Plutarch ‘ Sun Confessed Skill

In a well-known passage at the beginning of his Life of Alexander Plutarch asserts that he is writing biography, not history: he will use anecdotes that reveal the ‘signs of the soul’ of his subjects and will not report all their outstanding deeds, which do not particularly demonstrate virtue and vice. The announced omission is exaggerated, at least for this Life. Of Alexander’s major battles, only Issus is sketchily treated. The Granicus, Gaugamela and the Hydaspes get as full treatment as could be expected (Alex. 16, 31–33, 60: henceforth references by chapter and section only will be to the Alexander). The programmatic statement has tended to blind Plutarch’s readers to the amount of critical historical thinking that can be discerned in some of the Lives. The point could be illustrated from any of the Greek Lives where we have a parallel tradition, ² but this essay will confine itself to the Alexander, the longest of his Greek Lives, where the programmatic statement appears. As we all know, nowadays, Plutarch read a great deal. It is fortunately no longer fashionable (as it used to be, particularly in the British and the German tradition) to argue that he found all the reading already done and excerpted by a predecessor, unfortunately no longer extant and not to be securely identified. Plutarch liked to compare accounts in different sources, especially where a point aroused his particular interest, as is best seen in the impressive list at 46.1: even if we grant that some of those sources may be cited at second hand, the great majority were surely checked for this particular point, even if not read all the way through. He must have done more reading for this Life than for any of the shorter Greek ones, and all the primary sources, almost completely lost to us, as well as a great deal of secondary writing lost to us, must have been available to him. Even a polymath like Plutarch cannot have read, and kept notes on, everything in all of this mass of literature. But we can see that he knew many of them and, as we noted, was prepared to consult more on particular points. In the manner of ancient authors, he does not always cite his sources for his statements and interpretations: the technique of footnotes was not available, and a careful stylist would not clutter his text with references. Sometimes we can discover his source for ourselves where he does not give it. ³