribute his share to a better state of things. Yet it is nevertheless easy to see that in such an atmosphere no state like the one for which Themistocles, Pericles, and Demosthenes had worked and striven on the field and the tribune—no country like that for which heroes had fought and bled at Marathon, Salamis, and PlatÆa—could hope to thrive. In this cramped, commonplace sphere, amidst the provincial gossip and the petty interests of such surroundings, the fierce passions which had once inspired parties, which in Rome had fired the hearts of the Gracchi and the other martyrs of the declining commonwealth, were altogether impossible. Here were only the citizens of a small provincial town, the descendants of an ancient and highly renowned nobility but of beggarly presence, the wards of a subjugated land. The enthusiasm with which the higher minds of such an era revelled in the reminiscences of departed greatness was perfectly natural; no less natural was the dim twilight in which its heroes appeared to eyes so little accustomed to discriminate. We can understand why such a profound impression should have been made by all that was foreign in the olden times, especially when the means to analyze, probe, and comprehend it were wholly wanting.

Plutarch's keen appreciation of all the qualities in which the ancients had the advantage over his own contemporaries reflects much credit upon him. Yet he is incapable of comprehending them individually, for there was nothing to correspond with them in the world he lived in. His ideas of state and freedom, of country and virtue among the ancients, are distorted, because in his time their meaning had partly been changed, and partly been lost. To Plutarch's susceptible mind, the heroes of Roman and Grecian history appeared like the effigies preserved in some ancestral hall. He experienced, however, something of the thrill of exultation which electrified Sallust, when he, a warm-hearted youth, first tasted the same sensation; but when he endeavors to communicate this feeling to the reader, he succeeds only in demonstrating his unfitness for the task. An historian, in our sense of the word, Plutarch, we know, does not aspire to be; he claims merely to "paint souls" and "to teach virtue," but even herein he fails. His men are no real personages, no flesh and blood beings, whom he makes step out from the frame of tradition, but puppets gaudily and incongruously arrayed in all kinds of odds and ends. He has never produced a single genre portrait, but merely supplied the raw materials; and these may be even more valuable than any artistically finished but misdrawn historical likeness would have been. This is, however, all that can be said in the behalf of Plutarch's creations, and when we have followed him to his home and visited his mental laboratory, we perceive that it could not well have been otherwise. It is in this light that we have to depict to ourselves Plutarch in the character of the romancist of the ancient ideal of state and country. And when, in conclusion, we regard him further as the romancist of the ancient faith, he may be taken for the predecessor of the apostate Emperor Julian, whom David Strauss so admirably sketched twenty years ago as the romancist on the throne of the CÆsars.

And here also the priest of the Pythian Apollo was once more compelled to accommodate himself to the sad changes of his time. The priestess still sat on the tripod; the sacred fumes still rose out of the earth; the seeress was still beset by curious questioners, and the fountains of the oracle still continued to flow. But how different was the nature of the questions which the contemporaries of Plutarch addressed to the deity! Not war or peace between nation and nation, not rupture or alliance between state and state, as in former days, now demanded its solution. It was what should be eaten, drunk, sown, or harvested; what the deity thought of a nuptial, of the portion set apart for a son or daughter! Such were the things that tempted the curiosity of the oracle-seekers; and to answer them no longer in poetry, but in homely prose, had become the trivial duty of the sanctuary. And yet the magnificence of the gifts and endowments had of late rather increased than fallen off.

"Like the trees," exultingly exclaims Plutarch, "whose vigorous sap shoots forth continually new sprouts, so grows the Pylum of Delphi, and extends day by day in the number of its chapels, consecrated water-fonts, and assembly halls, which rise in a splendor unknown for years. Apollo has saved us from neglect and misery to overwhelm us with wealth, honors, and splendors; it is impossible that such a revolution should have been caused by human agencies without divine intervention; it is he who has come to bestow his blessing on the oracle."

But not even Plutarch could disguise to himself the sad fact that the worship of the oracle had by no means kept pace with the progress of superstitious faith. Still, while the heathen deities had multiplied to an extent which led Pliny to declare that the gods in Olympus outnumbered the men on earth; while the number of secret and public sects steadily increased in the east and west; while all the abominations of a misdirected religious instinct in both worlds united as in one common sewer at Rome, when Tacitus said that among the rising sects the one prospered most which proclaimed not only a new god, but a new license for all who were oppressed and poor; while all this was going on, the higher classes of society, the flower of the intellect of the heathen world, had repudiated the superstitions of the masses, partly to deny the existence of the gods, and partly to adopt strange and exclusive mysteries.

"This estrangement from the gods," exclaims Plutarch, "may be divided into two streams: the one seeks a bed in those hearts which resemble a rocky soil, where every thing of a divine nature is rejected; the other waters gentle souls like a porous soil with exactly opposite effects, producing there an exaggerated and superstitious fear of the gods."

Against both these illusions Plutarch protests in a whole series of works, and the manner in which he does it exhibits the best side of his character. "It is so sweet," he assures us, "to believe;" and we also readily believe him when he describes the feelings with which he witnesses the solemnities of divine worship.

"The unbeliever," he says, "sees in prayer only an unmeaning formula, in sacrifices only the slaughter of helpless animals; but the devout feels his soul elevated, the heart relieved of sorrow and pain."

He implores a pious and child-like reverence for the faith of his forefathers; it was these gods who have made Greece great, protected it in good and evil seasons; and those who will not pray to them from their inmost hearts, should at least suffer others to enjoy their peace of mind and happy simplicity. They should imitate the Egyptian priest, who, when too closely questioned by Herodotus, placed his finger upon his lips in mysterious silence. He thinks it shows little delicacy in the Stoics and Epicureans to attempt to represent the gods as merely another name for the elementary forces. Those who mistake fire, water, air, etc., for the gods, accept the sails, ropes, and anchor of a vessel for the pilot, the wholesome drug for the physician, and the threads of the web for the weaver.

"You destroy," says he to the Epicureans, "the foundations of society; you murder the holiest instincts of the human soul." To the Stoics he says,

"Why attack what is universally accepted? why destroy the religious idea which each people has inherited in the nature of its gods? You ask, above all things, proofs, reasons, and explanations? Beware! If you bring the spirit of doubt to every altar, nothing will be sacred. Every people has its own faith. That faith, transmitted for centuries, must suffice; its very age proves its divine origin; our duty is to hand it down to posterity, without stain or change, pure and unalloyed."

But what of Plutarch's own orthodoxy? It is just what we might have expected from one who was too intelligent to believe the ancient myths and too much of an enthusiast calmly to test his religious heritage. Socrates was not remiss in offering up prayers and sacrifices; no Athenian goddess could rationally complain of him; he believed not only in a Daimonion, or Deity, but (if the Apology be genuine) also in a Son of God; yet he was an atheist. Plutarch's piety is no doubt more enthusiastic in a ratio to his lack of the Socratian keenness of intellect, but strictly considered he has no greater claims to the odor of orthodoxy. With him also the different gods resolve themselves into demons, and it is only in his heart that he knows the one true God—a tenet which has nothing in common with the cheerful anthropomorphism of the Hellenic national creed.

In brief, we discover in Plutarch's character the same inconsistencies which are peculiar to all men of his kind. He stands between two eras. He flies from an aged civilization, which holds him in the iron bonds of custom, to new views of a world which, even imperfect as they are, involuntarily master his reason, though they fail to satisfy his imagination and feelings. From the prose of every-day life he turns to the memory of the glories of his nation, and becomes their chronicler. Repulsed by the unbelief and degeneracy of his contemporaries, he seeks consolation in the poetical fables of the ancient faith, and becomes thus the panegyrist of antiquity. He is, however, unable to reproduce this antiquity in a pure state. He cannot entirely divest himself of all sympathy with those among whom he lives, and remains more than he will admit the child of his own day. Hence what he transmits to us is veiled in that solemn but indistinct semi-obscurity which we meet not only in the ancient temples, but in the heads of the romancists themselves.