chapter 36 ’s Fortune in

Aurelio Pérez Jiménez

1 The Beginnings*

In his Castigos é documentos para bien vivir que dio a su fijo (“Advices and Instruction on how to lead a good life which he gave his son”, c. 1290), Sancho IV of Castile quoted an anecdote from Plutarch. Yet he did not borrow it first-hand but had learnt about the Chaeronean from John of Salisbury’s Policraticus. Even so, any reflection on Plutarch’s fortune in Spain must start from such early (pre- Renaissance) references, despite the fact that they are attached to the pseudo- Plutarchan Institutio Traiani. The Italica-born (citing Plutarch as his teacher) saw the inclusion of our author in the culture of Spain as a patriotic bonus. Plutarch also reached the early Castilian writers through Petrarch, who cites On the control of anger in his works.1 As for the actual Plutarch, his Parallel lives soon attracted the attention of Juan Fernández de Heredia (c. 1310–1396), Grand Master of the Knights Hospitaller from 1377. This influential Aragonese nobleman, connected both to the Papal Court at Avignon and the of Castile and , had a of the Lives made into Aragonese, which he then used for many passages of his Grant Crónica de los Conquiridores (“Grand Chronicle of the Conquerors”) and Grant Crónica de Espanya (“Grand Chronicle of Spain”).2 The fortune of Plutarch in the Iberian (including Spain and ) has been enormous ever since.3 His influence has been felt in histori- cal accounts, biographies (for which those of Plutarch were models), chroni- cles and, above all, treatises on instruction, religion, philosophy and ethics. The conservative Platonism of the Chaeronean author and his Aristotelian ethical ideals turned the Moralia into a source for pagan wisdom for the crusty thinkers of the Counter-Reformation. Plutarch’s fabled Christianisation (Renaissance biographies of Plutarch stated that he was baptised by Origen) relieved the

* I thank Dr. David Moreno Olalla, Professor at the University of Málaga, for the translation of this article into English. 1 Pérez Jiménez (1990: 229–230). 2 See Redondo (2011) and Redondo-Sancho Montés (2007) on the importance of Plutarch in the Valencian and Catalan Humanism of the 1300s–1400s. 3 See Pérez Jiménez (1990; 2014); Bergua (1995); García Gual (2017).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004409446_038 Plutarch’s Fortune in Spain 607 consciences of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish clerical writ- ers, who had recourse to the Lives and the Moralia as a way of imparting au- thority to their own ethical and theological considerations. They also quoted his name next to prestigious authors such as , , , Seneca or Tacitus, either as a display or erudition or as an instrument of authority and confirmation of Platonic-Christian orthodoxy.

2 Translations

Other factors helped shape Plutarch’s success. The most important one in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain, where only some elementary Greek was taught in Universities, was the role of translations.4 Concerning the Parallel lives, the translation of Heredia in the 1300s had the honour of being the first one that rendered Plutarch’s biographical works into a Western vernacular. Otherwise it had little influence, although it did serve as the basis for the first Italian translation, made by the humanist Coluccio Salutati.5 The first attempt at a Castilian version is an incunabulum by Fernández de ( 1491), based on renderings by Italian humanists in the 1200s–1300s. Its dubious literary merits explain why Diego Gracián de Alderete (1494–1584) called it “Deaths” rather than “Lives”. In the mid-1500s, interest in the Lives is reflected in the first translations from the Greek (Theseus-Romulus, Lycurgus-Numa, -Publicola and, using a differ- ent foliation, -Camillus) which Francisco de Enzinas (1518–1552) published in Strasbourg (1551). Under the pseudonym “Pedro de Salinas” he was probably behind an earlier paraphrase of Cimon-Lucullus (1547). The seventeenth century proved less prolific, though the moral and political interest in the Chaeronean meant the appearance of substantial paraphrases of some Lives: Brutus by Francisco de Quevedo ( 1654) and Numa, with religious and philosophical commentaries, by the Aragonese Antonio Costa (Saragossa 1672). In the following centuries, the importance of the sixteenth- century Latin translations from Stephanus’ Greek edition and the success of Amyot’s French version are probably responsible for the decrease in the num- ber of Spanish translations of Plutarchan works. It is not until the second half of the eighteenth century that the first complete Spanish translation of the Parallel lives, by the Soria-born humanist Antonio Ranz Romanillos (1759–1830)

4 See Lasso de la Vega (1962). The following is an abridgement of Pérez Jiménez (2009 and 2014). 5 Álvarez Rodríguez (2009: CLVI). See also Becchi in this volume.