Plutarch’s Lives are perennially interesting; even in inferior translations they hold the attention from cover to cover. And the reason of this is not far to seek: they deal with men of the first order, and they deal only with men whose careers and achievements have dramatic action and the story-telling quality; and these stories of real life are told with freshness, vigor and intelligence. The Lives are a portrait gallery of famous men. They are a mine of information, not always minutely accurate but truthful and full of vitality. They are sound to the heart in moral feeling and judgment; and are, therefore, the best possible text-books for the making of strong men. Montaigne, who was a shrewd judge in such matters, says in his “Essay on the Edu cation of Children;” Let him inquire into the manners, revenues, and alliances of princes, things in themselves very pleasant to learn, and very useful to know. In conversing with men, I mean, and principally those who only live in the records of history, he shall by reading these books, converse with those great and heroic souls of former and better ages. What profit shall he not reap as to the business of men, by reading the Lives of Plutarch?

the “business of men” in the world; the affairs, not of traffic and commerce, but of conduct, manners and action. This is the stuff of which men are made, and the Lives form a great Book of Heroes; they have been well described as “the pasture of great souls.” There is another good reason why men and women who speak English should read them;

Plutarch was born about fifty years after the birth of Christ. A Greek by birth and by speech, the future biographer found himself, when he began to take account of such matters, a world of which Rome was the center as Well as the master. There is reason to believe that he studied in Athens, which had become a university city, and in Egypt, whither the world-wide interest in “the wisdom of the Egyptians” sent him. Later he took the road which men of intellectual ambition or aspiration thronged, and found himself in Rome.

Bacon wrote about great subjects; Plutarch, in the Lives, about great men. He had the advantage of dealing with material of the highest interest, but if he had lacked the writer’s gifts of selection, arrangement and style, his material would not have saved him. Fortunately, he was a man of literary feeling and training as well as a student of history; and it has been well said that he wrote over a hundred books and was never dull! Montaigne declared that he would hardly be without Plutarch; he was “so universal and so full.” He adds, with characteristic frankness: “I no sooner cast an eye on him than I purloin either a leg or a wing.” The earliest modern essayist certainly borrowed with great freedom from his classical predecessor, but Plutarch had much to lend and Montaigne returned his loans with generous interest by his happy faculty of giving a quotation an effective setting. Shakespeare went to the same source for the material for “Antony and Cleopatra,” “Julius Caesar,” and “Coriolanus;” and Plutarch’s prose suited his purpose so well that it is introduced more than once with very unimportant changes; and Emerson, whose moral in sight was wonderfully keen, said of the Lives: “I do not know where to find a book—to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson’s—‘so crammed with life.’”

“I do not write Histories but Lives,” he said; “nor do the most conspicuous acts of necessity exhibit a man’s virtue or his vice, but oftentimes some slight circumstance, a word or a jest, shows a man’s character better than battles with the slaughter of tens of thousands, and the greatest arrays of armies and sieges of cities. Now, as painters produce a likeness by a representation of the countenance and the expression of the eyes, without troubling themselves about the other parts of the body, so must I be allowed to look rather into the signs of a man’s character, and thus give a portrait of his life, leaving others to de scribe great events and battles.”

As geographers, Sosius, crowd into the edges of their maps parts of the world which they do not know about, adding notes in the margin to the effect, that beyond this lies nothing but sandy deserts full of wild beasts, unapproachable bogs, Scythian ice, or a frozen sea, so, in this work of mine, in which I have compared the lives of the greatest men with one another, after passing through those periods which probable reasoning can reach to and real history find a footing in, I might very well say of those that are farther off, Beyond this there is nothing but prodigies and fictions, the only inhabitants are the poets and inventors of fables; there is no credit, or certainty any farther.

contumaciously

Ægeus, being desirous of children, and consulting the oracle of Delphi, received the celebrated answer which forbade him the company of any woman before his return to Athens. But the oracle being so obscure as not to satisfy him that he was clearly forbid this, he went to Trœzen, and communicated to Pittheus the voice of the god, which was in this manner,—   “Loose not the wine-skin foot, thou chief of men, Until to Athens thou art come again.”   Pittheus, therefore, taking advantage from the obscurity of the oracle, prevailed upon him, it is uncertain whether by persuasion or deceit, to lie with his daughter Æthra. Ægeus afterwards, knowing her whom he had lain with to be Pittheus’s daughter, and suspecting her to be with child by him, left a sword and a pair of shoes, hiding them under a great stone that had a hollow in it exactly fitting them; and went away making her only privy to it, and commanding her, if she brought forth a son who, when he came to man’s estate, should be able to lift up the stone and take away what he had left there, she should send him away to him with those things with all secrecy, and with injunctions to him as much as possible to conceal his journey from every one; for he greatly feared the Pallantidæ, who were continually mutinying against him, and despised him for his want of children, they themselves being fifty brothers, all sons of Pallas.

Alexander gave command to his captains that all the beards of the Macedonians should be shaved, as being the readiest hold for an enemy.

Theseus displaying not only great strength of body, but equal bravery, and a quickness alike and force of understanding, his mother Æthra, conducting him to the stone, and informing him who was his true father, commanded him to take from thence the tokens that Ægeus had left, and to sail to Athens. He without any difficulty set himself to the stone and lifted it up; but refused to take his journey by sea, though it was much the safer way, and though his mother and grandfather begged him to do so. For it was at that time very dangerous to go by land on the road to Athens, no part of it being free from robbers and murderers. That age produced a sort of men, in force of hand, and swiftness of foot, and strength of body, excelling the ordinary rate, and wholly incapable of fatigue; making use, however, of these gifts of nature to no good or profitable purpose for mankind, but rejoicing and priding themselves in insolence, and taking the benefit of their superior strength in the exercise of inhumanity and cruelty, and in seizing, forcing, and committing all manner of outrages upon everything that fell into their hands; all respect for others, all justice, they thought, all equity and humanity, though naturally lauded by common people, either out of want of courage to commit injuries or fear to receive them, yet no way concerned those who were strong enough to win for themselves. Some of these, Hercules destroyed and cut off in his passage through these countries, but some, escaping his notice while he was passing by, fled and hid themselves, or else were spared by him in contempt of their abject submission; and after that Hercules fell into misfortune, and, having slain Iphitus, retired to Lydia, and for a long time was there slave to Omphale, a punishment which he had imposed upon himself for the murder, then, indeed, Lydia enjoyed high peace and security, but in Greece and the countries about it the like villainies again revived and broke out, there being none to repress or chastise them. It was therefore a very hazardous journey to travel by land from Athens to Peloponnesus; and Pittheus, giving him an exact account of each of these robbers and villains, their strength, and the cruelty they used to all strangers, tried to persuade Theseus to go by sea. But he, it seems, had long since been secretly fired by the glory of Hercules, held him in the highest estimation, and was never more satisfied than in listening to any that gave an account of him; especially those that had seen him, or had been present at any action or saying of his. So that he was altogether in the same state of feeling as, in after ages, Themistocles was, when he said that he could not sleep for the trophy of Miltiades; entertaining such admiration for the virtue of Hercules, that in the night his dreams were all of that hero’s actions. and in the day a continual emulation stirred him up to perform the like. Besides, they were related, being born of cousins-german.

He thought it therefore a dishonorable thing, and not to be endured, that Hercules should go out everywhere, and purge both land and sea from wicked men, and he himself should fly from the like adventures that actually came in his way; disgracing his reputed father by a mean flight by sea, and not showing his true one as good evidence of the greatness of his birth by…

This Sinnis had a daughter of remarkable beauty and stature, called Perigune, who, when her father was killed, fled, and was sought after everywhere by Theseus; and coming into a place overgrown with brushwood shrubs, and asparagus-thorn, there, in a childlike, innocent manner, prayed and begged them, as if they understood her, to give her shelter, with vows that if she escaped she would never cut them down nor burn them. But Theseus calling upon her, and giving her his promise that he would use her with respect, and offer her no injury, she came forth, and in due time bore him a son, named Melanippus; but afterwards was married to Deioneus, the son of Eurytus, the Œchalian, Theseus himself giving her to him. Ioxus, the son of this Melanippus who was born to Theseus, accompanied Ornytus in the colony that he carried with him into Caria, whence it is a family usage amongst the people called Ioxids, both male and female, never to burn either shrubs or asparagus-thorn, but to respect and honor them.

was the part of a brave man to chastise villainous and wicked men when attacked by them, but to seek out and overcome the more noble wild beasts. Others relate that Phæa was a woman, a robber full of cruelty and lust, that lived in Crommyon, and had the name of Sow given her from the foulness of her life and manners, and afterwards was killed by Theseus.