At long last, I begin reading Plutarch’s famous Parallel Lives. It is a true classic, a work which was already a famous, must-read text over a thousand years ago; it was even considered a masterpiece while Plutarch lived. To make the reading and reviewing more practical and relevant, and to allow me (and you) more time to really engage with each entry, I am treating Parallel Lives as a series, so I will be reading the paired biographies one at a time. Where this doesn’t make sense, either because of missing materials or because Plutarch didn’t finish or follow his usual format, I will adjust accordingly. For now, let’s start in with Theseus and Romulus.
Going into these biographies, it must be borne in mind that Plutarch had different goals from most modern biographers. These are not Chernow-style, deeply researched immersions in a life, and they are not supposed to be. They are less about providing detailed biographical information, and more about showcasing exemplars (good or bad, but mostly good), and in the case of the parallel lives, comparing and contrasting the characters, virtues, and vices of the subjects. Of course, those virtues, vices, and morals are judged according to the conventions of the time, which can make for some peculiar conclusions. This first pair of biographies is particularly interesting, since its subjects are to modern readers more myth than they are real, historical figures, and even in Plutarch’s time they were at least half myth, half historical. Plutarch’s attempts at separating fact from fiction largely consist of determining what is “reasonable,” and comparing who and how many other historians attest to a particular fact or anecdote.
Perhaps because so many of the stories about these two, and Theseus in particular, have become part of the common cultural mythos, reading the biographies feels like reading a semi-academic summation of the various myths associated with them, from the minotaur to the philosophically complicated ship to the raised by a she-wolf trope, alongside lesser-known stories and ones which read as rather more historical in nature, like battles fought and cities conquered. That mixture is interesting in itself, showing how Plutarch and his contemporaries viewed these stories from their vantage about a hundred years AD. For comparison, Romulus is thought to have lived in the 700s BC, and Theseus, if he was a real individual and not a purely mythical demigod, probably lived between 1000 and 800 BC. In other words, we are closer in time to the great inventors of the Renaissance than Plutarch was in time to his first two subjects. That said, it seems reasonable that Theseus was a real individual who lived during the Greek Heroic Age, albeit probably not actually possessed of deific abilities or responsible for the more supernatural deeds ascribed to him.
Speaking of which, if you are expecting these Lives to be profiles in nobility, righteousness, and courage, you might want to think again. Even by ancient standards, “great” men does not mean the same thing as “good” men, and the stories told and retold about them, which become myth, are not the full stories captured by Plutarch. Most of us know some version of the story of Theseus and the labyrinth, even if we don’t remember all the details, but the myths of Theseus don’t capture his discomfiting tendency to kidnap young girls and make them his wives (young girls, the ones for whom Plutarch takes issue with Theseus’ behavior, refers to prepubescent girls – the same behavior towards postpubescent girls, even those much younger than Theseus, is depicted as normal). Even Plutarch highlights this as a bit of a problem, albeit not as much of one as it will be to most modern audiences. Romulus exhibits this tendency a bit less on a personal level, but organizes and participates in a particularly disturbing incident with about 200 women from an opponent’s city, which Plutarch depicts as wrong in the immediate incident, but rationalizes it for what he describes as its ultimately unifying effects on the two warring peoples.
These sorts of occurrences aren’t jarring on their own, per se. Oh, they are without context, but if you’re a student of ancient history, you’ll know this sort of behavior, and the acceptance of it, was common throughout various cultures and time periods in the ancient world, especially the time frame in which Theseus and Romulus lived. What makes them stand out in Plutarch’s biographies is the contrast with the stories we still tell of these mythical figures, and the expectations we tend to have of Greece and Rome. Reading texts from these places and times can make them feel strangely familiar and even modern, more so than most other ancient civilizations, and they (or an idealized version of them) are so much a part of our Western cultural heritage that we don’t think of them as being as distant and different from us as other ancient civilizations. In that sense, Plutarch’s biographies of Romulus and Theseus are an important reminder.
Frankly, Plutarch’s biographies of Romulus and Theseus are rather disappointing, consisting mostly of superficial recitations of the stories told about them, a few editorial paragraphs here and there, and occasional discussions of the alternative stories and facts shared by different sources. Nor is the comparison of the two considerably more substantial. If this is all the Parallel Lives is, I will be quite disappointed, but I have hopes that Plutarch’s ability will develop throughout his work, and furthermore that he will do a more robust and thorough treatment for historical figures a little closer to contemporaneous with him.
