From Cicero to Trump, they’re all in Plutarch’s ‘Lives’

Truman said the essayist ‘knew more about politics than all the other writers I’ve read put together.’

 
Thucydides has been enjoying quite the media moment, despite being dead for more than 2,400 years. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster have both been known to cite the Greek historian’s “Peloponnesian Wars,” which narrates the ancient conflict between Athens and Sparta. In May a group of staff at the National Security Council reportedly received a briefing from Graham Allison, who wrote a recent book about the “Thucydides trap.” Not to knock Thucydides, but Washington should reconfigure its reading list. There’s a better book for today’s times: Plutarch’s “Lives.”

“They just don’t come any better than old Plutarch,” President Harry Truman told biographer Merle Miller after he’d left office. “He knew more about politics than all the other writers I’ve read put together. When I was in politics, there would be times when I tried to figure somebody out, and I could always turn to Plutarch, and 9 times out of 10 I’d be able to find a parallel in there.”

Until fairly recently, the leading lights of Europe and America would have agreed. Plutarch’s “Lives,” which details the characters and careers of Greek and Roman men of action, were considered essential reading for citizens and statesmen. When the Founding Fathers clashed in political pamphlets, they wrote under names like Publius, Cato and Brutus. Alexander Hamilton was a huge Plutarch fan. So was his rival Thomas Jefferson, who recommended the “Lives” to several correspondents and made sure the University of Virginia had a copy. For more than a century after America’s founding, the classicist Meyer Reinhold has claimed, Plutarch’s Lives was the country’s most-read book after the Bible.

What made Plutarch so popular? He offered an education in civic virtue, packaged in a way that was pleasant to read. Our closest translation of the Greek word for “life” used in the book’s title is “biography,” but it can also mean “way of life.” Plutarch’s “Lives” offered both: It described each subject’s actions and character from birth to death, providing models for the reader to emulate. Thanks to Plutarch’s taste for the fine details that he says reveal “the signs of the soul in men,” citizens of the new American republic could intimately know the legends of antiquity and shape their own souls accordingly.

Plutarch also wrote his lives in parallel: He paired Greeks and Romans, concluding each presentation with a short “comparison” that prodded readers to decide which of the two was superior and in what respects. The point wasn’t to show that the Greeks were better than the Romans or vice versa, but to reveal the character of the competitors and nudge readers to form judgments about virtue.

Consider one pairing: Pericles, the great Athenian general who lived around 450 B.C., and Fabius, the consul of the Roman Republic who came along about 200 years later. It’s easy to admire both passively. Asking readers which of the two is better forces them to consider what exactly “better” means and how it applies to particular cases. Plutarch put his readers into the role of citizens casting a vote between worthy statesmen.

Plutarch did so, however, long after the ancient republics had declined. A citizen of the Roman Empire, he lived around A.D. 100 in the small Greek city of Chaeronea. He held local office and spoke with disdain of talented peers who decamped for careers in the metropolis. Fellow Greeks, he advised, should keep good relations with their Roman rulers, but not be too hasty to involve Rome in local affairs. Plutarch worried that demagogues might elicit Roman intervention, and thus he offered tips to fellow elites in how to oppose them. His “Lives” were meant in part to remind contemporaries what politics looked like before centralized Roman power eclipsed the cities. If a man acts on behalf of the polis, Plutarch once wrote, he is not ignoble; on the contrary, his “attention to duty and zeal are all the greater when applied to little things.”

Because Plutarch wrote at some remove from the lost world he depicted in his “Lives,” some readers have found him unreliable and out of touch. The British historian Thomas Macaulay wrote in 1828 that Plutarch and similarly earnest writers “conceived of liberty as monks conceive of love.” But Plutarch’s distance from the pre-imperial politics he depicted was also an advantage. It allowed him to view the sweep of history, from the formation of the Greek cities to their subjugation, and from the mythical founding of Rome to the end of the Republic. Plutarch distilled it all into a curriculum of contests meant to stimulate civic virtue no matter the context of his readers.

Today statesmen are scouring Thucydides for some rule so timeless that it applies to modern America just as well as it did to ancient Greece. To the extent that any such rules exist, Thucydides is surely a worthy guide. But Plutarch suggests that citizens and politicians need a different kind of education. The goal is teaching them to practice good judgment and hone their ability to discern when a proposition holds true and when it does not.

Plutarch aspired to shape character, whether his readers were local leaders in small Greek cities or important officials in Rome’s imperial hierarchy. He showed citizens how to admire and censure those in power, not to mention how to evaluate candidates for such positions. Two millennia later, in an age of novel threats and rising dangers, they still don’t come any better than old Plutarch.

Ms. Burgess manages the Program on American Citizenship at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Liebert is an associate professor of political science at the U.S. Military Academy and author of “Plutarch’s Politics: Between City and Empire.”