Dope
As I said in my last post, today is Plutarch day. Let's see - there is an incredibly large amount of info about Plutarch on the Net -- which is intriguing, considering that Plutarch was also a favorite of the printers when the printing press produced the book revolution in the Renaissance. The parallel might have been intentional - for instance, MIT's Perseus people surely had that in mind.

Let's start with Roger Kimbell's essay on Plutarch, for The New Criterion.

Unfortunately, Kimbell writes in an insufferable high table manner. I assume the name rings a bell - he's one of the warriors in that dreariest contemporary phenom, the Culture Wars - author of Tenured Radicals, etc. Poor Kimball - when he has some hair up his butt, he can get his rocks off, but without an opponent to caricature - writing in the belles-lettres format - he comes off sounding like he'd been suckled on bottle of port. What kills me is the High Table affectation combined with the middlebrow phrasing. Nabokov was always amused by that American combination of the Great Books and up-lift attitude - remember Lolita's mother, Charlotte Haze, with her Time-Life, Will and Ariel Durant culture? I don't share Nabokov's disdain for this kind of thing - hey, Will and Ariel Durant were socialists, and come out of the long Anglo tradition of Workingman's self-improvement groups (as Shaw pointed out, many a voluntary reading association provided a more up to date educational background than you could squeeze out of your average Oxford Don) - but it is funny to encounter such unconscious and pathetic bits of it in Kimball. Most interesting graf in Kimball's essay:

"I have always been surprised that more is not made of Alcibiades today. He seems the perfect contemporary hero: rich, handsome, brilliant, amoral; he had it all. He was even bisexual, virtually a prerequisite for appearing well-rounded these days. Plutarch notes that when it came to �temperance, continence, and probity,� Alcibiades must be judged �the least scrupulous and most entirely careless of human beings.� But he forgives him a lot, not least because �he was often of service to Athens, both as a soldier and a commander.�

In fact, Plutarch nearly always attempted to accentuate the positive."

Between the "He was even bisexual, virutally a prerequisite for appearing well-rounded these days" and the "accentuate the positive," you have the essence of the New Criterion stylebook - from the bizarre phobias dear to the conservative heart to the eyerolling cliches of fifties pop culture.

Kimball pairs Plutarch and Suetonius - the one dispensing moral admonition wrapped up in a life story, the other dishing dirt. Go to the Suetonius link for the intro to the Oxford Classics Magazine story about the guy.

Finally, here's a bit of Plutarch in North's translation, copied from Stoics Org - which I must warn you is a very badly put together site, taking forever to download. Still, Plutarch in English is North's translation from Amyot. It is, malheureusement, hard to find North - unfortunately the Plutarch we might find in the used book store is invariably the colorless Dryden/Clough translation. I remember picking up a copy of this when I was, what, fourteen, and falling asleep trying to read the Life of Theseus. Back in my adolescence, I was a great one for self-improvement. But I never made it through Theseus.

This comes from the comparison of two lawgivers - Lycurgus, ruler of Sparta, and Numa, ruler of Rome.

"But the LACONIAN, keeping his wife in his house, and the mariage remaining whole and unbroken, might let out his wife to any man that would require her to have children by her: naye furthermore, many (as we have told you before) did them selves intreat men, by whom they thought to have a trimme broode of children, and layed them with their wives. What difference, I praye you was betwene these two customes? saving that the custome of the LACONIANS shewed, that the husbands were nothing angrie, nor grieved with their wives for those things, which for sorrowe and jealousie doth rent the hartes of most maried men in the world. And that of the ROMAINES was a simplicitie somwhat more shamefast, which to cover it, was shadowed yet with the cloke of matrimonie, and contract of mariage: confessing that to use wife and children by halfes together, was a thing most intolerable for him. Furthermore, the keeping of maidens to be maried by Numaes order, was much straighter & more honorable for womanhed: and Lycurgus order having to much scope and libertie, gave Poets occasion to speake, and to geve them surnames not very honest. As Ibycus called them Phanomeridas: to saye, thighe showers: and Andromanes: to saye manhood. And Euripides sayeth also of them. Good nut broune girles which left, their fathers house at large and sought for young mens companie, & tooke their ware in charge: And shewed their thighes all bare, the taylour did them wrong, on eche side open were their cotes, the slytts were all to long. And in deede to saye truely, the sides of their petticotes were not sowed beneath: so that as they went, they shewed their thighes naked and bare. The which Sophocles doth easely declare by these verses: The songe which you shall singe, shalbe the sonnet sayde, by Hermione lusty lasse, that strong and sturdy mayde: Which trust her petticote, about her midle shorte, and set to shewe her naked hippes, in francke & frendly sorte. And therefore it is sayed, the LACON Wives were bolde, manly, and stowte against their husbands, namely the first. For they were wholy mistresses in the house, and abroade: yea they had law on their side also, to utter their mindes franckly concerning the chiefest matters..."