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.

Great Books: Plutarch's Biography of Lycurgus (Part 3)

You can read the first two portions of this three part essay here and here.

After listing these primary reforms that Lycurgus brought to the Spartans, Plutarch shifts gears, indulging in a somewhat exhaustive survey of the social institutions and practices that set Sparta apart from its neighbors. While this is all presented as “ideas introduced by Lycurgus,” the multi-generational aspects of his analysis of those traditions turns this middle portion of the book into something other than merely a biography on Lycurgus. Step-by-step, we are taken on a little tour of classical Sparta from its education systems (for boys), its war-making machine (for older boys), its law-making practices (you get the drift).

Though this section of the work is interesting, it also muddles up our sense of time flowing as Lycurgus, a man who lived and died, is lost to the traditions that were born from his reorganization of Spartan culture. There is an implication throughout the work that Lycurgus (or the Senate or some combination of the two) instituted all of the reforms in a relatively short period of time and yet the picture that Plutarch sketches out for us looks more like a time-lapsed photo than a snapshot in time. Much like Pythagoras (with whom Lycurgus’ legacy shares many commonalities), traditions that would have taken generations to develop into actual mores are attributed to the iconic law-giver with little attempt to harmonize the inconsistencies. This cognitive dissonance is amplified when Plutarch returns to the actual subject of his narrative.

When he perceived that his more important institutions had taken root in the minds of his countrymen, that custom had rendered them familiar and easy, that his commonwealth was now grown up and able to go alone…[Lycurgus] conceived the thought to make it immortal too, and, as far as human forecast could reach, to deliver it down unchangeable to posterity. [47]

Calling a great assembly, Lycurgus tells his people that he has one final edict to issue but before he does, he wishes to consult the Oracle at Delphi one last time. He elicits an oath from them to change no law until his return and, with that, makes his way to the Oracle. His question for the Oracle was simply whether his reforms had been for the good of Sparta. When the Oracle returned an answer that his law were sound and would result in the ascendancy of Sparta for many generations to come, Lycurgus sprung his secret plan into action. Committing the Oracle’s response to writing, he sent it to the people of Sparta and never returned, thus binding them to their oath to uphold his laws without change essentially forever. He, then, undergoes a slow and stately suicide by starvation at an undisclosed location.

So what are we to make of this biography of Lycurgus? The entire account is historically challenged by Plutarch’s accurate description of his subject in the section’s heading as legendary. Indeed, the Sparta that deposed tyranny throughout Greece for centuries and opposed Athens’ attempt to dominate the Mediterranean was itself mostly legend by the time Plutarch is writing in the first century of the Common Era. Still, Plutarch enjoys certain advantages over others who might attempt a similar work in his sustained access to the Delphic records which spanned the epoch that separates him from his subject. In combining three sources (what was commonly believed about Lycurgus, what was known about Sparta, and the records of Lycurgus’ consultations at the Oracle), Plutarch is able to assemble a story that straddles history and myth; taking from both what best harmonizes with his own authorial agenda while discarding that which does not.

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

The first portion of this essay can be read here.

Lycurgus’ establishment of the Senate as a counterbalance to the two kings (Charilaus and his brother Archelaus) was merely the beginning of his reforms. Plutarch provocatively leaves the exact manner in which he brought about the rest as something of a mystery. The protocol for law making that Plutarch describes has the kings and the Senate crafting a new law and then bringing it before an assembly of the people for an up or down vote. There are, however, four essential laws or Rhetra that Lycurgus seems to have pushed through before the new process was allowed to commence. The first was the establishment of the Senate and the process for adding or amending law. No mention is made beyond Charilaus’ brief retreat to the Temple of Minerva of any meaningful opposition to this change. Still, Lycurgus was so concerned about the efficacy of his reforms that he again consulted the Oracle at Delphi and, having received a second confirmation of divine assent at his innovation, he proceeded to establish three more Rhetra that would define Sparta for the next five hundred years.

Lycurgus’ second reform was to take the land inside Sparta and the surrounding kingdom of Lacedaemon and divide it into equal plots, divvying it up among the people equally. As the Spartan civilization had grown and become more complex, greater concentrations of wealth had fallen into fewer and fewer hands. The primary measurement of this wealth was not coin but land, which dictated the quantity of foodstuffs that a family might be able to produce in excess of what they actually needed which might then be transformed into other kinds of wealth. While this kind of wealth redistribution may seem radical even within the context of contemporary political ideologies that have sought to reduce or eliminate the gap between the haves and have-nots, the idea was not unique to Lycurgus or without precedent in the ancient world. The first great civilization in Sumer held all land in common under the authority of the Temple and all food produced on it was held similarly, to be redistributed to the people of the city on the basis of need. Moreover, there was a tradition in Judaism that after a set period of time, any land acquired by one person at the expense of another was essentially forfeited on the basis of a family’s fundamental right to a particular piece of land as their birthright. One is tempted to believe that Lycurgus was ignorant of these traditions. Plutarch, on the other hand, is specific in noting that Lycurgus took great inspiration from some laws of the Cretans as the basis for his own reforms. Whether this particular facet was borrowed from them, from elsewhere, or conceived of whole cloth from his imagination is lost to the ages.

The third reform, an extension of Lycurgus’ assault on the corrupting influence of wealth was to abolish gold, silver, and other precious metals as legal currency within the state in favor of a functionally worthless currency based on large quantities of unworkable iron. This is a means with a panoply of discernable ends. It made the accumulation of coin a fruitless task. Plutarch wryly notes that, “to lay up twenty or thirty pounds, there was required a pretty large closet, and, to remove it, nothing less than a yoke of oxen” [36]. Lycurgus would go on to abolish all “needless and superfluous arts,” but the eradication of easily transferred monies made that edict itself superfluous. Though Plutarch doesn’t bring it up in the text, one must also assume that this Rhetra had the effect of isolating Sparta from trade with other developing city-states that didn’t share the Lacedaemonian disdain for coin for centuries to come.

If we are to take Plutarch at his word, Lycurgus’ first three reforms were accepted by the people, however begrudgingly, as means aiming at the highest social good. The fourth, seemingly innocuous in contrast with some as tangible as land re-distribution and the eradication of wealth, struck so deeply the nerves of ambition and status that it was met with eventual violence.

The third and most masterly stroke of this great lawgiver, by which he struck a yet more effectual blow against luxury and the desire of riches, was the ordinance, he made, that they should all eat in common, of the same and same meat, and of kinds that were specified, and should not spend their lives at home, laid on costly couches at splendid tables, delivering themselves up into the hands of their tradesmen and cooks to fatten them in corners, like greedy brutes, and to ruin not their minds only but their very bodies which, enfeebled by indulgence and excess, freedom from work, and, in a word, of as much care and attendance as if they were continually sick. [36]

Plutarch goes into extraordinary detail about the nature of these daily, common feastings but it is in a passing observation on the name used to describe them (phiditia) that he reveals something important about their implementation, noting that the “Cretans called them andria” [37]. This suggests that the cultural innovation, like the formation of a Senate before it, may have been one of the ideas that Lycurgus’ borrows wholesale from the people of Crete.

Upon being stripped of their last means to benefit in some meaningful way from their acquired wealth, the wealthier men of Sparta rose up against Lycurgus’new-found authority and, as Plutarch so skillfully phrases it, “and from ill words came to throwing stones, so that at length he was forced to run out of the market-place and make to sanctuary to save his own life” [37]. While this is hardly surprising, given the vehemence with which he has struck at the things that made them distinct, Lycurgus manages to avoid all harm until he is confronted by a young man named Alcander who wounds him grievously in one eye. The resolution of this conflict is almost too strange to be strictly historical as Lycurgus, using his wound as a symbol of his virtue, rallies the people behind him and, takes Alcander into his house whereupon he becomes one of Lycurgus’ most vocal and ardent supporters. After this uprising is quelled, Lycurgus builds a new temple to Minerva and the social experiment is underway.

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

The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans: Lycurgus
Written by Plutarch sometime in the latter part of the 1st century CE
Place: Chaeronea in the province of Boeotia (Greece)

The complete text of Plutarch's biography of Lycurgus can be found online at http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/lycurgus.html. It utilizes the same Dryden translation of Lycurgus used in the Great Books' series and, indeed, for this essay. Page numbers cited correspond to the 2nd edition of the GB's set.

Part One:

Unlike Plutarch’s biographies of figures closer to him in time, his treatment of Lycurgus (as well as Numa Pompilius) is more an exercise in selective storytelling than a serious historical document. Plutarch himself notes in his opening that there is great discord, even in his time, between those who have written about the legendary figure of Spartan history. By the time Plutarch got around to writing about him, somewhere between 600 and 900 years had passed since Lycurgus had walked the Earth and reorganized the Spartan culture on his journey. For this reason, parsing myth from fact is nigh impossible. Still, Plutarch is upfront about his methodology, announcing that “we shall endeavor to compose the history of his life, adhering to those statements which are least contradicted, and depending upon those authors most worthy of credit” [32].

Plutarch begins his examination of Lycurgus’ life with a summary of the events that led up to his great reshuffling of Spartan culture. He was born in a line of kings supposedly descended from Hercules himself though the line (the Eurypontids) was named for his ancestor, Eurypon. Eurypon was remembered as having “released the rigor of the monarchy” [34], beginning a trend of multi-generational chaos that found its climax in Lycurgus’ own father’s assassination. After acquiring the throne after his short-lived brother (with no suggestion in the text that Lycurgus himself might have been responsible for his death), Lycurgus quickly abdicates his throne when it is discovered that his brother’s wife is pregnant with his brother’s child. This child, named Charilaus, is installed, essentially at birth, as the rightful heir to the throne and, for a period of time, Lycurgus functions as regent to the infant king.

In short order, however, it became clear to Lycurgus that other powers in the Queen’s family resented his influence on the throne and had begun to plot his death in turn. Rather than suffering his father’s fate, Lycurgus imposed a self-exile, making himself notably scarce until Charilaus had reached the age of marriage and, himself, produced a legitimate heir. His own claim to the throne now twice nullified, Lycurgus began to travel the world in order to collect information from a variety of cultures of the most effective and virtuous means of governance. Visiting Crete, Lycurgus was greatly impressed by their system of governance and convinced the Cretan poet and philosopher, Thales to return to Lacedaemon with him in order to bring some of that harmony to his people. From there, he sailed to Asia (modern day Turkey) to contrast the Cretan style of politics with the more sensual Ionians who resided there. It is from this visit that Lycurgus is said to have first come into contact with the epic poetry of Homer and, in turn, transmitted it for the first time to the people of Lacedaemon, thus assuring that body of work a place in Greek culture for many centuries to come.

In his absence, many had grown weary of the monarchical rule of his nephew and were receptive to his permanent return and involvement in government. Plutarch has them suggesting that, “for kings indeed we have who wear the marks and assume the titles of royalty, but as for the qualities of their minds, they have nothing by which they are to be distinguished from their subjects” [34]. Seizing on this half-hearted support for continuing the monarchy as was, Lycurgus begins considering the possibility of bringing his new-found wisdom on governance back to his people. In order to ensure the best outcome, Lycurgus, we are told, consulted the Oracle at Delphi as to the proper course of action. Plutarch describes the Oracle’s response, writing that:

He returned with that renowned oracle, in which he is called beloved of God, and rather God than man; that his prayers were heard, that his laws should be the best, and the commonwealth which observed them the most famous in the world. [34]

It is, of course, tempting to assume that just as history is written by the victor, so may oracles be later re-written in order to appear favorable to something that turned out well. Plutarch’s participation as a priest of Apollo at Delphi (though much later) lends a good deal of credence to the idea that the utterance that Lycurgus’ received there is, in fact, the same one upon which he built his plans for a new kind of state.

Armed with this divine providence, Lycurgus sets about to reforming the state through measures designed to make sweeping changes to the Spartan way of life; indeed, changes that would define the Spartan apart from other Greeks for centuries to follow. By Plutarch’s account, Lycurgus’ coup of the existing state was essentially bloodless. Gathering thirty prominent Spartans he had won to his cause, the men assembled with arms in a show of force that left King Charilaus taking refuge in the temple of Minerva. After some negotiation, he was brought into Lycurgus’ revolution and, from this vantage, legitimized it among the skeptics and loyalists through his participation. In his first act as lawmaker for this new Spartan state, Lycurgus created a Senate, composed of twenty-eight prominent men of the city, to rule in a co-equal status with the kingship. By Plutarch’s assessment, the establishment of the Senate served as a moderating force between those advocating for an absolute monarchy and those who clamored for absolute rule of the people. We may infer from this that Lycurgus saw both of those ideas of governance as intrinsically flawed and in need of a moderating influence from the oligarchy to act as “ballast in a ship, which always kept things in a just equilibrium” [34].