Plutarch: biography of this classical thinker and biographer

Plutarch is known in academic circles especially for his Parallel lives, the extensive work that he wrote in his maturity and which includes several biographies of famous Greek and Roman characters. It is thanks to his magnificent compilation that, today, we know details of the lives of historical figures such as Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great.

What people may not know is that Plutarch published another lesser-known biographical work, The excellence of women, dedicated to Clea, a priestess of Apollo, her friend, and which constitutes a compendium of biographies of female characters whose courage is on a par with that of their male counterparts. And it is that, without falling into the anachronism of saying that Plutarch was a feminist, we can affirm that he was a rather interested in demonstrating that virtue did not and does not understand gender, and that he always advocated intellectually educating people women.

In this biography of Plutarch we will see the life of one of the great Greek thinkers

, who later obtained Roman citizenship under the name of Lucio Mestrio Plutarco and who had an enormous influence on the philosophy and literature of modern Europe.

Brief biography of Plutarch of Chaeronea, the great classical thinker

Plutarch's family was wealthy and came from the city of Chaeronea, in the Greek region of Boeotia, a peripheral territory that had a certain reputation for being uncultivated and barbarianAt least for the inhabitants of Athens. There was some truth in this consideration, obviating the obvious contemptuous charge that the Attics expressed in this idea. And it is that Chaeronea was a small provincial town, in which intellectual life was relatively sparse. and where, in truth, he is surprised that a thinker of the stature of Plutarch decided to live his entire existence.

Born in this town around the year 50 AD. C., from his family we know several names, since he embodied them in his writings. Thus, we know that his grandfather was called Lamprias and that it meant a lot to the young Plutarch. As for his father, he received the name of Autobulo or Aristobulo, a name that our philosopher would give to one of the children he had with Timoxena, his wife.

If anything is evident in Plutarch's character, it is his love for family. and his respect for what marriage represented. It is known that his union with Timoxena was happy, despite the fact that they had to go through the misfortune of seeing several of her children die. On one of these occasions, after the death of his youngest daughter (named Timoxena after his mother), Plutarch wrote his moving consolation to my wife, a short text in which he tries to mitigate the woman's pain in the face of such a tragedy.

In addition to his family, whom he adored, Plutarch gathered a very large group of friends in his native Chaeronea, with whom he chatted and talked about philosophical topics and life in general. These meetings, along with the multitude of books that he brought back from his numerous trips, helped to broaden the cultural life of this modest provincial town. which, on the other hand, was famous among the Greeks for having been the scene of two important battles: the one between Philip of Macedonia and the Athenians in the fourth century to. c. and the one that gave victory to Sulla over Mithridates del Ponto, in 86 a. c.

• Related article: "The 15 Most Important and Famous Greek Philosophers"

Plutarch's travels

Despite the fact that Plutarch spent practically his entire life in Chaeronea, it is no less true that he made several trips through Greece, Rome and Egypt. His first departure from his hometown occurred in his teens, when he moved to Athens to study philosophy. There he received education from Ammonius, who taught at the Academy and who imbued him with Platonic philosophy, which Plutarch would never part with.

Around the year 67 he returned to Chaeronea to finish his studies, but immediately left for Alexandria and Asia Minor. The desire for knowledge of him has no limits; Very interested in ancient Egyptian religion, his travels resulted in his work On Isis and Osiris. In the city of Izmir (present-day Turkey) it seems that he came into contact with the second sophistical school, led by Philostratus, who sought to recover and expand ancient Greek rhetoric.

Several trips to Rome are also known, where he established friendship with different imperial officials and other important figures of the Roman world. Plutarch was ignorant of Latin; He did not begin to study it until he was old, with the aim of reading the Latin sources that he used for his writings and, furthermore, he never managed to speak it quite well. However, the use of this language was not necessary for him to function in Rome, since the upper echelons of the empire knew Greek and the majority were completely bilingual. Let us remember that, still in imperial times, Greek was the language of prestige among Roman society.

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Biographies and moral texts

Some authors consider that Plutarch was not exactly a brilliant philosopher. However, his undeniable literary talent makes him an essential figure. On the other hand, his moral texts, compiled under the eloquent name of moralia (a title imposed much later by the Byzantine monk Máximo Planudes) offer a relaxed view of the morality, and they are, rather, a kind of friendly advice between friends, as also shown by their after-dinner talks. This little rectitude when it comes to capturing moral teachings gives an idea of ​​the open character and inclined to dialogue of our character. On the other hand, as Carlos García Gual points out, this collection of texts are clear predecessors of modern essays.

Of course, the text by which he is universally known is his Parallel lives, which consecrated it for posterity. It is a compilation of biographies of Greek and Roman characters, treated in pairs (hence the name, parallel), in order to better compare their strengths and weaknesses. Thus, for example, the biography of Alexander the Great is compared with that of Julius Caesar, Pericles with that of Fabius Maximus, Theseus with Romulus, etc.

From what was said above, two things can be appreciated; one, that the comparisons always pair a Greek character with another Roman. and two, what Plutarch includes in his Lives to characters of doubtful historical existence, like Theseus and Romulus, legendary kings of Athens and Rome, respectively. However, Plutarch himself is critical of this aspect, since, precisely in the introduction of life of theseus, the author maintains that he cannot guarantee the veracity of the story, because he is in the world of legend...

A prolific writer, a restless thinker, with a fairly open mind and a great lover of his friends and his family, Plutarch's work had enormous resonance in the Europe of the following centuries, and powerfully influenced authors such as Montaigne in France or Shakespeare in England. And let us not forget that, in the French Revolution, Plutarch was the author of the head of any aspiring republican, and that Napoleon always carried it with him... along with the Werther Goethe's, apparently.