Plutarch’s Lives was one of the most influential texts to have survived from Antiquity, and its traces are to be found in many intellectual contexts, as the author of Plutarch’s Politics reminds us in his preface. Hugh Liebert wants to extract a concrete political statement, even a political philosophy, from Plutarch’s biographies, taking the literary form that Plutarch chose as a mere mode for the deployment of his core message, suitable for allowing an analysis of the stage on which his great men were playing. This premise is courageous, since Plutarch himself, in the Life of Alexander, famously rejects the notion that he could be understood as a historian, claiming that he wants to write lives instead of histories that aim at representing human virtue or vice (Liebert is fully aware of this problem, as his introduction to Chapter 3 shows).
On the other hand, which ancient author can reasonably be labeled as not a “political thinker”? It has long been acknowledged in political science that, apart from the great philosophers, only a few Greek authors (primarily Thucydides, occasionally Herodotus, Xenophon, and Polybius) should be included in the noble ranks of those able to think politically, or to produce thinking worthy to be called political. This, of course, is debatable: Historians, playwrights, poets, and even geographers all confront us with their political thinking to a degree that makes the choice of whom to label as “political thinker” rather arbitrary. The quality and depth of political thinking, indeed, is another matter, and this is why Liebert’s study is valuable as it tries to grasp the complexity of Plutarch’s literary approach.
Liebert insists that Plutarch’s thinking focuses on the place of his protagonists in the polis, the entity that is the constitutive unit for nearly all Greek political thinking (“a study of not only particular men and cities, but of man and city”; p. 2). He claims that Plutarch would use his sketches—reversing Socrates’ analogy between the polis and the citizen’s soul—as a “window onto the city”. This assumption, serving as a working hypothesis, raises a new set of questions about an often underrated author, and it produces a challenging and stimulating set of results. While the reviewer retains reservations about the reading of Plutarch as a mere theoretician of politics who uses his protagonists as examples for his teaching, the change of perspective is in itself an important and fruitful approach.
To display his major thesis, namely, that Plutarch is conceiving of the relationship between the philotimia (love of honor) of the individual and the given structure of a polis as the main interest in his biographical sketches, Liebert chooses to provide an in-depth analysis of the parallel lives of Lycurgus and Numa as his central case study. For Liebert, Lycurgus represents the Spartan regime as it was before the fall of Sparta and its decay to become nothing more than a “tourist trap” in Plutarch’s times. This depiction is understood by Liebert as a reply to criticisms that are to be found in Plato and Aristotle, denying all possible shortcomings that the great philosophers had detected in the Spartan regime. Lycurgus serves as a projection for the perfection of the individual’s design of a regime that canalized philotimia as a civic virtue but that was doomed to fall due to the impossibility of living in its own world (a Platonic motive, for sure). Numa is the philosopher-king who civilized Rome and established rules that brought stasis to an end and ensured Roman stability—but everything he created was perverted over the centuries, when expansion and empire won over the idea of a harmonious city.
Liebert’s overall interpretation is that Plutarch created ideal types of cities (especially in Lycurgus’s Sparta) via the depiction of their prominent exponents; he did so in order to make a claim for the preservation of the polis structure, even within an all-encompassing empire. This is an attractive idea, rooted in the tradition of classical Greek philosophy, and it is worthwhile to reread Plutarch under this premise. But in fact, the demonstration seems too narrow given the importance and the influence of Plutarch the thinker. The focus Liebert chooses is far from being the only perspective you could adopt to grasp political thinking in Plutarch’s Lives—and the author admits this openheartedly. For example, it is open to debate whether philotimia really is at the center of Plutarch’s conception of the problematic relation between the individual and the state—and note 81 (p. 115) even reveals (with reference to Pelling) that philotimia is far more prominent in the Spartan Lives than in the others.
In addition, the main assumption that Plutarch decided to write about citizens of free cities or living prior to imperial structures (as Liebert states in his introduction 1.3: The Parallel Lives as Political Philosophy”) is simply not correct. Alexander is the first example that comes to mind, Demetrios is another, and the Lives of Galba and Otho prove that Antony was not “the last of Plutarch’s Romans” (p. 34); even the Roman “great men” of the Civil Wars are seldom depicted as living in a still-existing, functioning republic (see Plut.Caes. 13 as one reference). On the contrary, these figures constitute a major part of the Lives, and therefore, it is at least debatable if the choice of early Sparta and early Rome, of Lycurgus and Numa, is fully representative of Plutarch’s political cosmos and the deductions that should derive from this worldview.
A particularly strong point about Liebert’s study is that it is very well suited to present its subject to the audience at which it aims. The balance among explanation, context, interpretation, and theses shows a highly alert and gifted author at work. Never meaning to plunge too deeply into classicists’ quarrels (nor into theoretical debates), the author persistently develops his argument; this construction requires some patience, but it opens the field for reflection. Some minor errors—for example, see the continuous misspelling of Ulrich Wilamowitz or the statement that the doors of the temple of Ianus would have been closed by Augustus for the first time after Numa’s reign (RgdA 13 tells us another story)—do not cause harm to this thought-provoking book.
To conclude, within the growing dialogue between the classics and political theory, Plutarch’s Politics is an important contribution for assessing the relevance of Plutarch’s political thought. It contains many interesting and stimulating findings and remarks, even for those who would not conform with the overall approach to Plutarch’s philosophy. An often neglected author is back center stage where he has stood for much of the last five hundred years, and the invitation to disagree about the interpretation of his messages is inherent in Liebert’s claims. After all, this is everything that should be hoped for by an intellectual.
