It is a scholarly commonplace that the best treatment of Plutarch's reception is still R. Hirzel's 1912 monograph Plutarch. If nothing else, the volume under review will put this commonplace to rest. Its 37 chapters are arranged in five parts: ‘The Early Fame’ (five chapters), ‘Late Antiquity and Byzantium’ (fifteen chapters), ‘Other Medieval Cultures’ (two chapters: the Syriac tradition and the Medieval Islamicate world), ‘Renaissance’ (seven chapters) and ‘Enlightenment and the Modern Age’ (eight chapters). The last part is more selective and disparate than the others, understandably so, given the increase of available material and the decrease of Plutarch's cultural significance in this period: the modern reception of Plutarch effectively is a story of capita selecta.
The volume's most important achievement is clear: the advancement made with regard to Plutarch's reception in Byzantium is spectacular and reflects the relatively recent burgeoning of Byzantine studies in terms of both methodology and available sources. Hirzel's treatment of the matter serves as a reminder of early-twentieth-century standards: while devoting seven rather pointless pages to lamenting the absence of Plutarch during the Western Middle Ages, he treated the wealth of Byzantine material in merely four pages. Those pages, moreover, attributed the Plutarchan presence to Byzantine nostalgia and lack of originality. By contrast, more than 250 pages of the volume under discussion are devoted to late antiquity and Byzantium, and they succeed in showing how creative this period's reception of Plutarch could be. For instance, several of the chapters show how the reception of Plutarch's Lives informed the biographical turn in Byzantine literature.
The view of reception as ‘a dynamic process’ is announced in the introduction and is admirably upheld throughout the volume. Several authors discuss instances of, for example, a ‘common literary heritage’ (shared by Plutarch and the receiving author), an ‘affinity of concepts’, ‘Plutarchan ideas’, Plutarch's philosophy being ‘in the air’, a ‘technique which appears inspired’ by Plutarch. They are right to do so, since reception is often at its most interesting when it becomes murky, although I would have liked to see more discussion or at least consideration of the methodological challenges involved.
A particularly interesting instance of murkiness is the reception of pseudo-Plutarchan works, esp. of Doctrines of the Philosophers (in Stobaeus, Psellus and the Arabic tradition) and of On the Education of Children (in Italian humanism). Again, the inclusion of these and other pseudonymous texts is most praiseworthy, although explicit considerations of how this inclusion impacts (our view of) the reception of Plutarch (i.e. as an encyclopaedic source or as an educator respectively) are scarce. I should note, however, that A. Das and P. Koetschet, in their chapter on what they aptly call ‘para-Plutarchan’ texts in the Arabic tradition, largely make up for this.
Most chapters offer generous introductions to the receiving authors and/or contexts per se, which is most welcome in view of the broad scope of the volume and which gives the reader a chance to appreciate the reception of Plutarch as a true dynamic engagement with his work. Adding to this appreciation is the fact that the editors have achieved a remarkable balance between relying on eminent Plutarchists and casting specialists in the receiving cultures, eras or genres. The companion exhibits the manifold uses of Plutarch throughout history and in a great diversity of genres (philosophical, historical, rhetorical, encyclopaedic, literary, pedagogical …). As the editors signal, this is a companion to the literary (or more broadly textual) reception of Plutarch: visual arts, for instance, are not considered.
Chapters are intended to be read separately and include separate bibliographies. Cross-references are scarcer than one would have hoped, and there is little dialogue between the chapters. In the chapter on Psellus, for instance, E. Delli detects a reference to Plutarch's Cato Maior which D.R. Reinsch rejects in the chapter on the same author, and both scholars seem to have different takes on where and how often Psellus uses the name ‘Plutarch’ to refer to Plutarch of Chaeronea (as opposed to the Neoplatonist Plutarch of Athens). There are some instances of repetition or overlap (most notably in the cases of Aulus Gellius, Eusebius, Psellus and Zonaras; in the cases of Eusebius and Psellus the fullest biographical introduction to the author can be found in the later chapter). Generally, however, the division of labour is clear, and readers are helped by both an index rerum et nominum and an index locorum. The structure of the volume speaks for itself, although it is somewhat confusing to find the first editions of Plutarch's works lumped together with Thomas North's translations (in an otherwise excellent chapter by M. Lucchesi) and only after the chapter on Amyot by F. Frazier and O. Guerrier. Perhaps this harmlessly shows that in contemporary scholarship as well the reception of Plutarch is always defined by the interests of his readers.
Several chapters are (sometimes thoroughly) revised and updated versions of earlier publications (Xenophontos's two contributions, on Theodore Metochites and Adamantios Koraes; A. Rigolio on the Syriac tradition; T. Schmidt on the papyri; F. Becchi on humanist Latin translations of the Moralia traces back to an earlier Italian paper on the subject; M. Pade on Bruni is based on her seminal 2007 monograph on The Reception of Plutarch in Fifteenth-Century Italy). The editorial convention to use Latinised names (e.g. Philostratus) for ‘ancient’ authors (whatever that may mean), while using Greek transliteration (e.g. Eusebios) for ‘late antique and Byzantine’ names struck me as rather arbitrary and is not applied consistently (e.g. Iamblichos but Syrianus; both Simplicios and Simplikios; Philoponos and Philoponus). Generally, no knowledge of Greek or Latin is needed to follow the arguments (except, perhaps, for the chapter on Amyot, which offers analyses of how certain passages are translated), which expands the potential readership of the volume to include, for instance, scholars of modern literature or cultural history.
Apart from a succinct paragraph in the introduction, there is little explicit discussion of earlier scholarship or guidance for further reading. Moreover, despite the efforts made by the dazzling array of specialists to contextualise their assigned topic, it is sometimes hard to keep track of the broader historical narrative and of how the various Plutarchs of the various chapters relate to one another (to give but one example, a brief confrontation of Psellus’ Plutarch and Zonaras’ Plutarch might have been interesting). The run-through of the chapters in the introduction is too brisk to serve as a broad overview and even risks misleading the reader by suggesting that ‘Voltaire … turned to [Plutarch's] biographical and philosophical writings for moral and political instruction’ (p. 9), while F. Manzini's fascinating chapter on ‘Plutarch from Voltaire to Stendhal’ correctly contextualises Voltaire's criticism of Plutarch as an example of negative reception, which was in turn countered by Rousseau. I realise that this blurring of the bigger picture is a price we have to pay for added depth. Nevertheless, I was reminded of how, in Brill's Companion to the Reception of Plato in Antiquity (2018), of course much less broad in scope, this was remedied elegantly by editorial introductions to each part of the volume, and I would recommend such an approach to editors of future volumes in the series.
The final chapter, E. Almagor on Plutarch in Modern Hebrew literature, epitomises the volume's achievements in several ways: it questions Eurocentrism, it combines a painstaking survey with a more interpretative approach, and it succeeds in pointing out ‘not only … how the past has been received in a later period, but also how modern and recent writers were able to underscore facets which were not so pronounced in antiquity’ (p. 645). Of course, every reader will find something else to miss (Johannes Kepler and Francis Bacon would be at the top of my personal wish list), but it is clear that this volume is leaps and bounds ahead of earlier scholarship both in the scope of material collected and in interpretative depth. Brill's Companion to the Reception of Plutarch will undoubtedly stimulate further study of Plutarch's reception, not only as a reference work, but also by inspiring new ways of approaching the rich afterlife of this unforgettable intellectual.
