Plutarch

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A day’s walk east of the small Boeotian town where he was born, the road runs up to Delphi, and for the last decades of his life Plutarch made that walk as one of the two priests who served Apollo at the most famous oracle in the Greek world. He held the office while the sanctuary was sliding into the long quiet of its old age — fewer pilgrims, a single Pythia where once there had been more, the bronze and gold of centuries dulling in the mountain light — and he wrote, among much else, to ask what the god still meant when the crowds had thinned. Plutarch of Chaeronea (c. 46 – after 119 CE) is the figure in whom the Greek philosophical reading of religion reached a particular fullness: a Platonist who was also a working priest, a biographer who was also a theologian, a man who took the myths of his own people and of Egypt and read them not as stories about gods but as a veiled grammar of the divine.

Roman-era marble portrait long identified as Plutarch, displayed in the Archaeological Museum of Delphi, near the sanctuary he served — Zde, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

He came of an old and comfortable family. His father was Autobulus; the grandfather Lamprias, a vivid talker, appears by name in his dialogues, and his sons and brother do too, so that the household itself becomes a kind of standing cast for his philosophy. As a young man, while Nero was touring Greece in 66 or 67, Plutarch went to Athens and studied under the Platonist Ammonius — an Egyptian by some accounts, a teacher remembered chiefly through the affectionate portrait his pupil drew of him — and read Plato where Plato had taught. He traveled to Rome, lectured there, made influential Roman friends, and through one of them, Lucius Mestrius Florus, took the citizenship and the name Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus. But he went home to Chaeronea and stayed, holding local magistracies and joking that he remained in a small town lest it grow smaller still. The wider Mediterranean came to him through letters, dialogues, and the steady stream of guests who fill the staged conversations of his books.

A Platonist between the Academy and Plotinus

Plutarch belongs to the long middle stretch of Platonism — the centuries between the closing of the skeptical Academy and the systematic Neoplatonism that Plotinus would build in third-century Rome. In that period the dialogues of Plato were read again as a theology: a supreme God beyond the reach of the senses, the eternal Forms as the contents of the divine mind, a craftsman who shapes the visible cosmos after their pattern, and a graded order of lesser divine beings, the daimones, carrying providence down and prayer up across the gap between heaven and the human. Plutarch is among the most fully preserved voices of that world, and the only one of the major Middle Platonists whose work survives in bulk rather than in fragments and report — the condition in which Numenius of Apamea and most of the others reach us.

He read Plato with a stubborn literalness that set him apart. Where most Platonists treated the world-making of the Timaeus as a teaching device — the cosmos described as though it had a beginning, the better to display its structure — Plutarch held that the dialogue meant what it said: that the visible order was genuinely brought into being out of a prior disorder. This commits him to a real dualism. Before the cosmos there is matter already stirred by a disorderly, irrational soul, a principle of motion that is not evil by design but is the source of everything resistant to reason in the world. Creation is the moment the demiurge imposes measure on that unruly substrate, and the persistence of evil is the persistence of what was never fully mastered. He set this out at length in On the Generation of the Soul in the Timaeus, and it is the philosophical spine beneath everything else he wrote about the gods.

This dualism made him a sharp and lifelong opponent of the Stoics. Against the Stoic doctrine that the cosmos is a single rational substance, providence and matter and god all collapsed into one continuous fire, Plutarch wrote whole treatises of attack — On Stoic Self-Contradictions, On Common Conceptions — pressing the charge that a system in which god is simply the world cannot keep evil from being god’s own act. He fought Epicurus from the other flank, defending providence and the soul’s survival against a philosophy that denied both. What he wanted was a god clean of the world’s disorder yet genuinely its orderer: transcendent enough not to be implicated in evil, present enough to make the cosmos good. The architecture this forces — a highest principle held apart from making, the work of ordering pushed onto an active second power, the soul ascending back toward the source — is the same architecture later raised into a full system by the Neoplatonists, and Plutarch stands among the craftsmen who cut the stones before the arch was sprung.

The two priests of Apollo

The ruined Temple of Apollo at Delphi, seat of the oracle Plutarch served as priest — Jason M Ramos, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Around the year 95 Plutarch was made one of the two priests of Apollo at Delphi, and he wore the office for the rest of his life, close enough to home that priesthood and household never came apart. Out of it came the cluster of works now called the Delphic dialogues — On the E at Delphi, On the Oracles of the Pythia, On the Obsolescence of Oracles — in which the philosophy of the god and the daily life of a declining shrine are held in one frame. Why does the oracle now answer in plain prose rather than in the old hexameters? Why have so many oracles across Greece fallen silent? The questions are practical, the answers metaphysical. The god does not speak directly through the priestess, in Plutarch’s account; the divine works through intermediaries, through the daimones and through the natural exhalations of the place, and where those mediating powers weaken or withdraw, the channel narrows. The oracle’s decline is not the god’s absence but the thinning of the chain that joins god to ground.

That order of daimones is one of Plutarch’s most consequential contributions. In On the Sign of Socrates he takes the daimonion of Socrates — the inner voice that checked him — and reads it as the touch of one of these intermediate beings, a soul sufficiently purified to hear what coarser souls cannot. Around it he builds a whole tiered cosmos of spirits between the gods and the human, some rising, some fallen, who serve the cults, attend the oracles, and preside over the soul’s passage after death. The same intermediating world fills his great myths of the afterlife — the vision in On the Sign of Socrates, the moon as the way-station of souls in On the Face in the Moon, the punishment-myth of On the Delays of Divine Vengeance — in which the soul is shown sorting itself out across the cosmos according to what it has become. These are not decorative tales appended to argument; for Plutarch the myth carries what discursive philosophy cannot reach, the same conviction that would govern his reading of Egypt.

On Isis and Osiris

The fullest statement of that conviction is the treatise On Isis and Osiris, written late, around 120 CE, and addressed to Clea — a priestess at Delphi who was also an initiate of the rites of Dionysus and of Isis. It is the longest sustained interpretation of a foreign religion to survive from antiquity, and it set the terms on which the West would read Egypt for a millennium and a half. Plutarch recounts the Egyptian myth in its Hellenized form: Osiris the good king murdered and dismembered by his brother Typhon, his body scattered, gathered and mourned by his sister-wife Isis, who conceives from him their son Horus; and Horus at last contending against Typhon for the order of the world. Then he asks what it means — and refuses, pointedly, to let it mean what it literally says. The gods are not the figures in the story. To take Osiris for a once-living king, or to worship the animals and rivers the myth names, is to mistake the sign for the thing signified. The myths are a script written in symbols, and the priest’s task — the philosopher’s task — is to read through them to the realities they veil.

Late Period Egyptian statue of Isis sheltering Osiris with her wings — Walters Art Museum, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain / CC0)

Read so, the story becomes a metaphysics. Osiris is reason and the ordering principle, the intelligible itself, the seat of the Forms and the source of all measure and form in things — in the vocabulary of the dialogues, the demiurgic intellect, even something of the Good of the Republic. Isis is the receptive principle, the female and material ground on which that order is impressed: Plutarch reaches straight for Plato’s Timaeus and identifies her with the Receptacle, the nurse of all becoming, the space that takes every shape and is none. She is not inert. She loves and longs for the ordering reason, turns toward it, receives its imprint, and so brings the cosmos to birth; her gathering of the scattered limbs of Osiris is matter’s reception of the dispersed forms of the intelligible, drawing them into the visible world. Horus, the child of the two, is the sensible cosmos itself — the ordered world that results when reason is sown in the receptive, an image in matter of the intelligible pattern. And Typhon is the disorderly, the irrational, the destructive: the same recalcitrant principle that Plutarch’s reading of the Timaeus sets before all making, the drag of unreason that the world’s order must perpetually overcome but never wholly defeats. The myth’s grief and its violence are not scandals to be explained away but the truest part of it — they register, in narrative, the real resistance built into things.

The reading carries Plutarch’s dualism on its surface. He gathers into the treatise a survey of the world’s peoples to argue that the wisest everywhere have held two opposed principles, a maker of good and a maker of disorder, neither reducible to the other — and he cites the Persian magi, Zoroaster’s Oromazes set against Areimanius as light against darkness, with a mediating power between, as the clearest statement of the doctrine he finds half-told in Egypt and grounds in Plato. The Egyptian myth, the Persian theology, and the Timaeus are made three tellings of one structure: an ordering reason, a receptive ground, and a disorder that must be subdued. He does not flatten the cult into philosophy; he honors its rites, its priests, its discipline of secrecy, and reads the secrecy itself as fit to the matter, since the divine is approached through veils. The famous image at Saïs — the seated figure the Greeks called Athena and Plutarch identifies with Isis, inscribed that she is all that has been and is and shall be, and that no mortal has lifted her mantle — stands in the treatise (chapter 9) as the emblem of the whole method: the truth is there, and it is wrapped.

Jan Luyken’s 1681 frontispiece to Blasius’s “Anatome Animalium,” in which Science unveils a veiled Nature drawn from Isis — a later echo of Plutarch’s Saïs inscription that truth is real and wrapped — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Beside Philo, Numenius, and the lecturers of the age

Plutarch is best placed among the thinkers of his century who were doing, in different keys, the same kind of work. Philo of Alexandria, a generation or two before, had read the Hebrew scriptures as Plutarch read the Egyptian myths — as an allegorical surface beneath which Platonic metaphysics could be found, the Logos mediating between a transcendent God and the world. Numenius of Apamea, his younger contemporary, pushed the graded divine toward the sharper hierarchy that Neoplatonism would inherit, and looked, as Plutarch did, to the older Eastern peoples for confirmation of Greek truth. Maximus of Tyre, the traveling lecturer, carried the same theology — the unnameable God, the daimones between, the question of what images of the gods are for — to general audiences in the polished style of the public hall. They are not a school; they are a temperature, the climate in which a transcendent God ringed by mediating powers became the common furniture of educated religion. Plutarch’s distinction within it is the doubleness of his standing: not a lecturer reporting doctrine, nor a scriptural exegete bound to one revelation, but a priest reading the rites he served and the rites of others as one continuous veiled wisdom.

That standing is what made him a source rather than a stage. His insistence that Egyptian myth conceals a Platonic metaphysics, that the gods of the cult are symbols of intelligible realities, that the rites guard truths too high for the crowd — this is the very disposition the Hermetic writings would assume a century later, when Greek philosophy and Egyptian religious prestige fused in the dialogues attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. The reverence for Egypt as the homeland of a primordial theology, veiled in image and reserved for the initiated, which runs through the Corpus Hermeticum and through the later mystery cults, found in On Isis and Osiris its most articulate Greek charter. When the Renaissance recovered Plato and the Hermetica together and read them as one ancient wisdom, Plutarch’s treatise was already there to teach it how Egypt should be read — and the veiled Isis of Saïs, mantle uncovered by no mortal, became the standing emblem of a nature that hides its truth and yields it only to the patient.

The corpus, the catalog, and the reading

What survives of Plutarch falls in two great masses. The Parallel Lives pair eminent Greeks with Romans — Alexander with Caesar, Demosthenes with Cicero — to weigh character against character; they are biographies written by a moralist, and they made Plutarch, through Sir Thomas North’s Elizabethan English, the quarry from which Shakespeare cut his Roman plays. The rest is the Moralia, a sprawling collection of dialogues, treatises, and essays on ethics, religion, natural questions, literature, and table talk, into which all his philosophical and theological work falls. The two masses are one mind: the same convictions about providence, the soul, and the daimonic order that animate the essays shape the judgments of the Lives.

An ancient list called the Lamprias catalog, ascribed to a son of Plutarch and surviving in mutilated form, names 227 titles — the first forty of the Lives, the rest of the Moralia — and so records how much is lost: of those titles a large share no longer exists. What remains of the Moralia runs to some seventy-eight or eighty pieces, of which a number, including the treatises on the education of children and on music, are now judged not to be his. Disentangling the genuine from the spurious, and the early from the late, is the long labor of modern scholarship, anchored by John Dillon’s reconstruction of the Middle Platonist movement and by the critical and bilingual editions through which the texts are now read — the standard English of On Isis and Osiris being Frank Cole Babbitt’s Loeb edition of 1936, with the Greek facing the translation. The modern recovery of the treatise’s argument — that it is a coherent Platonic theology and not a grab-bag of antiquarian lore — runs through commentary such as the Center for Hellenic Studies’ close reading of the essay, which traces how Plutarch makes the myth carry the metaphysics, and the broader account of his place between the schools set out in the Stanford reference treatment of his philosophy.

He died sometime after 119, an old man still walking up to a quieting oracle. What he left was a way of reading. Long after the cult of Isis was suppressed and Delphi fell mute, the method outlasted both shrines: that a sacred story is a cipher, that the dismembered god is reason scattered into matter and the mourning goddess the world reaching back toward its source, that the divine shows itself only through what conceals it. Through that reading the gods of Egypt entered the Platonic and the esoteric stream and never left it — Osiris become the Logos, Isis the veiled face of nature, the myth become philosophy without ceasing to be myth.

→ In the library: Plato — The Dialogues (Jowett) · The Virgin of the World (Kingsford & Maitland, 1885)

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