As I made my way through this wonderful collection of essays that originated from a symposium in honour of the Plutarchan scholar Anastasios Nikolaidis, I found myself repeatedly asking: ‘Why hasn't anyone attempted such a collection before?’ Indeed, as Athanassaki and Titchener explain in the introduction, previous looks at Plutarch's use of the polis have focused on his political thought. They, in contrast, have arranged this collection in the hopes of discussing Plutarch's city ‘as a physical entity and as a social organization with emphasis on Plutarch's representations of the intellectual, religious, cultural, and artistic landscape as lived experience in the present and past, and of the significance of the polis as a paradigm to think with’ (p. 7). They have done so successfully. There is much in this book that offers new directions, while it also gives useful and rich details on topics that are essential to Plutarch's intellectual thought. The book is divided organically into four parts: ‘Contemporary Cities: Travel, Sojourn, Autopsy, and Inspiration’; ‘Cities of the Past: History, Politics, and Society’; ‘Cities to Think With’; ‘Afterword’.
Part 1 opens with the two most important cities in Plutarch's life. E. Bowie focuses on the bedrock of Plutarch's intellectual and cultural persona, his hometown of Chaeronea. He tracks down the presence of Chaeronea throughout Plutarch's works and its frequency in other authors’ works, and points out the methods that Plutarch uses to elevate his humble hometown culturally and intellectually. P. Stadter's chapter, published posthumously, looks at Plutarch's Delphi. He paints a vivid picture of the blend of history, mystery and religion of the sanctuary, summarises Plutarch's duties there and elegantly ties together the totality of the image with the thoughts, concerns and aspirations expressed in Plutarch's writings. Stadter argues well for the inspiration of Delphi on Plutarch as a place that taught him to consider the human past and divine present as a system, with the aspirational goal of seeing temporal ‘fluidity as an opportunity for movement towards god, a chance to achieve some aspect of divinity’ (p. 56), a hope not only worthy of Plutarch, but just as worthy of Stadter and his influence on the field of Plutarchan studies.
P. Desideri next tackles a common topic: Plutarch in Rome, by creatively approaching Plutarch's relationship with the city via sojourns. Desideri posits that daily walks inspired him to include monuments in his writings and also points out some worthwhile observations: Plutarch's view of Roman architecture as flair over substance, his frustrating indifference to ‘the conflicts of his age’ (p. 71; quoting A. Momigliano), and, as a result of his forays into Rome, caution in attempts to speak with the emperors he found it so important to try to guide.
J. Geiger then provides a concise synopsis of how Plutarch sees the interrelationship between city and religion. Geiger focuses on religious sanctuaries to illustrate Plutarch's curiosity and his knowledge as a tourist of the temples of cities and towns. He also shows how Plutarch's depictions of such sanctuaries draw out distinctive opinions of city and country, and the benefits that each type of sanctuary can present for the self-aware tourist, man of business and, especially, pilgrim.
Athanassaki concludes Part 1 with an intriguing hypothesis that Plutarch employed specific monuments and artefacts of the Athenian agora as referents in De gloria Atheniensium. Athanassaki sees the oration as acquiring much of its topicality from a delivery located in the agora. Her interpretation gives a new reading for this inscrutable entry in the Moralia and opens up possibilities for considering the relationship between Plutarch and specific spaces in his other works.
C. Pelling opens Part 2's focus on cities of the past. He compares Plutarch's representations of Athens and Sparta with those of his two titanic predecessors, Herodotus and Thucydides. This charming essay is Pelling at his most enlightening. He deftly and wittily summarises Plutarch's predecessors’ descriptions of Sparta and Athens and their stereotypes of the two poleis, and notes just how much Plutarch's portrait depends on those of his historiographical predecessors. Plutarch, he concludes, has an affinity for Thucydides’ Athens, but makes his own, varied picture of Sparta. Like his predecessors, he uses the specific to ask questions of the universal.
The next two chapters focus on Athens and Alcibiades. In the first A. Kavoulaki, noting the civic importance of ritual processions and using Alcibiades’ revival of the procession to Eleusis as a focal point, shows the various implications of that performance in the context of Athens diachronically and in the year 407 bce. T. Duff also writes on Alcibiades and Athens, examining early anecdotes in the Life of Alcibiades to illustrate the bipolar relationship the Athenian polis had with him and their ‘mutual interdependence’ (p. 163). Duff is expanding on a powerful conclusion he has presented before (e.g. Plutarch's Lives [1999], Chapter 7) that Athens comes to mirror Alcibiades’ character, which is as endearing and frustrating to him as he is to them.
Next, D. Leão looks at post-classical Athens of the fourth century. He argues that the civic identities of Phocion and Demetrius of Phalerum are reflective of a general tension in the identity of the Athenian polis under the Diadochoi. Leão points out how claims to restore the ancestral constitution of Athens, while at times seemingly on the rise, were in reality nothing but democratic fictions dependent on the whims of the Macedonian monarchs.
J. Marincola points his pen at another polis vitally important to Plutarch's Greece: Thebes. He analyses in detail Plutarch's treatment of Thebes in the Persian Wars, the Peloponnesian War, the liberation of the Cadmeia and the great Thebes of the fourth century, and Thebes’ valiant but dramatic destruction at the hands of Alexander. Each section clearly shows how, with bias and graciousness, Plutarch reconfigures Thebes into an increasingly more noble polis.
K. Panagopoulou hunts for Plutarch's takes on the Northern Greek cities, an investigation that results in a severe state of aporia. Plutarch avoids describing the civic, social or religious elements of the cities of Thessaly, Epirus and Macedonia, and he seems to lack reliable geographical knowledge. Panagopoulou offers a few possibilities for this lack of interest and seems on to something in connecting this disinterest to the Antigonid monarchy in particular.
In the final paper of Part 2 J. Mossman directs her gaze at Plutarch's Troy through three approaches: first, how Plutarch presents its geographical site particularly in relation to Strabo, and second, what visitors to the site do there, analysing scenes that occur at Troy in his Lives. Mossman concludes with a detailed examination of a scene of Porcia viewing a painting that depicts Hector and Andromache in Iliad 6 from the Life of Brutus. Mossman's essay is valuable in its emphasis on just how important the idea of Troy was to Plutarch, but also brings in his potentially dynamic concern with civic art.
A. Zadorojnyi provides the ideal opener to Part 3, ‘Cities to Think With’. He concisely illustrates representative ways in which the city–soul dynamic is employed by Plato in the Republic and how Plutarch (and others, such as the Stoics) employs such imagery. Where Zadorojnyi really shines is in pointing out how Plutarch portrays the soul's struggles as that of a city holding out against a foreign adversary (unlike his contemporaries, who view it as driving out an enemy or tyrant) and just how nuanced the ethico-political Platonic concept of city–soul is behind many otherwise seemingly unrelated events in the Lives.
A. Pérez Jiménez looks at another trope of the polis, the ‘ship of state’. He shows how this well-worn metaphor is well-suited to Plutarch's ‘baroque’ (pp. 253, 266) literary sensitivity. He lists several examples from the Lives and Moralia that show how Plutarch evokes pictures of chaos and calm, looming danger, and the relationship between leader and city through his use of this (often strongly Platonic) device; ironically, Pérez Jiménez's examples present a strong argument for Plutarch's originality.
G. Roskam addresses an oft-unquestioned view of Plutarch's political thought: that Plutarch prioritises the polis in his political essays. Roskam dissects the claim with precision, illustrating that Plutarch often argues from the perspective of the polis, but frequently from a loftier, almost ideal, political perspective as well. For Roskam, Plutarch believes that the lessons and values of governing and living in the contemporary and ideal polis are equally applicable and valid to any politician. This intertwining of lessons at each level powerfully reinforces Plutarch's practical approach to philosophical politics: flexibility trumps idealism.
L. Van der Stockt elaborates on such duality in exploring the idea of a civitas Dei in Plutarch. He notes casual ways in which the ancient Greeks refer to ‘god and city’, then Plutarch's complicatedly explicit ways of proclaiming that Sparta and Rome are cities that owe a significant portion of their beginnings to divinely ordained origins. Drawing a conclusion similar to Roskam's, Van der Stockt sees Plutarch as a promoter of the civitas Dei as a realm of justice, not on earth, but in heaven, and thus one to be aspired to, though unlikely to be achieved.
T. Whitmarsh concludes Part 3 by examining what Plutarch says about religion in a contemporary city, as opposed to a city of divine providence. Admittedly, Whitmarsh does not talk so much of religion of the city specifically, but mostly about how Plutarch's On Superstition fits into a larger sacro-political discussion of divine belief, stressing the work as a nuanced attack on Epicurean thinking on the gods. Whitmarsh also makes a strong argument that deisidaemonia (‘superstition’) extends beyond philosophical haggling to a warning against alien cults, including, specifically, Judaism. The work, as Whitmarsh provocatively argues, makes an impromptu push for proper piety in the face of both philosophical and foreign religious threats.
In the afterword Athanassaki presents elements that are amenable for future research. Her discussion on the relationship among ‘Autopsy, Emotions, and Composition’ strikes me as a particularly apt direction. Other areas highlighted are ‘Ritual and Politics’, ‘Plutarch and His Sources’ and, adding a brief expansion to the most intriguing section of Mossman's essay, Plutarch's use of ‘Civic Art’.
Plutarch's Cities is a comprehensive discussion of myriad aspects of Plutarch's thinking and presentation of cities. While not quite every essay ideally fits the theme, the dynamic ways of looking at cities of the present, past and intellectual spheres in Plutarch's works makes this collection a thorough, important and highly valuable one.
