Justified True Belief

(●) A small-town priest of Apollo who wrote fifty biographies, and taught Christian Europe how to read a human life. + If you have ever heard Enobarbus describe Cleopatra coming down the river, the barge like a burnished throne and the poop of beaten gold, you have been listening to Plutarch without knowing it. Shakespeare wrote that speech with an English translation of a French translation of Plutarch open on the desk beside him, and in places he did little more than move the line breaks. Plutarch was a Greek from a small town in Boeotia, the farm country of central Greece, and he lived the whole of his life under the Roman empire. For decades of it he served as a priest at Delphi, the mountain shrine where Greek cities had been sending embassies for centuries to ask a god what they should do. And he wrote two things. One was the Parallel Lives, fifty biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen and generals, nearly all of them set out in pairs so that a Greek and a Roman could be measured against each other. The other was a shelf of essays and dialogues that later editors bundled under the title Moralia, which is Latin for something like "the moral pieces," and which range from how to bring up children to what a good man should say to God. Two things make him worth a Christian reader’s attention. The first is that he is the most attractive pagan of the century in which the church was born: he thought superstition was a worse insult to God than atheism, he thought God punished slowly on purpose, and he addressed his god with the words "Thou art." The second is that he is the pagan the church kept. Eusebius put him in the witness box against his own religion, Basil borrowed his method for teaching Christian boys to read Homer, Erasmus turned him into Latin for a king, and for four centuries English readers learned what a life looks like from the fifty he wrote.

(●) c. AD 46: Born at Chaeronea, a small town best known for the battle that ended Greek freedom, and he stayed there all his life. + No ancient writer troubled to record the year of his birth, and what stands in the place of a record is arithmetic. He was born before AD 50, probably somewhere in the middle forties, and the figure "c. 46" is a modern estimate worked back from how old he seems to be in the handful of scenes that can be dated. Every date in his life carries the same softness, then, and the ones tied to his age carry it twice. The place, at least, is certain. Chaeronea sits in Boeotia, in the middle of the Greek mainland, on the plain where in 338 BC Philip of Macedon destroyed the combined armies of Athens and Thebes and finished the independence of the Greek cities for good. Plutarch grew up on that field. He came from a settled local family: his grandfather Lamprias and his father both appear in his dialogues as speakers, though he never once sets down his father’s name, and he had two brothers, Timon and Lamprias, whom he writes about with plain affection. He could have left. Educated Greeks of his rank went to Athens or Alexandria or Rome and stayed. He went, and came home, and gave his reason in one dry sentence in his life of Demosthenes: "I live in a small city, and I prefer to dwell there that it may not become smaller still." Everything he wrote was written by a man who could see his own field from his own doorway.

(●) c. AD 66: He studied at Athens under the Platonist Ammonius, and was at Delphi in the year the emperor Nero came through. + At Athens he read mathematics and philosophy with a teacher named Ammonius, and those years fixed the shape of his mind for the rest of his life. Ammonius was a Platonist, and Plutarch stayed one. He wrote a commentary on the soul-making passage of Plato’s Timaeus, he read the old dialogues the way a theologian reads a creed, and he spent a great deal of ink arguing in Plato’s name against the two schools that had the crowd in his century. The Stoics taught that the world is one vast living order run by a divine reason, and that nothing outside a man’s own character is worth calling good or bad. The Epicureans taught that everything there is consists of atoms falling through empty space, and that the gods, being perfectly content, take no interest whatever in us. Plutarch thought both were wrong, and he wrote against them for the rest of his life. Historians have a label for the kind of Platonist he was, and it is worth having, because it explains a good deal about how he sounds. Middle Platonism is the stretch of Platonic teaching that runs between two landmarks. Behind it lay the long period in which Plato’s own school, the Academy, had made a speciality of doubt, arguing against whatever position anybody offered and holding none of its own. Ahead of it, a century and a half later, lay the great system of Plotinus, who built a whole world out of Plato and gave paganism the last philosophy it would produce. In between came the men of Plutarch’s stripe, and their distinguishing move was to put a single transcendent God at the top of the picture, above the world and above change: not the largest item in the universe but a God who stands outside it altogether. The second half of the move was to treat everything Plato said about the Forms and the Good as theology rather than logic. The Forms are Plato’s perfect originals, justice itself and beauty itself, of which the fair verdicts and lovely faces down here are copies, and the Good is the highest of them, the sun that lights the rest. Read that way, Plato stops being a set of arguments about definitions and starts being an account of God. That is why Plutarch keeps sounding, to a Christian ear, closer than he is. In AD 66 and 67 the emperor Nero toured Greece, competing in its festivals and collecting its prizes. Plutarch, still a young man, was at Delphi when the imperial party passed through, and remembered the visit for a reason that has nothing to do with Nero: it was the occasion of a conversation about the mysterious letter E in the temple, and he says he heard "Ammonius and some others discourse" on it there. He was still turning that conversation over decades later, and it became one of his best essays.

(●) AD 70s onward: Rome gave him citizenship and lent him a Roman name, and he never found the time to learn Latin properly. + Plutarch travelled to Rome more than once on public business for his city and stayed to lecture on philosophy. He made friends there of a kind a Boeotian schoolmaster does not usually make. One was Lucius Mestrius Florus, a senator close to the emperor Vespasian, who sponsored his Roman citizenship; an inscription at Delphi preserves the result, because a Greek granted citizenship took his sponsor’s family name, and Plutarch became Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus. Another was Quintus Sosius Senecio, who held the consulship twice, which was as high as a Roman public career could go, and to whom Plutarch later dedicated both the Parallel Lives and the nine books of his Table Talk. Here is the oddity, and he owns it himself. The man who wrote the standard lives of Caesar, Cato, Cicero, Marius and Antony admits in the opening of his Demosthenes that during his time in Rome and Italy he "had no leisure to practise myself in the Roman language, owing to my public duties and the number of my pupils in philosophy." He came to Latin late and worked at it with difficulty, reading for the facts and leaning on Greek sources wherever he could. That admission is worth holding on to when reading him. He is not an insider explaining Rome from within. He is a provincial Greek, writing for other Greeks in a world Rome now owned, asking whether his own people had ever produced men to match the ones who had conquered them.

(●) Date unknown: A two-year-old daughter died while he was away from home, and the letter he sent his wife survives. + He married a woman named Timoxena and they had at least five children. Four were sons. The fifth came last, after the four boys, when his wife had been longing for a girl, and he named the baby after her mother. The little Timoxena died at about two years old. Plutarch was travelling; the messenger sent to find him took the wrong road to Athens, and he heard the news from his niece when he reached Tanagra, by which time the funeral was over. The letter he wrote back is one of the tenderest documents to survive from the ancient world, and it is tender partly because it is so exact. He remembers that she was "naturally mild, and compassionate to a miracle," and that she used to ask her nurse to feed not only the other children but her toys as well, inviting them to the table and getting them the best supper she could. Then he asks his wife for something hard. "Only, dear wife, let you and me bear our affliction with patience. I know very well and do comprehend what loss we have had; but if I should find you grieve beyond measure, this would trouble me more than the thing itself. For I had my birth neither from a stock nor a stone." Nobody recorded when he wrote it. Two of their children are known to have died young, though, so the house he was writing to had been down that road before.

(●) c. AD 95: He became a priest of Apollo at Delphi, and at home he stood in the road overseeing the delivery of roof tiles. + Delphi is about twenty miles from Chaeronea. For something like a thousand years it had been the religious centre of the Greek world: cities sent embassies to ask its god what to do, and the answers, delivered through a woman called the Pythia, decided colonies and wars. By Plutarch’s day the traffic had thinned badly, the verse oracles of the old days had given way to plain prose, and most of the smaller shrines of Greece had gone silent altogether. He served as one of the two priests of Apollo there for the last decades of his life, took part in many of the Pythian festivals, the contests in music and athletics that the sanctuary held every four years, and wrote three dialogues set on the temple terrace trying to work out what had happened to the place. He also worked, all his life, as a local magistrate in a town nobody had heard of. He served as archon of Chaeronea, which is to say its chief officer for the year, and he handled the ordinary business of a small municipality, and he knew exactly how that looked to other people. In his Political Precepts he answers the people who laughed at the sight of a famous philosopher standing about at a building site: "But I, on the contrary, say to those who upbraid me for being present at and overseeing the measuring of tiles, or the bringing in and unloading of clay and stones: It is not for myself, but for my country, that I perform this service." The two jobs are the same job, in his mind. A man serves the god and he serves the town, and the size of the town is not the measure of the duty.

(●) c. AD 100 onward: He wrote the Parallel Lives, setting a Greek beside a Roman, for a Roman consul who was his friend. + The great work of his old age was a series, published in instalments and dedicated to Sosius Senecio, in which a famous Greek and a famous Roman are told one after the other and then compared in a short closing essay. Theseus with Romulus, because each was remembered as the founder of his city. Alexander with Caesar, for the obvious reason. Demosthenes with Cicero, two men who talked their countries into a war they could not win. Twenty-three such pairs survive, along with four lives that stand alone, fifty in all. The pairing is the argument. Greece in Plutarch’s lifetime was a Roman province, poor, depopulated and picturesque, visited by tourists. Rome had the legions and the law. What Plutarch does, without ever making a speech about it, is put the two on one scale and weigh them by character, where a Greek can stand up. He is not scoring points; several of his Romans come out better than their Greeks. He is insisting that the measure of a public man is the same in both languages. He was capable of unfairness. His one sustained attack on another historian, On the Malice of Herodotus, accuses the greatest of Greek historians of systematic bad faith, and a good deal of the heat in it comes from Herodotus having told the truth about Boeotia’s conduct in the Persian wars. It is the least generous thing he wrote, and it is worth knowing about, because the same man wrote the essay on how to profit from your enemies.

(●) After AD 119: He died at a date nobody recorded, and the books outlived every temple he served. + The last events he can be shown to know about fall after AD 119, and he is generally thought to have died in the early 120s, an old man. Delphi and Chaeronea together set up a portrait of him by order of the Amphictyony, the council of Greek states that ran the sanctuary, which is a considerable honour for a provincial writer and is the nearest thing to a public verdict on him from people who knew him. Two later honours got attached to his name, and both are worth naming and weighing. The first comes from George Syncellus, a chronicler of the early ninth century in Byzantium, the Greek-speaking Christian empire that carried on in the east long after Rome had fallen in the west. Copying out Eusebius, he reports that the emperor Hadrian made Plutarch procurator of Achaea in his old age. A procurator was an imperial officer who looked after the emperor’s money in a province, and Achaea was what Rome called the province of Greece. The second comes from the Suda, a Byzantine encyclopedia compiled later still, which gives him consular rank from Trajan. Neither honour is supported by anything Plutarch says, and the two are not in the same condition. The consular rank is usually set aside as a Byzantine embellishment. The procuratorship, most likely an honorary title rather than a working post, is taken seriously by some scholars and doubted by others. What is certain is the survival. Delphi’s oracle was closed for good under the Christian emperors, and the temple he served is a foundation and some standing columns. Of his own writing, fifty biographies and seventy-eight essays and dialogues came through, which is more surviving prose than almost any other pagan Greek can show, and none of it has ever been out of circulation for long.

What He Taught

(T1) Being afraid of God is a worse mistake than not believing in him. + Picture a man who will not start a journey because a bird went the wrong way over his house, who lies awake counting the omens of the day just past, and who goes into a temple the way you would go into a room with a wasp in it. That man is not irreligious. He is, on Plutarch’s reading, the most seriously irreligious person in the street. The Greek word is deisidaimonia, literally "fear of the divine," and it is usually rendered superstition. It does not mean reverence. It means dread: the settled conviction that the powers above are watching for a chance to hurt you. Plutarch takes it apart in a short, angry essay. Atheism, he says, is a wrong judgment, an error in the reasoning, and a man who makes it simply does not fear the gods because he does not think there are any. Superstition is worse, because it is a wrong judgment with a passion built on top of it: the sufferer believes in gods and believes they are the cause of his pain. So his religion becomes a life sentence. "When the garland is on his head he turns pale, he offers sacrifice and feels afraid, he prays with quavering voice." Then Plutarch turns the argument around, and this is the move the essay is remembered for. Which of the two, he asks, actually insults God? To say there is no God is to deny his existence. To say there is a God and he is vindictive is to keep the existence and slander the character, and Plutarch says plainly which he would rather have said about himself. He also names the failure mode: a man who runs away from superstition often runs straight past true religion and into "a rough and hardened atheism, thus overleaping true religion which lies between." A Christian reader will notice how much of this Scripture says back to him, and will want to notice where it stops. The fear of the Lord in the Bible is reverence rather than dread, and the answer to a terrifying god is never fewer gods but a truer one. But Plutarch has no way to get from "the gods are not malicious" to "God is love," and he never tries.

(Q) "Why, for my part, I should prefer that men should say about me that I have never been born at all, and there is no Plutarch, rather than that they should say 'Plutarch is an inconstant fickle person, quick-tempered, vindictive over little accidents, pained at trifles.'" + Source: Plutarch, On Superstition 10 (169F–170A), Babbitt translation. He has just asked why the philosopher Anaxagoras could be prosecuted for impiety, which at Athens was a criminal charge and meant an offence against the gods of the city, for saying that the sun is a stone, while nobody calls a man impious for believing the gods are spiteful. The reply is the argument in one sentence: a slander on a person’s character is a worse thing to say about him than a denial that he exists (T1).

(T2) God alone truly is, and everything else is only on its way to being something else. + There was an object in the temple at Delphi that nobody could explain: the Greek letter E, mounted on the wall, in three versions, wood and bronze and gold, dedicated at different periods by different people. It was famous and it was a puzzle, rather like an old inscription over a church door that the congregation has stopped being able to read. Plutarch wrote a dialogue in which the company works through the guesses. E is the numeral five, so perhaps it honours the five wise men. E is the word "if," and Apollo is the god you come to with a question. The answer that Plutarch gives the last and longest speech to is his teacher Ammonius’. In Greek the letter is called ei, and ei is also a whole word: "thou art," the second person singular of the verb to be. Carved on the same temple is the god’s greeting to everyone who climbs the path, "Know thyself." The E is the visitor’s reply. The god says what you are; you say what he is. What makes the essay more than a piece of antiquarian cleverness is the reason Ammonius gives for the reply being appropriate. A human being cannot honestly say "I am," because a human being is never twice the same. Plutarch quotes Heraclitus on the river you cannot step into twice, and adds that we are the river: "it is not lawful to say of any thing which is, that it was or shall be." Of God the opposite holds. He is not in time at all but in an eternity "in which there is nothing first, or last, or newer," and which "has filled its eternal duration with one only 'now'." To exist without a past tense or a future tense is what it means to be God, and there is only one such being, because to be many is to be mixed, and to be mixed is to be corruptible. A Christian reading this comes to a full stop somewhere in that paragraph, because he has heard it before, out of a burning bush: "God said to Moses, 'I am who I am'" (Exodus 3:14). The likeness is real and worth sitting with. So is the difference. Plutarch is addressing Apollo, and the one being he has argued his way to is a principle of pure being, contemplated by philosophers at a shrine. The God of Exodus gives his name in the middle of a conversation, and gives it in order to be trusted with a promise.

(Q) "And we again, answering the God, say to him EI, thou art; attributing to him the true, unfeigned, and sole appellation of being, as agreeing to him alone." + Source: Plutarch, On the E at Delphi 17, Goodwin edition of the Morals. Ammonius has just said that the god’s own salutation to the pilgrim is "Know thyself," and that this is no less a greeting than "All hail." The E on the wall is the answer coming back the other way (T2). Three chapters later the same speech reaches its conclusion: "But God, we must say, is, and he is not in any time, but in eternity."

(T3) One providence orders the world, and the nations have given it different names. + Everyone on earth can see the sun, and every language has its own word for it, and nobody thinks there is an English sun and a separate Greek one. That homely observation is the hinge of Plutarch’s longest religious essay, On Isis and Osiris, written for Clea, a woman he knew at Delphi who was both a senior priestess there and an initiate of the Egyptian rites. Two technical words are doing the work, and he uses them the way a modern writer would use "reason" and "providence." The first is logos, which Goodwin’s old translation renders "discourse": the ordering intelligence that arranges things, the same word John’s Gospel will use of Christ. The second is pronoia, providence, which is the mind that plans and oversees, as opposed to blind chance. Plutarch’s claim is that there is one logos and one pronoia over the whole world, and that Isis and Athena and the rest are the honours and titles that different peoples have assigned to it under their own laws. The essay has real teeth, and they bite in a direction Christians will recognise. Plutarch has no patience for Egyptians who worship the animals themselves rather than what the animals stand for, and he says outright that nothing without a soul, and nothing that human beings can use up and destroy, can possibly be a god. The same instinct shows in the essay against superstition, where he quotes with approval a line that the old philosopher Xenophanes threw at some Egyptians beating their breasts over a dying god at a festival: "If these beings are gods, do not bewail them; and if they are men, do not offer sacrifices to them" (On Superstition 13, Babbitt translation). That is the mockery of idols that runs through Isaiah, arrived at from the pagan side. And yet the conclusion goes somewhere Scripture will not follow. Paul stood in Athens, saw an altar inscribed to an unknown god, and used it: "What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you" (Acts 17:23). But he did not tell the Athenians that their god had been the true one under another name all along. He told them the times of ignorance were over and a day of judgment was fixed (Acts 17:30–31). The one God of the New Testament has one Lord beside him and a particular history (1 Corinthians 8:6), and that is not a name the nations can be said to have been using in their own dialects.

(Q) "But as the sun, moon, land, and sea are common to all men, but yet have different names in different nations, so that one discourse that orders these things, and that one forecast that administers them, and those subordinate powers that are set over every nation in particular, have assigned them by the laws of several countries several kinds of honors and appellations." + Source: Plutarch, Of Isis and Osiris 67, Goodwin edition of the Morals, where "discourse" translates logos and "forecast" translates pronoia, providence (T3). He goes straight on to the danger of the whole approach, in both directions: some who cannot reach the meaning behind the symbols "have slid into downright superstition," and others, "while they would fly the quagmire of superstition, have fallen unwittingly upon the precipice of atheism."

(T4) God punishes slowly on purpose, and the delay is a lesson in patience. + A father with his hand already raised stops, puts it down, and says he will deal with this after supper. Every parent knows why. Plutarch built an entire dialogue on that pause. It opens with a man storming out of the room. A speaker Plutarch calls Epicurus, arguing the case of the school whose name he carries, has been attacking divine justice, and he has flung away in haste before anyone can answer him, which leaves the friends who remain stuck with the objection and nobody to aim their reply at. Plutarch states it at full strength before he touches it, which is the honest way to do this, and stated at full strength it runs about like this. If God waits, the wait looks like indifference. Punishment long delayed does not deter anybody, since the deterrent works by being prompt. It comes too late to be any use to the victim. It emboldens the criminal, who concludes that nothing is coming. And it quietly destroys ordinary people’s belief that anybody is running the world. To what good purpose, the objection asks, do the millstones of the gods grind, when they grind so slowly? His answers run in three directions. First, the delay is instruction. Human punishment chases the offence like a dog barking after a cart, and what comes out of that is not justice but the satisfaction of temper; God, who has nothing to fear and nothing to regret, waits anyway, and in doing so shows us what to do with a raised hand. Plutarch has the examples ready: Plato standing over a slave with a stick and holding still until his own anger passed, and the philosopher Archytas coming in from a field his servants had let go to ruin and saying only, "It is your good fortune that ye have angered me." Second, the delay is room to repent. God can see which souls are still curable, and he "allows time for the reformation of those whose wickedness is neither invincible nor incorrigible." Third, and most searching, the delay is often an illusion. The wicked man other people envy is already being punished, all day and every day, by the thing he has become. The first two of those turn up in the New Testament with a different foundation under them. "The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" (2 Peter 3:9), and Paul asks the man who is banking on the delay whether he does not know "that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance" (Romans 2:4). The difference is what the patience is buying time for. In Plutarch the offender uses the interval to reform himself. In the New Testament he uses it to turn to someone who has already paid.

(Q) "Much more becomes it us, beholding God, with whom there is neither dread nor repentance of any thing, deferring nevertheless his punishments to future time and admitting delay, to be cautious and circumspect in these matters, and to deem as a divine part of virtue that mildness and long-suffering of which God affords us an example, while by punishing he reforms some few, but by slowly punishing he helpeth and admonisheth many." + Source: Plutarch, On the Delays of the Divine Vengeance 5, Goodwin edition of the Morals, where the essay is titled Concerning Such Whom God Is Slow to Punish. The sentence comes at the end of a run of human examples, Plato with the raised stick and Archytas in his ruined field. If stories about men can cool a temper, Plutarch argues, the example of God ought to cool it further (T4).

(T5) A jest can show what a man is better than a battle can. + Think of somebody you know well and ask what you would tell a stranger about them. It will almost certainly not be their largest accomplishment. It will be something small: what they said when the car would not start, how they treat a waiter, the thing they always do at the door before leaving. This is Plutarch’s working method, and he states it at the top of the life of Alexander because that particular life needed the excuse. Alexander conquered the known world; the material is enormous; and Plutarch announces that he is going to leave most of it out. He is not writing history, he says, but lives, and character does not always show up in the famous deeds. He compares himself to a portrait painter, who works hard at the face and the eyes, where the likeness lives, and does not fuss over the rest of the body. The second half of the method is the part that mattered to everyone who came after. Plutarch does not write biography so that his readers will know things. He writes it so that they will change, and he says openly that the first person it changed was himself: he began the Lives for other people’s sake and went on with them for his own, "using history as a mirror and endeavouring in a manner to fashion and adorn my life in conformity with the virtues therein depicted." In the life of Pericles he explains why he thinks this works. Skill in a low craft can be admired without being envied, but goodness is different: seeing it done makes a person want to do it. Scripture takes the same route and puts a different face at the end of it. "Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith" (Hebrews 13:7). Paul writes "Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ" (1 Corinthians 11:1), which is Plutarch’s mirror with a further reflection in it. When Christians of the next few centuries began writing lives of martyrs and monks, they were working in a form no ancient writer had done more than Plutarch to establish.

(Q) "For it is not Histories that I am writing, but Lives; and in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice, nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities." + Source: Plutarch, Life of Alexander 1 (Perrin translation). He is apologising in advance to readers who wanted the campaigns, and asking them to let him work at "the signs of the soul in men" the way a painter works at the face (T5). The companion sentence stands at the head of his life of Aemilius Paulus: "I began the writing of my 'Lives' for the sake of others, but I find that I am continuing the work and delighting in it now for my own sake also, using history as a mirror."

(Q) "The laws of our country forbid this, and teach us that it is an impious thing to lament for those whose souls pass immediately into a better and more divine state." + Source: Plutarch, Consolatory Letter to His Wife 11, Goodwin edition of the Morals. Writing to Timoxena about their dead daughter, he reminds her that Greek custom held no funeral feasts for infants and did not sit by their graves, and takes the custom as evidence of what the ancestors believed. A few lines earlier he has given her his picture of what death is: "the soul, being incapable of death, is affected in the same manner as birds that are kept in a cage," and a soul that has grown used to the body will, in time, "return again, and at length enter the body" in another life. This is the nearest that unaided reason got to a Christian funeral, and the gap is still wide. Paul writes to a congregation burying its own so "that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope" (1 Thessalonians 4:13), and the hope he names is not a cage door but a resurrection.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Eusebius called him as a witness against his own religion, and the church has been retelling his ghost story ever since. + An educated Greek in the early fourth century, invited to become a Christian, felt he was being asked to come down in the world: to give up the poets and philosophers he had been raised on for a book of Jewish stories and a crucified provincial. Eusebius of Caesarea, the first church historian, wrote a long work to meet exactly that objection, the Praeparatio Evangelica, the "Preparation for the Gospel." His method was to quote the educated pagan’s own authorities at length, and to go on quoting until the case made itself. Plutarch is one of the authors he quarries hardest, and Book V leans on the Delphic dialogues in particular. The passage Eusebius wanted most is a story that one of the speakers in a dialogue of Plutarch’s, Philip the historian, says he had from his own schoolmaster. Epitherses, who lived in Philip’s town and taught him grammar, was sailing to Italy when the ship was becalmed in the evening near the islands of Paxi. A voice called three times for Thamus, an Egyptian pilot whose name hardly anyone aboard knew, and told him that when he reached Palodes he was to announce that the great god Pan was dead. Thamus decided that if there was wind he would sail past in silence, and if there was a calm he would shout it. At Palodes the sea was like glass. He stood on deck, called out the message, and the passengers heard from the shore a sound of many voices groaning together. The news reached Rome, and the emperor Tiberius sent for the pilot. Plutarch sets the story inside a dialogue arguing a thesis of his own, and the thesis needs one Greek word explained first. A daemon is not a devil. The word covers a whole rank of beings that the Greeks placed between the gods and ourselves, long-lived but not eternal, carrying messages in both directions and doing the everyday work at the shrines. What Plutarch argues is that the daemons who staff the oracles are not immortal, and that a shrine falls silent when its daemon dies. Eusebius quotes the whole thing and then puts his finger on the date. "But it is important to observe the time at which he says that the death of the daemon took place. For it was the time of Tiberius, in which our Saviour, making His sojourn among men, is recorded to have been ridding human life from daemons of every kind." Honesty requires the rest of it: Plutarch himself never suggests any such connection, and the explanation he prefers for the silence of the Greek oracles is that Greece had lost most of its population and no longer needed so many.

(†) Basil taught Christian boys to read pagan poetry by a method he had learned from Plutarch. + In the fourth century a Christian family with a bright son faced a practical question with no obvious answer. All the schooling there was ran on Homer, and Homer is full of gods behaving disgracefully. Do you send the boy or not? Basil of Caesarea, bishop and one of the architects of the doctrine of the Trinity, answered in a short piece written for his own nephews, the Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature. Yes, send him, and teach him to read like a bee: the bee goes to the flower for the honey and leaves the rest of the flower alone. Take the passages where courage or self-control is shown and use them; pass over what the gods get up to. That is Plutarch’s argument, from the essay How the Young Man Should Study Poetry, and the resemblance runs deeper than the general idea, down into the choice of examples. Basil never names him, so the borrowing is a judgment of scholars rather than a claim of Basil’s own; but the two essays go together closely enough that in 1902 Frederick Padelford printed them side by side in one volume of the Yale Studies in English. What the church got out of it was a settled answer, for a thousand years of schoolmasters, to whether a Christian may read a pagan book: yes, attentively, and with a filter.

(†) Christian Europe copied him, translated him, and handed him to schoolboys, until an English playwright turned his prose into blank verse. + Everything of Plutarch’s that survived at all came through the Middle Ages in Greek, in the hands of Christian copyists in Constantinople. Around 1302 a Byzantine monk named Maximus Planudes did the essays a service nobody else had done: he gathered them into a single corpus and had them written out together. The manuscript made at his instigation, now Parisinus graecus 1672 in Paris, is the only one in the world that contains all seventy-eight. Once the West could read Greek again, he moved fast. Erasmus, working at Cambridge, turned a set of the essays into Latin and in 1513 sent How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend to Henry VIII with a dedicatory letter, which is a fair sample of Erasmus: the one book a king most needs and is least likely to be given. In France, Jacques Amyot, a scholar who ended as Bishop of Auxerre, translated the Lives in 1559 and the Moralia in 1572; Montaigne read them until Plutarch had become his household author and half his essays quote him. Then Sir Thomas North made English out of Amyot’s French in 1579, and his Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes became one of the first masterpieces of English prose. Shakespeare read North, and for Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra he sometimes did no more than break North’s sentences into lines. An audience that has never heard of Chaeronea has sat for four centuries listening to a Boeotian priest.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the temple he never left, the spirits he set between God and the world, the second life he offered his wife, and goodness learned by looking at good men. + This is the other column of the ledger, and every entry in it is drawn from what Plutarch himself taught and did. - The temple. His cure for bad religion was better philosophy practised inside the old rites, not leaving them. He served Apollo at Delphi to the end and defended the oracle in print, and the essay against superstition ends by warning the reader not to overshoot into atheism. Paul in Athens used the altar to an unknown god as a doorway (Acts 17:23) and then told the city that the times of ignorance were over and it must repent (Acts 17:30–31); what the first Christians were remembered for was that they "turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God" (1 Thessalonians 1:9). - The middlemen. Because a God who simply is cannot be mixed up with a world that keeps changing, Plutarch fills the gap with daemons: long-lived beings between gods and men who run the oracles, take the cruder sacrifices, and can die. The whole machinery exists to keep God at a distance from matter. The central Christian claim is the one that machinery forbids: "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). - The second life. Consoling his wife over their daughter, he offers her a soul that cannot die and that will in time come back into another body. Scripture allows one life and then a verdict: "And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment" (Hebrews 9:27). - The ladder. His entire moral programme is imitation. Look steadily at good men and you will want to be one, and wanting is most of the way there. Scripture does use that (Hebrews 13:7), but it does not think the trouble is that we cannot picture goodness. Paul’s complaint is that he can picture it perfectly and still cannot do it (Romans 7:18–19), which is why the rescue arrives as a gift rather than a curriculum: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8–9). He got further without a Bible than almost anyone has, and he is worth reading for the ground he covered as much as for the ground he never crossed.