Plutarch

From Philosopedia

Plutarch (46?–120)

A Greek essayist and biographer, Plutarch after traveling widely became a priest, Stoic, and skeptic in his native Boeotia, a region of ancient Greece.

In The Parallel Lives (translated by Sir Thomas North in 1579), he paired biographies of Greeks and Romans and influenced many, supplying Shakespeare with material for Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra but also supplying Rousseau with doctrines and Alexander Hamilton with his heroes and ambitions.

“The superstitious man,” he wrote, “wishes he did not believe in gods, as the atheist does not, but fears to disbelieve in them.”

Bertrand Russell found Plutarch interestingly gossipy. Plutarch told how Mark Antony, before he pursued Queens, traveled with a third-rate actress, inflicting her talent upon respectable provincials. He also tells how Caesar as a young man got into trouble “for reading a love letter from Brutus’s mother during a meeting of the Senate, where no one was allowed to read anything.” For Plutarch, who condemned the vulgar notions of deity, he would rather men said there was no Plutarch than traduce his character—in other words, superstition is more impious than atheism. Commented Lord Russell, “His heroes are not statuesque figures of perfection; they are concrete men, who could have existed even if they never in fact did.”

{BDF; Lee Eisler, The Quotable Bertrand Russell; GL; HNS2; Bertrand Russell, Understanding History; TYD}