Thammasat University students interested in Greek history, literature, classics, ethics, and related subjects may find a new book useful.
An Opaque Mirror for Trajan: A Literary Analysis and Interpretation of Plutarch’s Sayings of Kings and Commanders is an Open Access book available for free download at this link:
https://lup.be/products/230589
It is by Dr. Laurens van der Wiel, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Warsaw, Poland.
The TU Library collection includes a number of books by and about Plutarch.
Plutarch was a Greek philosopher, historian, biographer, and essayist.
Plutarch’s best-known work is the Parallel Lives, a series of biographies of celebrated Greeks and Romans, arranged in pairs to underline their shared moral virtues and faults.
The book offers more insight into human nature than a historical account.
As is explained in the opening paragraph of his Life of Alexander, Plutarch was not concerned with history so much as the influence of character, good or bad, on the lives and destinies of men.
Sometimes he barely mentioned major events, but devoted space instead to anecdotes and narratives.
He believed that such accounts often said more about his subjects than their most famous accomplishments.
He tried to create rounded portraits, comparing his work to that of a painter.
Like an artist, he tried to find parallels between physical appearance and moral character.
In many ways, he must be counted amongst the earliest moral philosophers.
Another influential work by Plutarch was Moralia, a collection of essays and speeches.
Among later writers who admired Plutarch, many of whom are represented in the TU Library collection:
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Montaigne, James Boswell, Ben Jonson, John Dryden, Alexander Hamilton, John Milton, Edmund Burke, Joseph De Maistre, Mark Twain, Francis Bacon, Cotton Mather, and Robert Browning.
Sayings of Kings and Commanders is a collection of almost 500 anecdotes about barbarian, Greek, and Roman rulers and generals.
It is introduced by a dedicatory letter to the emperor Trajan as a summary of the author’s well-known and widely read Parallel Lives.
The work is therefore Plutarch’s only text that explicitly addresses a Roman emperor and is likely to shed light on his biographical technique.
Sayings of Kings and Commanders was for some years not considered by researchers to be by Plutarch.
In more recent years, most authors accept that Plutarch wrote this collection.
Here are some observations by Plutarch from books, some of which are in the TU Library collection:
The most perfect soul, says Heraclitus, is a dry light, which flies out of the body as lightning breaks from a cloud.
- Life of Romulus
To conduct great matters and never commit a fault is above the force of human nature.
- Life of Fabius
Knowledge of divine things for the most part, as Heraclitus says, is lost to us by incredulity.
- Life of Coriolanus
Archimedes had stated, that given the force, any given weight might be moved; and even boasted that if there were another earth, by going into it he could remove this.
- Life of Marcellus
It is a difficult task, O citizens, to make speeches to the belly, which has no ears.
- Life of Marcus Cato
Cato used to assert that wise men profited more by fools than fools by wise men; for that wise men avoided the faults of fools, but that fools would not imitate the good examples of wise men.
- Life of Marcus Cato
Marius said, “I see the cure is not worth the pain.”
- Life of Caius Marius
Extraordinary rains pretty generally fall after great battles.
- Life of Caius Marius
Lysander said that the law spoke too softly to be heard in such a noise of war.
- Life of Caius Marius
The old proverb was now made good, “the mountain had brought forth a mouse.”
- Life of Agesilaus II
Pompey bade Sylla recollect that more worshipped was the rising than the setting sun.
- Life of Pompey
The most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men.
- Life of Alexander
When Alexander asked Diogenes whether he wanted anything, “Yes,” said he, “I would have you stand from between me and the sun.”
- Life of Alexander
Demosthenes overcame and rendered more distinct his inarticulate and stammering pronunciation by speaking with pebbles in his mouth.
- Life of Demosthenes
Xenophanes said, “I confess myself the greatest coward in the world, for I dare not do an ill thing.”
- Of Bashfulness
One made the observation of the people of Asia that they were all slaves to one man, merely because they could not pronounce that syllable No.
- Of Bashfulness
Euripides was wont to say, “Silence is an answer to a wise man.”
- Of Bashfulness
Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds; and his friends asking him if any accident had befallen him, he returns this answer: “Do you not think it a matter worthy of lamentation that when there is such a vast multitude of them, we have not yet conquered one?”
- On the Tranquillity of the Mind
The pilot cannot mitigate the billows or calm the winds.
- On the Tranquillity of the Mind
I, for my own part, had much rather people should say of me that there neither is nor ever was such a man as Plutarch, than that they should say, “Plutarch is an unsteady, fickle, froward, vindictive, and touchy fellow.”
- Of Superstition
That proverbial saying, “Ill news goes quick and far.”
- Of Inquisitiveness
When Demaratus was asked whether he held his tongue because he was a fool or for want of words, he replied, “A fool cannot hold his tongue.”
- Of Demaratus
Lycurgus the Lacedæmonian brought long hair into fashion among his countrymen, saying that it rendered those that were handsome more beautiful, and those that were deformed more terrible. To one that advised him to set up a democracy in Sparta, “Pray,” said Lycurgus, “do you first set up a democracy in your own house.”
- Lycurgus, Sayings of Kings and Commanders
The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting — no more — and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth. Suppose someone were to go and ask his neighbors for fire and find a substantial blaze there, and just stay there continually warming himself: that is no different from someone who goes to someone else to get to some of his rationality, and fails to realize that he ought to ignite his own flame, his own intellect, but is happy to sit entranced by the lecture, and the words trigger only associative thinking and bring, as it were, only a flush to his cheeks and a glow to his limbs; but he has not dispelled or dispersed, in the warm light of philosophy, the internal dank gloom of his mind.
- On Listening to Lectures, Moralia 48C
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)