Great Books: Plutarch's Biography of Alexander (Part Four)

The first three parts of this essay can be read here, here, and here.

In one battle, Alexander had changed the political landscape of the Mediterranean and Asia (what we now think of as Asia Minor and the Middle East) forever. Functionally, he now controlled all of Greece and Asia Minor and became master of an unimaginable hoard of slaves and treasure seized from the Persians at Damascus. Despite his upbringing as a prince of a nation flush with military success, the spoils won from the Battle of Issus were enough to cause Alexander to remark, “This, it seems, is royalty” [550].

Plutarch uses the aftermath of the battle as another opportunity to rhapsodize on Alexander’s benevolence, detailing a half dozen or more ethical situations that arose from his success and how he, invariably, resolved them in a manner more generous than might be expected. Of greatest importance to history, as it had yet to unfold, was Alexander’s treatment of Darius’s mother, wife, and two daughters. Upon learning that they had been taken among the Persians at Damascus, Plutarch writes that:

Alexander sent Leonnatus to them, to let them know that Darius was not dead, and that they need not fear any harm from Alexander, who made war upon him only for dominion; they should themselves be provided with everything they had been used to receive from Darius. [550]

Despite the temptation to immediately pursue Darius and deliver the killing blow while he was still in retreat, Alexander decided instead to bring the eastern coast of the Mediterranean under his authority, whether by diplomacy or force. Some, like the peoples of Cyprus, surrendered without a fight. As a result, Alexander marched unopposed as far as modern day Lebanon before reaching the well-defended island city of Tyre which refused to submit to him.

With no fleet of his own to attack the island, Alexander first blockaded Tyre from land reinforcements and then set about building a land bridge to Tyre across which he could move his large siege engines and armies. Though it took seven months and the lives of hundreds of his men, Alexander eventually reached the city and overcame its defenses. He ordered the destruction of large portions of the city and sold most of its inhabitants into slavery as punishment for refusing his authority.

As with Thebes before it, the destruction of Tyre sent a chilling message to the other vassal nations that found themselves suddenly far stranded from their Persian rulers: Submit or be destroyed utterly. While the historical record tells us that the Siege of Gaza a few months later was an equally bloody ordeal, Plutarch chooses to skim over it for reasons that remain his own, deciding to fix instead on the strange manner in which Alexander was seriously wounded (his version includes a bird, a dirt clod, and an unruly siege engine). Regardless, by 332 BCE, Alexander had subdued the entirety of the eastern Mediterranean coast and, without pause, turned his attention immediately towards Egypt.

Unlike the coastal cities that held out against Alexander (who by and large fought for their own independence rather than out of a tortured sense of loyalty to Darius), Egypt was only too happy to welcome Alexander as their ruler. Plutarch’s first mention of the Egyptians announces their capitulation as an established fact, noting that, “when he was master of Egypt, designing to settle a colony of Grecians there, he resolved to build a large and populous city and give it his own name” [552]. After laying out the plans for Alexandria, Alexander set out on a dangerous journey to consult the Oracle at Ammon. While Plutarch again offers little speculation on his motivation, one can presume that his intentions were at least two-fold. First, in order to legitimize (if not secure) his sovereignty over Egypt, he would have to be anointed to some extent by its religious leaders. Second, the Oracle at Ammon was as revered as that at Delphi and Alexander, it seems, had a few questions yet that he believed only a god could answer.

Having passed through the wilderness, they came to the place where the high priest, at the first salutation, bade Alexander welcome from his father Ammon. And being asked by him whether any of his father’s murderers had escaped punishment, he charged him to speak with more respect, since his was not a mortal father. Then, Alexander, changing his expression, desired to know if any of those who murdered Phillip were yet unpunished, and further concerning dominion, whether the empire of the world was reserved for him? This, the god answered, he should obtain and that Phillip’s death was fully revenged, which gave him so much satisfaction that he made splendid offerings to Jupiter, and gave the priests very rich presents. [553]

Every historian who approaches Alexander as a subject must wrestle at some point with the question of whether or not he believed that he was born of divinity and Plutarch is no exception. His methodology gives him some distance from the topic as he presents evidence for and against the idea throughout the whole of this biography. It is, nonetheless, tempting to look at this moment in Ammon where Alexander is informed in no uncertain terms that he is the son of the greatest god (for the priests, Ammon; for Alexander, Zeus; and for Plutarch, Jupiter) and wonder if this is when he began to believe his own hype. His success as a general was without question as he had accomplished in three years what the Greek city-states, in hundreds of years, could not. Claiming that one was a distant descendent of a god (as both Phillip and Olympias had) was the privilege of the nobility. To insist that one was the direct offspring of Zeus was an exponentially more audacious claim and yet that, whether by his own design or by those who venerated him in the chaos that reigned after his death, is the myth that survived him.

While in Egypt, Alexander received a letter from Darius outlining terms for a cease-fire. In exchange for the cessation of hostilities between them and the safe return of the hostages, Darius was willing to cede all lands west of the Euphrates to Alexander, along with a ridiculous amount of treasure and the hand of one of his daughters in marriage to Alexander to bind the agreement. Alexander sent word back that unless Darius came before him and yielded his authority, he would come and take it by force.

Soon after, Darius’ wife, Statira, died in childbirth. Plutarch explicitly states on numerous occasions that Alexander did not force himself upon her or any of Darius’s family during their captivity. The timing however of this particular death (some two years after Darius’ defeat at Issues) suggests that someone was keeping her company in the aftermath and, given the lifestyle that Alexander lavished upon Statira and the others, it makes more sense that the child would have been his as, by the rules of war, she was part of his personal spoils. With peace denied and new indignities having been suffered by Darius, there was to be nothing to stand in the way of a fresh engagement between these two empires.

Great Books: Plutarch's Biography of Alexander (Part Three)

The first two parts of this essay can be read here and here.

Before extending our discussion of Alexander’s exploits among the Persians, Plutarch’s own narrative designs insist that we take a moment to acknowledge a few aspects of Alexander’s person and the world in which he lived not related specifically to military conquest. Plutarch makes the observation early on in his biography that Alexander’s temperament was different than many of his contemporaries. Growing up, as he did, in an ascendant kingdom flush with new wealth, his principle interest seems to be focused more on knowledge than anything else (as suggested in the story of his meeting with the Persian ambassadors). We can easily imagine Phillip as something of a social-evolutionary throwback; a king eventually ruling over Greek cities in disarray that had done away with kings as an institution of government for centuries. He had accepted the mantle of Greek Supreme Commander against the Persians, but there is little evidence from what remained of his life that he ever intended to fulfill that promise. It was a title that showed his mastery over the more civilized people to his south and, perhaps little else, which, given the sorry state of affairs in Greece at the time, may have suited them just fine.

Alexander, in contrast, embraced information acquired through learning. Though he was a noted patron of the arts, Plutarch tells us that he disdained sport of all kind, presumably recognizing it as a sublimation of the military urge for which he strove in its pure form for the length of his adult life. He seems, at least from this distance, determined to bring to life the legendary qualities that he found in The Iliad and lacking in the world around him. It is only fitting then that his last action before engaging the Persians for the first time was to visit Troy and bask in the vicarious glory of its relics and statuary; in some sense, mixing the functions of ritual and play into one seamless act of devotion to a long-since decayed ideal.


The other exotic aspect of Plutarch’s examination of Alexander’s life is the attention paid to omens and sacrifices as the catalyst for the more climatic events. Both Alexander and Darius draw sustained inspiration from various portentous events though, in nearly every case, the omen reported is always favorable to their endeavors. This leads us to believe that either their interpreters were smart enough to know that every odd occurrence better equal something good or their life expectancy might not be so hot or that bad omens were perhaps left unmentioned as they diverted the observer from whatever action against which it portended. Some have noted that Rome in the 1st century CE was, in many ways, more superstitious than the late-Hellenic culture from which Alexander himself emerged. This sustained emphasis on the power of the supernatural on mortal events is woven into the very fabric of Alexander’s myth, if not his life and makes Plutarch’s re-imagination of him perhaps more epic than if spun by an earlier or later writer.

After having taken the Pamphylian coast down to Side, Alexander turned his army north and westward on a winding path through rugged terrain. Skirmishing with unallied Pisidians along the way, he eventually reached the land of the Phrygians. While Plutarch describes him as having “conquered the Phrygians,” he makes no mention of a siege which suggests that the city merely capitulated to his obvious military superiority. Gordium was also a major stopping point on the Persian royal road leading to the eastern coast. In taking this city, Alexander effectively cut Darius off from using the road to rush reinforcements or supplies to his insurgents still operating in those territories.


As Alexander turned again southward, after having taken another city on the road a little further west, and eventually entered Cilicia. Perhaps weakened from wounds sustained in earlier battles, Alexander became gravely ill in Cilicia. Plutarch suggests that bathing in a cold river set off his sickness and that he was only cured by medicinal means that brought him closer to death before bringing him back from it. Temporarily deprived of leadership, the massed army of Macedonian, Greek, and assimilated armies along the way came to a standstill in Cilicia. As Plutarch recounts, the significance of this was not lost on Darius even if he misjudged the reason.

Darius was by this time upon his march from Susa, very confident, not only in the number of his men, which amounted to six hundred thousand, but likewise in a dream, which the Persian soothsayers interpreted rather in flattery to him than according to the natural probability…There was at this time in Darius’s army a Macedonian refugee, named Amyntus, one who was pretty well acquainted with Alexander’s character. This man, when he saw Darius intended to fall upon the enemy in the passes and defiles, advised him earnestly to keep where he was, in the open and extensive plains, it being the advantage of a numerous army to have field-room enough when it engages with a lesser force. Darius, instead of taking his counsel, told him he was afraid the enemy would endeavor to run away, and so Alexander would fall out of his hands. “That fear,” replied Amyntus, “is needless, for assure yourself that far from avoiding you, he will make all the speed he can to meet you, and is now most likely on his march toward you.” [548-9]

As history would show, this was the omen to which Darius should have hearkened as, within days, his fortunes and the once-impervious empire that rested on his shoulders would be rent asunder by Alexander and his armies at the Battle of Issus. Meeting in the valleys and swamps of Cilicia, Darius realized too late that his overwhelming numbers were of little use in the fragmented terrain and lost not only the battle but his wife, two daughters, and a substantial amount of treasure in a hasty retreat that barely saved his own life.

1st image- Portrait of Alexander the Great. Marble, 2nd-1st century BC. Said to be from Alexandria, Egypt. Photo by Andrew Dunn, 2004.

2nd image- Alexander at Ilium by Andre Castaigne (1898-99)

3rd image- Alexander Cutting the Gordion Knot, by Martino Altomonte. 1708.

4th image- The Battle of Alexander at Issus. Albrecht Altdorfer. 1529

Great Books: Plutarch's Biography of Alexander (Part Two)

This first portion of this essay can be read here.

Plutarch remarks that Alexander’s transition to power could not have come at a more pivotal moment in Macedonian history. While Phillip’s throne could and did pass from him to Alexander by virtue of blood (as well as ambition), the same could not be assumed of his mantle as Supreme Commander of the Greeks against the Persian Empire. If the Greeks were to be counted among Macedonia’s subjects, they would have to be conquered anew and many feared that the effort necessary to bring this about might rend the country apart.

Alexander, by Plutarch’s account, would hear none of this caution and, after subduing the barbarian tribes to his north and west to the banks of the Danube, he turned his attention to important Greek cities already in revolt, Thebes and Athens. After making initial attempts at diplomacy, Alexander turned the full might of his armies upon Thebes so that, in Plutarch’s word, he might make them, “so severe an example [that it] might terrify the rest of Greece into obedience” [545]. In 335 BCE, Thebes, with the exception of her temples and a house belonging to the poet Pindar, was burned to the ground and its citizenry, for the most part, sold into slavery.

As might be expected, the Athenians quickly lost their own taste for defiance and entered Alexander’s burgeoning empire as willing and respected servants. With the wealth and armaments of the whole of civilized Greece (with the exception of Sparta) backing him, Alexander accepted the title as the Supreme Greek Commander against the Persian Empire and began plotting the downfall of his counterpart among them, Darius III. Plutarch makes no mention of whether the Greeks actually thought Alexander could deliver what he was promising but it does not take a time machine to appreciate that a young, ambitious ruler making mischief outside of Greece had to be preferable to one focused on micro-managing affairs at home. Before venturing to the East to begin his campaign, Alexander traveled to the Oracle at Delphi to gauge divine opinion on his actions. Plutarch, who, in his role as high priest of Apollo at Delphi would have access to records regarding the event, recounts it as such:

Then he went to Delphi, to consult Apollo concerning the success of the war he had undertaken, and happening to come on one of the forbidden days, when it was esteemed improper to give any answer from the oracle, he sent messengers to desire the priestess to do her office; and when she refused, on the plea of a law to the contrary, he went up himself, and began to draw her by force into the temple, until tired and overcome with his importunity, “My son,” said she, “thou are invincible.” [546]

From Delphi, Alexander travels on to Troy where, we are told, he makes a sacrifice to Minerva (Athena). Given what we know about Alexander’s love for the Iliad, it’s not hard to imagine him choosing Troy as his point of departure so that he might bask in the glory of legend before creating a few of his own. He would not have long to wait as a large Persian army, commanded by satraps (local governors appointed by Darius III) was amassed on the opposite side the river Granicus and represented the very large barrier that Alexander would have to go through in order to gain access to the interior of Asia.

The Battle of Granicus. Engraving based on a painting by Lebrun


By Plutarch’s account, the battle begins with Alexander making a foolhardy rush across the river in the middle of the night on his horse to attack the enemy with his cavalry splashing along behind him to keep him from getting killed in the opening moments of the campaign. Plutarch writes:

However, he persisted obstinately to gain the passage, and at last with much ado making his way up the banks…he had instantly to join in mere confused hand-to-hand combat with the enemy, before he could draw up his men, who were still passing over into any order. For the enemy pressed him with loud and warlike outcries; and charging horse against horse, plied with their lances; after they had broken and spent these, they fell into it with their swords. [547]

Conjuring an image that recalls Groo the Wanderer moreso than the soon-to-be master of the known world, this is an archetype that Plutarch utilizes over and over; of Alexander as an impetuous but fearless leader who is always willing to throw himself headlong into the enemy with no concern for his well-being. While we can accept some of this as myth-building (as it reinforces the essential nature of Alexander’s conquest), one is tempted to believe some of the hype, given the number of times that Alexander is gravely wounded in battle.

As the Greek army arrives on the opposite bank to join their war-crazed leader, the Persian forces are quickly overwhelmed and dissolve under the force of their attack. Only one group of Greek mercenaries surrender to Alexander, presumably hoping their common heritage will spare them the indignity of execution. Alexander’s response is to attack them without warning, resulting in further casualties. Plutarch obviously doesn’t approve of this Greek on Greek violence as he describes Alexander’s refusal to accept their surrender as “guided rather by passion than judgment,” noting later that the “obstinacy of his to cut off these experiences desperate men cost him the lives of more of his own soldiers than all the battle before” [547-8].


The Capture of Miletus by Andre Castaigne (1898-1899)

Whatever his shortcomings may have been at the Battle of the Granicus, Alexander knew that he had changed the rules of the battle that the Greeks had been fighting against the Persians for centuries with a single victory. Turning his army southward, he took the rich city of Sardis and then went on down the Western coast to liberate former Greek colonies at Ephesus, Miletus, and Halicarnassus. These early successes provided Alexander with something of a quandary. In toppling Sardis, he had disrupted Persian authority in the entire area and returned to Greek authority the very colonies that had been the original source of enmity between the two peoples. Traditional strategy, like that exercised by Darius, dictated that he should consolidate his rule in the area and, as Plutarch puts it, “made himself secure in the resources of these provinces” [548].

There was something, however, about the relative ease with which he had been able to accomplish a feat that had eluded the Greeks for hundreds of years that spoke to his more impulsive side. The decision, according to Plutarch and the myth-makers that preceded him, ultimately did not come from Alexander himself but from an unexpected intervention of the supernatural.

While he was thus deliberating what to do, it happened that a spring of water near the city of Xanthus in Lycia, of its own accord, swelled over its banks, and threw up a copper plate, upon the margin of which was engraven in ancient characters, that the time would come when the Persian empire should be destroyed by the Grecians. [548]

Whether spurred by his own ambition or this miraculous prophesy coming to light just as he debated his next move, Alexander quickly marshaled his armies and turned them eastward, conquering along the treacherous Pamphylian coast until they reached the city of Side which surrendered without a fight.

Great Books: Plutarch's Biography of Alexander (Part One)

Great Books: Plutarch’s Lives of Noble Grecian and Romans: Alexander
Written by Plutarch sometime in the latter part of the 1st century CE
Place: Chaeronea in the province of Boeotia (Greece)


Alexander the Great. 3rd century BC statue, signed "Menas". - Picture by: Giovanni Dall'Orto


The complete text of Plutarch’s biography of Alexander can be found online at http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/alexandr.html
and utilizes the same Dryden translation as the quotations in this essay. All page attributions refer to the 2nd edition of the Great Books of the Western World series from Encyclopedia Britannica.

With our third Plutarchan biography now under analysis, we are able to discern at least two valuable truisms in his writing on the lives of historical figures. First, the closer that the subject approaches to the time in which Plutarch is writing, the more credible strains of information that he must filter regarding that subject in order to create a narrative that is truly his own. Second, while Plutarch places a high premium on empirical evidence (literal mountains of which still existed in Plutarch’s time), he does not discard what is clearly hearsay or outright myth-building in his quest to reconstruct the meaning of Alexander’s life. Towards the end of his introduction, Plutarch defends his approach with candor.

As portrait painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face, in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavor by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated of by others [541].

He begins, however with those facts about Alexander’s birth and lineage that are as beyond dispute as a study of the past will allow. Alexander was born to King Phillip II of Macedonia and one of his wives, Olympias. Both lines could purportedly trace their lineage back to Zeus himself though this probably tells us less about his actual ancestry and more about (forgive the pun) the penetration of the overarching culture that venerated Zeus in this and other parts of Greece.

Plutarch spends a good deal of time in his treatment of Alexander’s childhood emphasizing the tensions between Phillip and his son, beginning with the story (or stories) surrounding his birth. Olympias, he records, participated in cultic rituals unfamiliar to Macedonia that venerated snakes and, quite possibly, incorporated them into the act of worship. From this simple point of departure, a wide range of myth is generated regarding Alexander’s birth, ranging from a number of dreams predicting his greatness to a full-blown visitation by Zeus himself to the Queen’s bed in order to conceive the world’s new master.



Later, Plutarch describes a meeting between a young Alexander and ambassadors from the Persian Empire in which he so impresses them with his penetrating questions that they praise him as Phillip’s superior even before he ascends to the throne. This, added with commentary that Alexander chafed at his father’s every military success as a battle that he would not be glorified in waging himself reinforces a narrative that Alexander considered himself as somehow bigger than the kingdom he would inherit as well as the King from whom he would inherit it. Indeed, this very idea is placed into Phillip’s mouth after Alexander tames a wild horse named Bucephalus with only his natural graces, to which Phillip is supposed to have uttered his timeless words, “O my son, look thee out a kingdom equal to and worth of thyself, for Macedonia is too little for thee” [543].

At first, though, Alexander’s remarkable qualities seem to earn him great favor with his father. Though Alexander’s early education was overseen by famed teachers of his time, Phillip thought enough of his son’s potential to recruit perhaps the Greek world’s most renowned philosopher, Aristotle to be his tutor at the age of fourteen.



It proved to be something of a Faustian bargain for Aristotle. In exchange for his services, Phillip restored and repopulated Stagira, Aristotle’s birthplace which had been destroyed in recent conquest. Aristotle ended up spending two years actively teaching Alexander before the demands of the state drew the young prince away to more pressing affairs. History suggests that Aristotle spent four more years (until Alexander’s ascendancy to the throne) at the palace before returning to an Athens now subdued by Macedonian authority. Plutarch makes little pit stops while telling Alexander’s tale to indicate how the relationship with Aristotle cooled over time, indicating perhaps that the master was dissatisfied with his student’s application of his theories on governance. Still, Alexander was reported to have carried an edition of the Iliad notated by Aristotle himself on the length of his journeys and never repudiated his teacher to such as degree as to order his execution; a rarity among those who stayed too long within his erratic orbit.

Just as Alexander is elevated to regent of the kingdom at the age of 16 (notching a few military victories of his own in his father’s absence), dissension about the eventual line of succession begins to arise. Working militarily in tandem, Alexander and Phillip conquered both the Thebans and Athenians. Phillip was eventually named as the Supreme Commander of a planned invasion of the Persian empire on behalf of all the Greek cities but Sparta. Upon his return to Macedonia, however, he chose to marry a woman named Cleopatra, the niece of Attalus, one of his more celebrated generals. As Olympias was not of Macedonian origin, an heir between the couple would have threatened Alexander’s claim to the throne, despite his proven service to the kingdom.

These fears came to a head at the royal wedding when Attalus offered a toast in hopes of a legitimate heir to Phillip’s throne. Alexander became incensed and began verbally berating him, only to have his father advance upon him with the intention to kill him. As Plutarch recounts the story, Phillip tripped on his way and fell flat on his face before the disgusted Alexander who, in turn, fled the capital with his mother. After a short self-imposed exile, tensions between the Phillip and Alexander were eased by friends interceding on the behalf of both and, in time, Alexander returned to his father’s side.

This threat to his eventual rule became more exaggerated when he later intercepted a courier from a neighboring state, offering the king’s eldest daughter to another of Alexander’s brother, Arrideus. Fearing his father again meant to bypass him in the eventual transfer of power, Alexander sent an advocate back to the Persian satrap, tarnishing Arrideus as an illegitimate heir and offering his own services as husband to the princess. Furious that his son would undermine his authority so openly among his vassals, Phillip banished all of Alexander’s entourage from the kingdom.



Whether guided by Olympius, Alexander or other less visible forces within the kingdom, a man named Pausanias, rendered all of the political posturing moot when he assassinated Phillip. After dispatching his enemies and other contenders to the throne, Alexander then ascended the throne of Macedonia at the age of twenty. He was taking over a kingdom, “beset on all sides with great dangers and rancorous enemies” [545]. Though Phillip had radically expanded the influence of Macedonian authority, the lands he conquered were far from subjugated and still desired internal rule. It was poised on this precipice of outright rebellion across the Macedonian kingdom that Alexander took the reins of power and began plotting his own course forward; one that would lead him away from Macedonia, never to return.

Great Books: Plutarch's Biography of Numa Pompilius (Part Three of Three)

The first two portions of this essay can be read here and here.

There are two final aspects of Numa’s reign that bear some consideration before moving on to Plutarch’s comparison of Numa and Lycurgus. The most convincing piece of evidence that Plutarch presents in proving some connection between Numa and Pythagoras comes in a discussion of Numa’s preferred mode of worship. In addition to reorganizing the clergy of the city to reflect this shift away from wanton war-making, Numa issued two edicts that run counter to everything happening in Greece or Italia at the time. The first was a ban on idolatry and, the second, the reliance on the oral tradition rather than the written one to impart the most important aspects of culture.

Plutarch writes that, “Numa forbade the Romans to represent God in the form of a man or beast, nor was there any painted or graven images of a deity admitted amongst them” on the basis of his belief that saw “the first principle of being as transcending sense and passion, invisible and incorrupt, and only to be apprehended by abstract intelligence” [53]. This is interesting because it mirrors a transition that took place among a people deeply committed to the written language as their primary means of transmission. Numa may have found the oral tradition more effective for dampening factional disputes that arise over the interpretation of fixed writing. Whatever the reason, we may infer that in the next few centuries, Rome turned away from the anthropomorphic pantheistic religions that surrounded them and, in a very real sense, gave them a cultural distinction that could not easily be absorbed by influence from the Greeks or Gauls.

One must also assume that the emphasis on the spoken word caused rapid developments in the Roman language due to the new complexity of topics it was being asked to handle. Plutarch makes many remarks about the similarity of words from the Roman lexicon that borrowed on Greek vocabulary extensively. Perhaps it was the oral codification that led to the development of a stable and separate language, Latin, to emerge in its full potential some seven to eight hundred years later (depending on who you believe) to replace Greek as the language of culture.

Plutarch’s comparison of Lycurgus and Numa Pompilius

The complete text of Plutarch’s Lycurgus and Numa Compared can be found online at http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/n_l_comp.html and uses the same translation as this essay. Page numbers correspond to the 2nd ed of the Great Books series from Encyclopedia Britannica.

For all of their similarities, Plutarch finds Numa and Lycurgus to be studies in puzzling contradiction. Noting first those elements of their reforms held in common (the disdain for luxury, the use of religion to enforce the mandates of the state), Plutarch moves on to systematically contrasting their differences. Numa’s primary goal was to temper the war-like character of the Roman and Sabine peoples while Lycurgus instituted rigorous martial obligations (not unlike the samurai of Japan) upon those who would claim to be Spartan, though for the purpose of self-defense more than expansion. Of the two, Plutarch finds Numa’s goals more virtuous as seeking the good as its own end whereas the good that Lycurgus seeks is one that offers something, namely, security and, for his city, immortality. Plutarch also notes that while Numa’s reforms improved the lot of slaves, those of Lycurgus seemed more sympathetic to the rights of women as daughters, wives, mothers, if not as people.

Another drastic divergence between the two was their attitude towards wealth. For Lycurgus, the inequitable distribution of land (and therefore wealth) was the fundamental evil that had corrupted what we can only assume he believed was once a stable and virtuous system of governance. Plutarch gives no record of Numa taking great concern about the vice of greed beyond offering lands outside the city to farm for the less fortunate living within it. Otherwise, he suggests, Numa allowed, “free scope [beyond war-making] to every other means of obtaining wealth; nor did he endeavor to do away with inequality in this respect, but permitted riches to be amassed to any extent, and paid no attention to the gradual and continual augmentation and influx of poverty” [63].

The final irony is that, though Lycurgus’ system of governance was more autocratic and his goals, less lofty than his Roman counterpart, it was his reforms which lasted the test of time. Most were still in practice during the Peloponnesian War, some four hundred years later, and, by Plutarch’s account, “so soon as the Lacedaemonians fell from the institutions of Lycurgus, they sank from the highest to the lowest state” [64]. Most of Numa’s reforms, in contrast, were undone immediately upon his death and Rome reignited its engines of war, consuming first the kingdoms of the Italian peninsula before moving on to the world stage with yet grander schemes of world domination.

Are we to infer from this that aspiration to the higher virtue does not always equal success using the standards by which history measures the evolution of human culture? Plutarch himself seems perplexed as to the lesson history teaches here, noting in his closing that, “A question like that will need a long answer, if it is to be one to satisfy men who take the better to consist in riches, luxury, and dominion, rather than in security, gentleness, and that independence which is accompanied by justice” [64].

Great Books: Plutarch's Biography of Numa Pompilius (Part 2)

Part One of this essay can be read here.

In the end, Numa is convinced by his father and kinsmen to accept the responsibility and ascend the throne of Rome as its king. After making the appropriate sacrifices, he proceeded there, only to be met by crowds of politicians and well-wishers as he neared the city, creating a sense, according to Plutarch, “that they seemed to be receiving, not a new king, but a new kingdom” [52]. Numa refused to take the robe and scepter of rule until his ascension had been formally sanctioned by the gods of the city who, conveniently, provided the oracle necessary to move things forward.

In his initial moves as he takes power, we see that Numa plans to act according to his virtue and try and pacify the warlike Roman peoples. In his first act, he disbands the Celeres, a group of one hundred bodyguards loyal to the King and not the city (much like the Praetorian guard of later imperial Rome). One can imagine that the oligarchs and citizens alike saw this as a marked shift from Romulus’ often bloody style of rule. In his second act, he established a divine cult to Quirinus (the transfigured version of Romulus), no doubt to soothe tensions among those once loyal to the former king about who had murdered him.

These two edicts seem, on the surface, innocuous enough but, actually provide us a blueprint for how Numa would go on to reshape the Roman culture. As he surveyed that which he had found himself in charge of, Plutarch writes that he found a city that was:

In its origin, formed by daring and warlike spirits, whom bold and desperate adventure brought thither from every quarter, it had found in perpetual war and incursions on its neighbors its after sustenance and means of growth, and in conflict with danger the source of new strength; like piles, which the blows of the hammer serve to fix into the ground [53].

In order to pacify the Roman lust for war, Numa used the tools of religion available to him to transform the people from soldiers to farmers. By mixing traditional religion in with a few supernatural innovations of his own, Numa was able to create an environment where adhering to the old ways of doing things would be considered impious. He also transformed the clergy into an arm of government in its own right, mediating disputes between citizens as well as making the conditions that make war possible as difficult as possible to achieve. So, it is said, only during the reign of Numa Pompilius were the gates to the Temple of Mars left closed, indicating the city was at peace with the known world.

More profoundly, Numa delivered a mechanism to dissolve the kin ties that separated Roman from Sabine and kept tensions between the two groups as a constant sub-text to any political progress in the city. To combat this, Numa established trade guilds that segregated people into groups dictated by their skills and vocation, rather than by their ancestral heritage. This also allowed some amount of collective political power to accrue in the hands of those that might otherwise have no voice in governance.

There are two more elements of Numa’s reforms that are particular interesting in their relation to one another. First, he eschewed the practice of using live animals for sacrifice to the gods, preferring, instead, “flour, wine, and the least costly offerings” [53]. Secondly, he placed great emphasis on the piety and patriotism of farming as a vocation but taking the lands won by Romulus and dividing it up among the “indigent commonality” [59] so that the ills of poverty might be mitigated and the lands adjacent to Rome, better kept. This attention paid to agriculture and animal husbandry suggest that Rome was transforming from a nomadic tribal culture to a more stable, agrarian one. Little did Numa know that those values would be the same to eventually push Rome further and further afield in order to supply their unending need for food as their population exploded.

Plutarch spends considerable time in this biography exploring the idea that Numa’s reforms were related to the Pythagoreans and, indeed, draw a parallel between Rome and the famed philosopher’s own attempt to get involved in politics. He is able to produce no historical evidence that the two men ever met, or were even alive at the same time, yet, in the midst of contrasting cryptic homilies associated with both legendary figures, Plutarch does reveal a meaningful truth about the Roman audience for which he is writing. As a philosopher himself, Numa would have been deeply interested to hear of innovative ideas and, as it so happens, Pythagoras conducted the majority of his social science experiments closer to Rome than his home island of Samos. So, in that sense, it is feasible that some kernel of Pythagorean thought may have well spread to Rome early in its conception. Whatever the truth behind it, this idea that Numa brought Pythagoras’ wisdom to the Roman people feeds into the same desire to create a connection between Rome and the legendary past that makes the idea that Rome was founded by Lacedaemonians and its leaders, directly descended from the heroes of the Iliad culturally plausible if historically unlikely.

Great Books: Plutarch's Biography of Numa Pompilius (Part 1)

"Capital of Justice"- caption reads, "Numa Pompilius, emperor, builder of temples and churches"

photo by Giovanni Dall'Orto, 2008

The Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans: Numa Pompilius

Written by Plutarch sometime in the latter part of the 1st century CEPlace: Chaeronea in the province of Boeotia (Greece)

The complete text of Plutarch's biography of Numa Pompilius can be found online at http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/numa_pom.html.
It utilizes the same Dryden translation used for this essay. Page numbers cited refer to the 2nd edition of the GB set.

Part One:

Plutarch’s biography of the early Roman king Numa Pompilius is marked by a very different tone than his elegiac account of Spartan law-giver Lycurgus though the two men are presumed by his writings to be contemporaries. There are a number of reasons for this differentiation still visible even from this distance. Lycurgus, remote as he was from Plutarch in time, made his impression upon Spartan culture in a place where the eventual organs of history were just beginning to develop. Though much of Plutarch’s writing on Lycurgus is informed by the same non-written culture to which every other historian of his time had access, he sews that narrative together with access to the written records from the Oracle at Delphi in a way that none other could.

Numa Pompilius, in contrast, was king in Rome at a time just after its inception as a city. Its culture was still a fractious one, split between its Roman and Sabine populations and each still ill at ease with the other. The most notable thing that can be said of Rome at this time is that they weren’t a colony of some more developed civilization to the East. In contrasting Lycurgus with Numa, Plutarch is subtly making the argument that their accomplishments were of equal importance and scope. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth as, even if we are able accept the historicity of his reforms listed here, Numa’s contributions to the greater human culture would take much longer to reach fruition and be diluted through many other ideas before arrival.

To appreciate why Plutarch presents Numa as such, one must recall who Plutarch is, a Hellenized Greek, and to whom he is writing, an audience of predominantly Roman readers in the time of first Caesars. The larger history he is writing, The Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, is creating a story that persists unto this day: a two-part story that depicts the birth of civilization with the Greeks and then passes by means both natural and supernatural into the hands of the eager and industrious Romans; an Old and New Testament of knowledge and reason that trumpets the inevitability of those virtues winding up invested into the highest echelon of Roman authority.

Plutarch eludes to some of this historical slight-of-hand in his short section on methodology in the introduction.

Though the pedigrees of noble families in Rome go back in exact form as far as Numa Pompilius, yet there is great diversity among historians concerning the time in which he reigned; a certain writer named Clodius…avers that the ancient registers of Rome were lost when the city was sacked by the Gauls, and that those which are now extant were counterfeited, to flatter and serve the humour of some men who wished to have themselves derived from some ancient and noble lineage, though in reality with no claim to it. [49]

While making no claim to this position himself, it is with this patina of incredulity that he begins on his journey to reconcile the various histories about Numa with what little may be verified. He opens the story of Numa’s reluctant rise to power with a confusing account of how Romulus, the city’s founder, left the throne. During the performance of a ritual of the state, the sky darkened with a terrible storm and, in it, Romulus disappeared. Some presumed he had been murdered. Others suggested that he had be transfigured and brought to live among the gods, giving him a posthumous name, Quirinus to reflect this change. Whatever the truth of the circumstances, Rome now had a very big problem for it seems that Romulus left no mechanism for a smooth transition of power. For a period of time, known as the interregnum, the oligarchs of the Senate passed executive responsibilities around like a hot potato but the underlying tension between the Romans and the Sabines would not allow the throne to remain unfilled indefinitely.

They devise a scheme by which the Romans will select an Sabine and the Sabines, a Roman to select between for a ruler but, as we are able to infer later, no means can be found to choose between them that enjoys the legitimacy of Romulus’ reign. Then, the Romans nominate another Sabine, Numa Pompilius that gains the wide-spread acceptance of the Sabines. The first irony in his nomination is that Numa did not even live in Rome but had long since retired to the countryside to live in austerity after the death of his first wife. The second is that he appeared to have little to no interest in being king. Upon being solicited by the original candidates to rule over Rome, Numa is quoted by Plutarch as saying,

Every alteration of a man’s life is dangerous to him; but madness, only could induce one who needs nothing, and is satisfied with everything, to quit a life he is accustomed to; which, whatever else it is deficient in, at any rate has the advantage of certainty over one wholly doubtful and unknown…The very points of my characters that are most commended mark me as unfit to reign,--love of retirement and of studies inconsistent with business, a passion that has become inveterate in me for peace, for unwarlike occupations…I should, but be, methinks, a laughing-stock, which I should go inculcate the worship of the gods and give lessons in the love of justice and the abhorrence of violence and war, to a city whose needs are rather for a captain than for a king. [51]

Plutach also suggests that there may have been another reason for Numa’s unwillingness to leave his idyllic countryside. After the death of his wife, it was widely believed that Numa entered into some kind of physical relationship with the minor goddess, Egeria. It was from her that he was supposed to have gained divine wisdom regarding the rule of man. Plutarch goes to considerable lengths to show “historical” precedent for men enjoying the charms of the feminine divine just as so many Greek women had received visitation from a masculine one for aid in the conception of a hero or king, not knowing that that the first civilizations in Mesopotamia were founded on the idea of a male consort to a goddess dispensing wisdom among the people in how best to order their culture.