Plutarch and the Philosophical Dialogue By Anne I. McDonald B.A., University of Kansas, 2007 M.A., University of Bristol, 2008 Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Classics at Brown University PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2015 © Copyright 2015 by Anne I. McDonald This dissertation by Anne I. McDonald is accepted in its present form by the Department of Classics as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date __________________ ______________________________________ Stratis Papaioannou, Chair Recommended to the Graduate Council Date ___________________ ______________________________________ Mary Louise Gill, Reader Date ___________________ ______________________________________ David Konstan, Reader Date ___________________ ______________________________________ Frederick Brenk, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date ___________________ ______________________________________ Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii CURRICULUM VITAE Anne McDonald was born in Manhattan, Kansas in 1984 and spent her childhood in Lawrence, Kansas. As a National Merit Scholar at the University of Kansas, she wrote an honors thesis on St. Augustine’s reception of Virgil and won awards for nonfiction writing and translation from Latin and Greek. She earned B.A. degrees in Classical Languages and English with highest distinction in 2007. Anne continued her studies at the University of Bristol in Bristol, England, where she earned her M.A. in Classics and Ancient History with distinction in 2008, writing a dissertation entitled, “Augustine against the Clock: Time, Language, and the Economics of Salvation.” She began the Ph.D. program in Classics at Brown University in 2008. While at Brown, she won the Captain William McGinn scholarship for participation in the Classical Summer School of the American Academy in Rome, taught and assisted in numerous language and literature courses, and delivered papers on Augustine, Plato and Plutarch. After completing her Ph.D., Anne will teach as a Visiting Lecturer at Brown in the spring of 2015. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been begun or finished without the guidance and assistance of many teachers, advisors, and mentors. I owe first thanks to Anne Shaw and Stanley Lombardo, who provided a firm foundation and inspiration for future study of the classics. At Brown, I was fortunate to benefit from the guidance of David Konstan from my first years in the graduate program. Many enjoyable and challenging classes and conversations on Plato with Mary Louise Gill were formative for my research and remain one of the best parts of my experience at Brown. Stratis Papaioannou has been a wonderfully supportive advisor throughout the dissertation process, and I am deeply grateful for his guidance and encouragement. The careful reading and criticism of Frederick Brenk, who graciously served as an outside reader, have greatly improved the final form of this dissertation. It has been a privilege to work within the Classics Department at Brown, an extraordinarily collegial scholarly community. I am indebted to its faculty and to my fellow graduate students for careful consideration of many works in progress and countless lively conversations over the years. Susan Furtado deserves thanks for her cheerful and expert assistance with many details attending the completion of this project. The constant support of friends and family members has sustained me through many years of study and the final stages of the dissertation process. I am grateful first of all to my father, Bruce McEnroe, my first and most faithful reader, and to my mother, Michelle Tamburini. Emily and Scot Lange, the McDonald Family, Gail McEnroe, Anne and Kyle Rabe, and Rebecca and Keith Fairbank have provided assistance in many forms, very often unasked. I am humbled and inspired by their generosity. v I dedicate this dissertation to my husband, Joe McDonald, whose unfailing love, patience and good sense made its completion possible, and to Johnny, who has made the past year of work the best of my life. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter One Philosophical Discourse in Plutarch 22 Chapter Two Seeing and Believing: Dramatic Detail in 68 Amatorius, De genio Socratis, and De defectu oraculorum Chapter Three Wondering from the Path: Sightseeing in 121 De sera numinis vindicta, De genio Socratis, and De Pythiae oraculis Chapter Four Plutarch’s Personae and the Construction 164 of Identity Conclusion 208 Bibliography 211 vii INTRODUCTION Plutarch is well known as a biographer and essayist, but he is rarely remembered as a dialogist. Despite the fact that more of his dialogues remain to us than of any other classical author after Plato, his position in the history of the form has largely been ignored or incompletely considered, even amid a recent efflorescence of interest in the ancient dialogue.1 The relative paucity of scholarship on Plutarch as a dialogist is likely in part an unfortunate consequence of the inclusion of his dialogues within the catchall category of the Moralia, which includes a great deal more variety than the title suggests. The variety within the subset of Plutarch’s dialogues has likely further discouraged consideration of Plutarch as a practitioner of the form. Sixteen texts within the Moralia nominally qualify as dialogues in the minimal sense that they represent a discourse among multiple interlocutors.2 A number of these texts, however, are no more dialogical than this basic criterion requires. In several, a brief initial exchange between interlocutors gives way to a monologue by a single character who goes on to dominate the remainder of the text. These texts, not genuinely dialogical in form, often display a 1 Goldhill (2008) and Cameron (2014) are representative. Hösle (2012) is both an incitement and guide to the study of the entire tradition of the philosophical dialogue. Lamberton (2001), 146 has observed the neglect of Plutarch’s dialogues in modern times. 2 These are (in the order in which they appear in the Lamprias catalogue): De tuenda sanitate praecepta, Septem sapientium convivium, De E apud Delphos, De Pythiae oraculis, De defectu oraculorum, De cohibenda ira, De sera numinis vindicta, De genio Socratis, Quaestiones convivales, Amatorius, De sollertia animalium, De facie in orbe lunae, Gryllus, De communibus notitiis adversus Stoicos, Non posse suaviter vivi secundum Epicurum, and Adversus Colotem. 1 polemical spirit, aiming to refute the views of a particular philosophical school rather than cultivate a discursive exchange of ideas that works towards the discovery of truth. 3 Apart from these works, the nine books of Plutarch’s Quaestiones convivales constitute a sizeable subgenre of his dialogues. Though highly discursive in spirit, representing lively discussions in which contributions by all participants are politely welcomed, these dialogues are not well described as philosophical; the “atmosphere of social decorum and kind politeness”4 that dominates these texts does not lend itself to serious, focused philosophical investigation.5 In addition to all-but monological and sympotic works, the corpus of Plutarch’s dialogues also includes a number of texts that are both genuinely dialogical in form and spirit and represent serious investigation of a philosophical problem. Given the variety of Plutarch’s dialogues, it is perhaps unsurprising that the most ambitious studies of Plutarch’s dialogues, those of Hirzel and Kahle, have undertaken to impose some order on the entire group, describing and comparing them with particular attention to their themes, influences, and formal characteristics.6 Recently, the nine books of the sympotic Quaestiones convivales, a subset of the dialogues explicitly described by Plutarch as a unified group, has gained a good deal of overdue attention, particularly with respect to their social, cultural and historical dimensions.7 The 3 E.g. Non posse suaviter vivi secundum Epicurum and Adversus Colotem. 4 Van der Stockt (2000), 94. 5 Hösle (2012), 42-45 distinguishes between “serious discussion dialogues” and “chat dialogues”; he places the majority of ancient symposion and deipnon literature in the latter category. 6 Hirzel (1985, repr. 1963), Kahle (1912). 7 See especially Klotz and Oikonomopoulou (2011) and König (2012), Saints and Symposiasts: The Literature of Food and the Symposium in Greco-Roman and Early Christian Culture. 2 philosophical dialogues, however, have been neglected or, at times, deemed unworthy of consideration as such.8 Indeed, scholars have drawn vastly different conclusions regarding the philosophical and literary importance of these dialogues within the tradition of the form. Is Plutarch “the most important writer of philosophical dialogues in later Antiquity”9, or do the conversations reported in these texts amount to no more than chat?10 This dissertation proposes, to begin with, that Plutarch does indeed have an important place within the history of the dialogue, and in particular of the philosophical dialogue. Drawing on the work of recent scholars attempting to improve upon previous taxonomies of Plutarch’s dialogues, I identify seven of Plutarch’s dialogues that are both genuinely dialogical and committed to serious philosophical inquiry: De defectu oraculorum, De E apud Delphos, De Pythiae Oraculis, De sera numinis vindicta, Amatorius, De genio Socratis, and De facie in orbe lunae. I undertake to examine these texts