The Two Dozen Items Assembled Here Come from the Second Half of That Era

234 Book Reviews

Philip A. Stadter Plutarch and his Roman Readers (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), x + 394 pp. $175.00. ISBN 9780198718338 (hbk).

Philip Stadter has been publishing excellent scholarship on Plutarch for fifty years; the two dozen items assembled here come from the second half of that era. Through these essays every topic in Plutarchan scholarship arises but the connecting thread is Plutarch’s politically and socially influential Roman tar- get audience, who they were, how they were connected to Plutarch, and how Plutarch’s works, especially his Parallel Lives, developed amidst those relationships and could have and most probably did affect them. These essays have appeared in a host of international publications which are not always at hand, two are (still) forthcoming, two were previously published in Italian, and the first chapter is wholly new; some slight additions to the notes have been made. As one studies these chapters as a set, one thinks of Plutarch’s own works, the Moralia and the Parallel Lives, how they were written over many decades of a long and accomplished career, and how the latter reflect on the earlier writ- ings yet at the same time reveal a sound depth and sense already present in the earliest pieces. A constant feature of Stadter’s work is how he examines a Plutarchan detail with the larger rhetorical, historical, and political context always in mind. The pervasive depth of Stadter’s knowledge and the richness of his perspective make this set of essays the ideal companion to the study of Plutarch. Stadter’s study of Plutarch began in the 1960s when prosopographical work focused on the reconstruction of the web of relationships that Plutarch, and other Greeks, had with Roman elites. Plutarch’s interactions with these elites have been an enriching topic of study for its general historical value but also as an avenue to study the motives behind the writing of his Parallel Lives and much in the Moralia. In Chapter 1, ‘Friends or Patrons?’, Stadter considers the relationships with these Roman elites not simply as Plutarch’s friends but also as his socio-political superiors, as ruling Romans granting favors to a subject Greek. The thoroughness in postulating possible favors is admirable as is the thoroughness in pointing to known sources and the frankness in marking limi- tations. Chapter 2 then examines some of the evidence for this interaction and how it worked, such as Plutarch’s use of Latin, his thoughts on Greeks pursuing politics under Roman rule, and the role of philosophy in politics, with the dou- ble Life of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus used to illustrate how the best sorts, both personally and publicly, can all go wrong. (On the subject of this chapter see also Stadter’s chapter ‘Plutarch and Rome’ as well as Christopher Pelling’s

‘Political Philosophy’ in the new Blackwell A Companion to Plutarch, ed. Mark Beck [2014].) Chapter 3 presents a fascinating assessment of the mostly lost Lives of the Caesars, from Augustus to Vitellius (only the short Galba and dam- aged Otho survive). Of particular importance is Stadter’s persuasive argument for dating the set amidst Vespasian’s reign. Chapters 4 and 5 use Delphi and Roman interest there to examine the role of the oracle in Plutarch’s works and in his own life. Out of the abundance of rel- evant inscriptions, along with Plutarch’s near silence of his own role at Delphi, Stadter reconstructs in Chapter 4 a narrative both of events, religious, finan- cial, and architectural, over the course of Plutarch’s life and also of the roles of an array of elite Romans at the shrine. Chapter 5 supplements the preceding by surveying the presence, and absence, of Delphi and oracular responses in the Parallel Lives. I would note that the use here of Sulla 29.11-13, where Sulla pulls out a little statuette of Apollo and prays to it, is far more problematic than Stadter suggests (p. 93); Sulla 29.10 graphically details how Sulla’s sharp-eyed groom saved the oblivious Sulla, and the statuette itself is surely not ‘had from Delphi’ (p. 93) but rather extorted or stolen from the shrine, as Sulla 12.6 (cf. too the verbs used in the parallel Latin accounts: sublatum or ablatum [epitomes of Val. Max.,1.2.3] and sustulerat [Fron. Str. 1.11]). Chapter 6, a survey of the nine books of Table Talks, serves as a bridge between the socio-political background that Stadter has established in earlier chapters and the turn to the narratives in the Parallel Lives to follow. Chapter 7, ‘Leading the Party, Leading the City: The Symposiarch as politikos’, is the only essay in the collection that is somewhat redundant but it makes explicit the important political relevance of the Table Talks that is hinted at in the prior essay. Chapter 8 succinctly surveys Plutarch’s intellectual background, his career and decision to write the Lives, his sources, the choice of subjects and their par- alleling. Like Stadter’s preface to the Oxford translation by Robin Waterfield, Plutarch: Greek Lives (1998), but with updated bibliography, this essay is the best starting point for any reading of the Lives. The seemingly narrow focus of Chapter 9, ‘Plutarch’s Latin Reading: Cicero’s Lucullus and Horace’s Epistle 1.6’, broadens out from a question of language competence and source use into a view of the intellectual and political interaction between Rome and Greece through Plutarch’s own life and through his biography of Lucullus. Chapter 10 usefully compiles Plutarch’s knowledge and use of the Roman cursus honorum, seeing it as a barometer of the political weather in Rome. In Chapter 11 Stadter uses Pliny’s Panegyric of AD 100 as a foil for the style and moral purpose of Plutarch’s Lives, with a particular eye for criticism of Domitian who serves as a negative parallel to Trajan. Chapter 12, ‘The Justice of Trajan in Pliny Epistles 10

polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought 33 (2016) 173-242