The Nature of Virtue and the Need for Self-Knowledge in Plutarch’s Demosthenes-Cicero

Abstract

The first three chapters of Plutarch's Demosthenes comprise a prologue that introduces the Demosthenes-Cicero pair. Plutarch begins this prologue with a chreia that raises an ethical question about the right environment for happiness and the development of virtue. Referring to himself in the first person and addressing his dedicatee, Sosius Senecio, by name, he engages his reader directly, first about happiness and virtue, and then about his approach to the Lives that appear in this book and his reasons for pairing them. In the process, he provides personal information about himself, remarking on his fondness for his hometown and his late start in learning Latin. These remarks are typically taken at face value, and have become central to Plutarch's own biography in modern times 1 . Indeed, the prologue as a whole has been read most carefully not for understanding Plutarch's ethics or method in the Demosthenes-Cicero, but to characterize the form and function of his prologues in general 2 . It is also important, however, to consider the prologue's immediate context and its bearing on the book that it introduces. In fact, two central themes of the prologuethat virtue is independent of environment and that self-knowledge is critical to success -are important themes in the Lives that follow. In this essay I present a reading of the prologue that demonstrates how closely connected it is to the contents of the book and how its themes are elaborated in the pair of Lives.An important comparandum for the opening of the Demosthenes-Cicero is the prologue to the Alexander-Caesar, where Plutarch asks his readers not to quibble if he does not narrate all the great deeds of his heroes. In defense of his omissions, he makes his oft-quoted claim that he "is not writing histories, but lives" (Alex. 1,2). Often read as a general methodological statement applying to the composition of all the Parallel

Dreams in Plutarch’sLivesof Alcibiades and Demosthenes

“…Mossman (1999) 84.44 For the applicability of this maxim to the Life of Demosthenes, cf Beneker (2016)…”