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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Atypical Lives: Systems of Meaning in Plutarch's Theseus-Romulus Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6f213297 Author Street, Joel Martin Publication Date 2015 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Atypical Lives: Systems of Meaning in Plutarch's Teseus-Romulus by Joel Martin Street A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Classics in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Mark Griffith, Chair Professor Dylan Sailor Professor Ramona Naddaff Fall 2015 Abstract Atypical Lives: Systems of Meaning in Plutarch's Teseus-Romulus by Joel Martin Street Doctor of Philosophy in Classics University of California, Berkeley Professor Mark Griffith, Chair Tis dissertation takes Plutarch’s paired biographies of Teseus and Romulus as a path to understanding a number of roles that the author assumes: as a biographer, an antiquarian, a Greek author under Roman rule. As the preface to the Teseus-Romulus makes clear, Plutarch himself sees these mythological fgures as qualitatively different from his other biographical sub- jects, with the consequence that this particular pair of Lives serves as a limit case by which it is possible to elucidate the boundaries of Plutarch’s authorial identity. Tey present, moreover, a set of opportunities for him to demonstrate his ability to curate and present familiar material (the founding of Rome, Teseus in the labyrinth) in demonstration of his broad learning. To this end, I regard the Teseus-Romulus as a fundamentally integral text, both of whose parts should be read alongside one another and the rest of Plutarch’s corpus rather than as mere outgrowths of the tra- ditions about the early history of Athens and Rome, respectively. Accordingly, I proceed in each of my four chapters to attend closely to a particular thematic cluster that appears in both Lives, thereby bringing to light the complex fgural play by which Plutarch enlivens familiar material and demonstrates his virtuosity as author. In chapter 1, I take the preface to the Lives as my starting point, placing particular emphasis on the cartographic metaphor by which Plutarch fgures the writing of biography about these mythological fgures as a journey outward into unknown territories. In accounting for the surprising and counterintuitive aspects of this metaphor, I argue that Plutarch is engaging with competing models of the world, correlated with generic distinctions, and resolving them by the rhetorical strategy of syneciosis, the alignment of opposites. He is, moreover, inviting the reader to attend closely to the spatiotemporal dynamics of the Teseus and Romulus narratives, which one can understand as a set of movements along various axes and which unfold both alongside and against the metanarrative journey upon which Plutarch imagines himself as embarking in the preface to these Lives. In chapter 2, I build upon this spatial framework in order to explore the role of opsis (sight, vision) in Plutarch’s approach to history and biography. Proceeding from Plutarch’s inten- tion, as he expresses it in the preface, to make the mythological material “take on the look of his- tory,” I argue that opsis serves as a thematic preoccupation for Plutarch in the Teseus-Romulus, both on the level of his biographical project and within the narratives of these Lives. In surveying incidents of sight in both parts, I note that way in which opsis can grant discursive authority to the one who sees something happen (most paradigmatically, a messenger such as Proculus at the 1 end of Romulus) but can also overwhelm or “captivate” viewers and deprive them of agency. In- deed, it is this twofold potential of opsis that informs Plutarch’s nuanced model of how biography, myth, and history might “look.” For chapter 3, I turn to mimetic and imitative ideas in the Teseus-Romulus and under- score how Plutarch employs the recursive and iterative capacities of mimēsis to build large net- works that serve to connect reader, author, and both biographical subjects in various ways. Since it is a term that can take a wide range of people and objects as “input” and “output,” it appears in a particularly diverse set of circumstances in these Lives, and with a range of ethical evaluations that do not always align with the idea of ethical exemplarity implicit in Plutarch’s project in the Parallel Lives. At the same time, engagement with mimetic behavior is a key respect by which Plutarch differentiates his two biographical subjects in the Teseus-Romulus: the former is heavily bound up in imitation, especially in his relationship to Heracles and his institution of the crane dance on Delos, while Plutarch emphasizes the latter’s special status as founder of the new city of Rome by describing him as fundamentally non-imitative. In the fnal chapter, I turn to the motif of lēthē (forgetting) in the Teseus-Romulus, taking as my starting point Teseus 22, where Teseus neglects to change the sail on his ship to indicate his survival and Aegeus kills himself in the mistaken belief that his son is dead. I contend that Plutarch’s version of the story, which explains Teseus’ lapse as the result of his joy, relies on the pseudo-etymological link between joy (chara) and (choros) that Plato lays out in Laws II (645a). Broadening my focus, I look to the rest of the Teseus-Romulus and argue that Plutarch constructs a model of lēthē as a necessary element in cultural survival rather than a solely negative or de- structive process. To reinforce this model, I suggest the familiar Ship of Teseus paradox at Te- seus 23 as well as the trough in which Romulus and Remus survive at Romulus 7-8 as emblems of preservation in the face of change. More broadly, I contend that the survival, in Plutarch’s own day, of Greek identity in the face of Roman domination is bound up with the capacity of lēthē to accommodate cultural transformation without annihilation. 2 Table of Contents Introduction: Cracking a Biographical Code p. 1 1: "A map of days outworn": Spatiotemporality in the Teseus-Romulus p. 17 2: "Te conquest of thy sight": Vision and the Messenger p. 48 3: "Nothing like the sun": Recursion, Mimesis, and the Labyrinth p. 78 4: "To import forgetfulness": Cultural Transformation in the Teseus-Romulus p. 112 Bibliography p. 143 i Acknowledgements Outside of my committee, I am most indebted to Leslie Kurke and Donald Mastronarde from the classics department at UC Berkeley for their support, as well as to Greta Hawes and Jessica Priestley, who together organized the 2013 Bristol Myth Conference. Out of many supportive colleagues, I would like to thank Sarah Olsen and Seth Estrin especially. Lastly, but vitally, I must express signifcant gratitude for my family and for a number of friends who helped me throughout this process: Sarah Jean Johnson, Matt O'Connor, Lindsey Balogh, Sam Maurer, Jeff Johnson, Joseph Frislid, Derek Braun, Bob Masys, Jason Damas, Daniel Red- man, Stuart Schussel, Tim Dent, and James Pipe. ii Introduction Cracking a Biographical Code Plutarch's Teseus-Romulus is a pair of his Parallel Lives that is notable for the anteriority of its subjects. For Plutarch, just as they would be for a modern reader, Teseus and Romulus are mythological fgures, about whom any biographical information would have to be acquired by a scrutiny of rich and varied cultural traditions that would, in turn, yield tentative or uncertain his- torical conclusions. Our biographer himself, writing around the year 100 of the common era, fnds them to be atypical targets for his biographical project in the Parallel Lives and, consequent- ly, a reader in the twenty-frst century cannot seek to interpret them without accounting for their oddity. An Athenian culture-hero and the founder of Rome, respectively, Teseus and Romulus stand out against the pairs of Lives1 that one might see as more typical of Plutarch's biographical project, the bulk of whose biographical subjects lived between the sixth century BCE and the end of the Roman Republic. Te unusual nature of the choices of Teseus and Romulus also represents, however, an opportunity for us to better understand the underlying logic of Plutarch's approach to biography. Since, as I will note frequently, Plutarch registers this shift back in time as an expansion of or ad- justment to his model of biography, the anteriority of the subject material also offers us the chance to understand with greater clarity where the essence of Plutarchan biography lies. Tis is bound up closely with the problem of rationalizing myth. After all, if myth and legend could be uniformly transformed into history by any consistent and reliable process, then the choice of sub- ject matter would not necessitate great adjustments in the approach to biography. Even in antiq- uity, however, a prose writer such as Plutarch would fnd that much of his material cannot be re- solved beyond a reasonable doubt. Unlike the modern reader, he would seem to have no doubt of the existence of a fgure such as Teseus or Heracles, but the ability to gain access to the historic- ity of such individuals requires some tolerance for probabilities over certainties and, as he notes in his preface to these Lives, a pardoning attitude from these readers.2 Rather than a project of rationalizing, then, the Teseus-Romulus is at its core an expan- sion of the Parallel Lives into domains (myth, epic, poetry) that are under normal circumstances held distinct from the category of biography. I would argue, however, that the new turn apparent in this pair of Lives is in fact an aid to better understanding Plutarch's model of biography and of the uses of the genre.
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