Fifteen Eighty Four

In the recent Christopher Nolan film “The Odyssey” we see a curious depiction of Circe transforming Odysseus’ crew of sailors into pigs. The cinematic representation drips with Circe’s disdain for the sailors and their crude, vicious, animal-like qualities. Some suggest that Nolan’s departure in this regard from precise details of the Homeric narrative is driven in part by a longer tradition of feminist readings of the character Circe.1 Nolan uses poetic license to depict Circe as harshly critical of Odysseus and his crew for their violation of the basic convention of hospitality or xenia, both at Troy and in their voyage across the Mediterranean, due to their relentless recourse to violence and trickery.

We find in Plutarch another take on the Circe story. Plutarch’s Circe shows disdain for Odysseus himself, and not for violating laws of hospitality against the Trojans, but for his conceit striving for personal glory and honor often at the expense of his crew. The broader thrust of Plutarch’s dialogue offers a broader civilizational critique suggesting that a model of simplicity and moderation is constantly undermined by the constant striving and overreaching found in organized human societies, as exemplified by the figure of Odysseus himself. It offers a more probing and philosophical questioning of the virtues that should guide humanity in their collective lives.

The moral essay “Beasts are Rational” (or sometimes known by its Latin title “Bruta animalis ratione uti, sive Gryllus”) takes the form of a dialogue among Odysseus, Circe and Odysseus’ crew now in the form of pigs, as one of the pigs named Gryllus (or Mr. Grunt) has been granted the capacity to communicate in Greek by Circe and to relay the crew’s thoughts. Circe demands that Odysseus gain the consent of his former sailors to be transferred back into human form before she can work her magic, but she may already know that the pigs or sailors may not be as willing as Odysseus presumes. In Plutarch’s account, the pigs not only demonstrate their rationality (which Plutarch also ascribes to animals in other writings), but significantly their awareness of the benefits of simplicity and of a life according to nature. They are reluctant to be returned to their human form given the propensity of humans in collective life to both excess and vice. The Circe story in Plutarch’s hands becomes a Hellenistic morality tale and a cautionary critique of civilization. Circe is not punishing Odysseus and his crew in this account, but offering them them insight into the principles of a life well lived.

This way of telling the tale of Circe harkens back to deeper traditions in the classical world, such as that of the Cynics, who espoused a moral outlook based on a stark distinction between physis (nature) and nomos (culture) and who saw nature as a more reliable guide for the philosophic and moral life. Yet, it also served as a lynchpin in inspiring much later forms of critical thought in the early-modern period. Numerous Enlightenment thinkers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, espoused a vision of nature as a basis from which to criticize the excesses and corruption which they perceived in the manners, the social structures and the political functioning of the old regime. As Rousseau suggests in the Second Discourse, while human subjects are born good in their original natural state, they are inevitably corrupted by the social order.

The most recent book published by Cambridge University Press in their blue book series of key texts in the History of Political Thought offers a selection of new translations of key essays and writings by Plutarch of key significance for the history of political thought. Traditional classical scholars of Plutarch today tend to regard him as either a philosopher in the later Hellenistic Platonic tradition concerned with sometimes more esoteric questions of Delphic inscriptions and the nature of the soul, or as a staunch defender of the Greek tradition tirelessly compiling and drawing from earlier historical accounts of the ancient world, to reconstruct a moral account of key characters of the ancient world. Yet, from the perspective of the history of ideas, it is evident that Plutarch was a key source for many canonical thinkers in the European tradition. Machiavelli famously asked his friend Vettori to send him a copy of Plutarch’s Lives while he was awaiting trial in a Florentine prison and contemplating the drafting of The Prince (1513). Earlier, both Guillaume Budé and Claude de Seyssel used their vernacular translations of Plutarch as works to be read to the monarch as a form of political education. Erasmus also wrote his famous treatise The Education of a Christian Prince (1516) shortly after working on Plutarch translations with Aldus Manutius in Venice, and he integrated lessons from Plutarch’s writings into that work. This was the beginning of a long history of reception of Plutarch’s work specific to the tradition of political reflection, and it continued into the nineteenth century.

This book offers for the first time a collection of Plutarch’s essays and Lives that are most relevant for the history of political reflection. It includes new translations of the Lives of Lycurgus, Antony and Phocion, as well as new translations into English of some essays for the first time in over half a century, including Plutarch’s essay “On Women’s Courage”. These translations by noted classical scholar Liz Sawyer have been undertaken with the student in mind to ensure that the works are highly readable and accessible and with explanatory notes. The collection of writings is also accompanied by an introductory essay by Rebecca Kingston. The essay offers an introduction to Plutarch for the uninitiated reader, a brief account of the specific texts included in the collection, and a brief narrative of the uptake and reception of these texts in the subsequent history of political thought. The latter narrative is treated more in-depth in Rebecca Kingston’s Plutarch’s Prism: Classical Reception and public humanism in France and England 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). Still, there is much more to be said regarding the reception of Plutarch in the tradition of the history of political thought. It is hoped that this edition of Selected Writings of Plutarch will inspire new research and reflection on the questions important to Plutarch that political theorists have contemplated through the centuries.

Towards the end of his essay “On Listening to Lectures”, Plutarch describes the learning process not as the continual accumulation of facts and knowledge, but as the consideration of selected arguments and facets of another’s reflections to fuel one’s own independent thought and desire for the truth, using the metaphor of a spark. It is ultimately in this spirit, particularly regarding an ancient thinker for whom individual character and the virtues were so important in human and in public life, that we hope this edition can have an impact.