Plutarch's Classics
July 31st 2008 07:31
Plutarch's Classics
What books would a scholar like Plutarch have regarded as CLASSICS?
Plutarch lived in the first century and was in both senses of the word a classical scholar.
He was a scholar who wrote books we view as Classics and an expert of books his contemporaries and modern scholars view as scholars.
In his lives he mentions dozens of historians and biographers whose works are now lost to us and in his Essays the Moralia often his quotes direct or indirect are the solo traces we have for many authors.
He may quite literally have read more "Classics" than modern scholars as he had access to so many works now lost.
He mentions Homer and Hesiod and various of the early lyric poets and many of the fragemtns we have of lyric poets survived as quotes in Plutarch's works and no where else.
For us the big three of Attic tragedians is Aeschylus Sophocles and Euripides but he also known of Agathon and Ion and other lost dramatists.
Plutarch preferred Menander over Aristophanes and was familiar with other Old Atic Comedy writers like Cratinus and and Eupolis.
He actually seems to have preferred later Hellenistic historians over Herodotus and Thucydides mentioning authors we barely know of like Agatharchidas and Timaeus.
Plato's dialogues are frequently quoted or mentioned along with Aristotle and other lesser Platonic philosophers and judging from his essay Plutarch was also an expert on the Stoics and Epicureans.
His authority as a scholar is such that we have comments (scholia) on his comments in several manuscripts and unlike lesser writers his works were still being actively copied and read and studied well into the Byzantine period.
It could be argued Plutarch made the Classics.
His Lives is an invaluable reference for hisotrians and archaeologists.
The tantalizing quotes in his Moralia encouraged scholars to perserve in the search for further fragments.
If we had a list of Plutarch's idea of "Classical" authors I think it would be much longer than ours.
If you never read the Moralia or Lives in the Loeb edition or some other edition that includes the original Greek and has a full commentary of sources check out the notes and prepare to be shocked at just how many authors we know little more of than a name and one or two quotes and a scholia by some Byzantine author.
Plutarch's Classics were not ours!?
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