Book #60 (Part 2) - Roman Lives (Plutarch)

I'm sitting here drinking my Plymouth Gin martini and trying to figure out how to start this latest blog post.  Usually I try to be witty and funny, and I let the alcohol wash over me like a wave of inspiration, sweeping me up into the vast ocean of wisdom to be found in the world's greatest literature.  Meh, but not tonight.  My martini is good, but somehow it's not quite the drink I thought I was craving.  And my reading of late has been slow going, just because the pressures of daily life have kept me away from the pages.  And finally, the mass shooting a few days ago in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina has made me sad and worried for this country.  WOOO, 'Merica!!  Ugh.  This country is so divided between right and left, common sense and respect for wisdom and knowledge have gone out the window, and the government seems so incapable of doing anything except for what's good for the rich and powerful.  Fuck!

I've been reading a few more of Plutarch's "Lives" lately.  It's interesting to compare what's happening today, versus the events and lives Plutarch tells us about from over 2000 years ago.  Back in Ancient Rome, man, now they knew how to get things done!  No sitting around in fancy cocktail bars drinking $12 cocktails made with artisan gin and pineapple gomme and hibiscus bitters, and moaning about how bad things are getting.  No, when those ancient Roman dudes got pissed off they took to the streets and got it DONE!  Take Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, for example.  What, you never heard of them?  The Gracchi brothers?  Well Plutarch, in his Life of Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, tells us about how these two dudes stirred it UP in the old Roman Republic.  You know, before the whole Republic thing fell apart and became a dictatorship...uh, I mean empire.  The Gracchi brothers lived in the mid-100s BC, and came from a wealthy and noble family.  They both served as tribunes, which means they were elected officials who served to protect the interests of the plebeians against the senate.  The Gracchi, in spite of their wealth, sided with the 99% against the wealthy landowners, and decided to push for agrarian land reform.  OK, that sounds pretty dull, but what it meant was that they were pissed off at the rich dudes who hogged up all the farm lands and wouldn't give the little guy a chance to do any farming.  So the Gracchi figured they should pass laws limiting the amount of land any one person could own, and thus take some of the land owned by the rich farmers who were just kicking back smoking weed while their slaves worked their asses off, and give it to the poor and homeless who just wanted a break, and maybe were veterans and all, and deserved a chance at a piece of the pie.  Go Gracchi!!  Occupy Rome!!  Of course, the rich dudes in the senate didn't like this at all, because they themselves owned a lot of farmland and didn't want it to get snatched up.  So the rich fought back against attempts by the Gracchi brothers to redistribute some wealth to the poor, and guess how that turned out.  Yep, the Gracchi were killed.  Tiberius was clubbed to death by his fellow senators, and Gaius killed himself years later after being cornered by an angry mob of political opponents.  Woohoo, violence solves everything!  Anyway, that was the beginning of violence seeping into the Roman political system, which became more and more ingrained as time went on, eventually undermining the Roman Republic.  So what can we learn from this?  We can learn Fight the Power!...and if we do we'll literally get beaten down and killed.  Woo.  I need another drink.

Ahh, feeling better now.  I'm drinking a rum and pineapple now, because rum remotely sounds like Rome.  That seemed like a pretty valid reason to me.  Meanwhile back in Ancient Rome:  after the Gracchi brothers, along came these dudes Marius and Sulla.  And yes, Plutarch wrote two of his Lives about them too.  Under their leadership, the violence in Rome's political system got worse.  A lot worse.  Gaius Marius was born in 157 B.C., Marius became a great Roman general, beating up on Germanic tribes and other foreigners, and served as consul for an unprecedented seven times.  Marius became a Roman hero, but in 88 B.C, another Roman consul, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, was put in charge of a Roman army to defeat an enemy of Rome, King Mithridates.  Marius did not like this, and tried to get the army for himself, and in response, Sulla took the army and turned it against Rome and Marius in an act of Civil War.  Marius was defeated and had to flee Rome.  Plutarch describes his flight, and it's pretty exciting, with lots of close calls and near escapes.  Finally Marius makes it to Africa, where he is safe, and Sulla takes his army and goes to fight Mithridates.  Sulla's absence allowed Marius to raise his own army and to march on Rome, retaking it for himself.  He and his soldiers sought a bloodthirsty vengeance, and killed a lot of his opponents upon his return to Rome.  Then he died in 86 B.C., of some kind of illness.

But the violence was not to end there.  In 83 B.C., Sulla once again marched on Rome, after having won the war against Mithridates.  After a huge battle, he seized control of the city.  Then the killing began in earnest.  Seems like Sulla was the Stalin of ancient Rome, instituting a series of purges where lists of "enemies of the state" were publicly posted, and bounties put upon their heads.  Sulla's enemies were killed, and then enemies of Sulla's friends, and then just rich people so that Sulla could seize their property and auction it off.  It was a bloodbath.  Plutarch's descriptions of the murders and executions are chilling.  Finally, two years later, Sulla surprisingly ended his dictatorship and returned Rome to its Republican rule.  He retired from public life and died a few years later of natural causes.  Nonetheless, his example of being a dictator was not lost on Julius Caesar, who took control of Rome a generation later and finally ended the Republic for good.

Reading Plutarch is surprisingly fun, for two reasons.  First, the dude is a natural born storyteller.  He's the kind of guy you'd want sit around the fire with on a cold winter evening, and hear him tell stories about the old days while sipping on another rum and pineapple.  But second, it's fascinating to hear these stories of people and times that are 2000 years gone, and yet still ring true today.  It's not hard to imagine how today's political debates and divides could break out into violence...and indeed, they sometimes do.  The Roman Republic fell, and launched an age of emperors, and that too eventually ended.  We sometimes take for granted that our own republic will always stand, but there's no guarantee.  Reading Plutarch makes one remember that nothing is permanent, and today's strife and struggles will one day be ancient history, and yet they may one day also be repeated in one form or another.  Hmm, so then I might as well have another rum and pineapple...

Book #60 (Part 1) - Greek Lives (Plutarch)

Whatever happened to The Classics, anyway?  I have the impression, perhaps based on a combination of wishful thinking and idealization of the pre-antibiotic era, that high school and college students of the 1800s read and studied and were intimately familiar with The Classics, often in their original Greek or Latin, and that the mark of an educated man was having read Homer, Thucydides, Livy, Sophocles, Plato, Plutarch, and the rest of their ilk.  The classics had a cachet, and were thought to contain ancient yet timeless wisdom, that could still benefit those of us born a couple of thousand years later.  So what happened?  When I was in high school we read Homer (The Odyssey), and maybe a play by Sophocles, but that was about it.  The classics were definitely not the core of the curriculum.  Are they anywhere anymore?  And were they really the centerpiece of a good 19th century education, or is that just an idealized fantasy?  I don't know.  What the hell do I know, anyway?  I'm sitting here typing into a computer, sucking down a very strong yet delicious Margarita, made with tequila (Hornitos...mmmm), triple sec, lots of freshly squeezed lime juice, and a splash of orange juice.  Yes, dear reader, if there's one thing in life you get out of this blog, it's not to read the classics or Middlemarch or any other book I've blogged about, but this:  throw in a splash of orange juice when you're making a Margarita at home.  Use the best orange juice you can get, not that cheap frozen, concentrated crap, but real freshly-squeezed, never-frozen stuff, like Odwalla or something, and I guarantee you that your Margarita satisfaction will be upped 1000%.  Trust me.  Then after that, go read Middlemarch and the classics if you want.  Or not.  Whatever.  God, I love Margaritas.

Anyway, where was I?  Oh yeah, The Classics.  I've been on a classics tear lately, having spent some quality time with Thucydides, and I decided to continue with my reading about ancient Greece by reading some of Plutarch's "Lives", specifically a collection of nine of Plutarch's Greek Lives compiled by the Oxford University Press.  Ah, Plutarch...everybody in my idealized 19th century used to read this guy, and who does now?  Well, me at least.  Plutarch, or Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and philosopher, who lived from 46-120 AD.  He was Greek at a time when Greece was part of the Roman empire.  He was born into a wealthy family, and apparently became a leading citizen of his hometown of Chaeronea.  He also became famous as a writer, and wrote a helluva lot of books, only some of which survived down through the millennia.  Perhaps his most famous works, and the ones which I have on my reading list for this blog, is a series of biographies known as the Parallel Lives.  These are biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, which are arranged in pairs to show their common qualities. The surviving Lives contain 23 pairs, each with one Greek Life and one Roman Life, as well as four unpaired single Lives.  The pairs of Lives also have short essays attached to them, comparing the paired Greek and Roman Lives.  My goal for this blog is to read all 50, plus the comparisons, and so I started by reading this collection of nine of Plutarch's Lives of famous Greeks.  The biographies included in this collection are Lycergus, Solon, Themistocles, Cimon, Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades, Agesilaus, and Alexander the Great.

To start off this discussion of Plutarch, let me just say this it is a tragedy that neither Plutarch, nor any of the nine Greeks whose biographies make up this book, ever got to taste a Margarita.  That is an utter shame, and suggests that perhaps the ancient world was not all it was cracked up to be.  From what I can tell, the ancient Greeks drank mostly wine, and they drank it diluted with water.  Which makes me curious...was ancient Greek wine anything like a modern day Zinfandel from Napa Valley?  Was it delicious and notable and worthy of comparison with any of the wines we drink today?  Or was it real rotgut stuff, which is why they had to dilute it with water?  I don't know.  But wine was important enough to the Greeks for them to have their own god of it, Dionysus.  But how would Dionysus react to a Margarita?  Very favorably, I suspect.  Especially if it contained a splash of freshly-squeezed orange juice.

Anyway, Plutarch...I love this guy! Plutarch, as he himself explains in his Life of Alexander, is not a historian, but is a biographer, and is particularly interested in moral character.  In his biographies he will often skip over major battles and historical events, and instead focus on anecdotes and stories that reveal elements of his subjects' personalities.  He's a philosopher, and is more interested in what makes people's characters than in telling a chronological history of events.  Nonetheless, Plutarch's Lives are invaluable historic resources, since Plutarch had an extensive library which he used to write his biographies, and many or most of the sources he used and cited no longer exist (goddamn passage of time!).  So his Lives are sometimes the only records we have of certain historical events and persons.  But while he had access to many manuscripts lost to history, you and I have access to Margaritas, so perhaps the trade-off is about even.  And Plutarch seems exactly like the kind of guy you'd want to hang out with in your living room while tossing back a few delicious Margaritas and munching on some chips and guacamole.  Not just because the Margarita and the guacamole would have totally blown his mind.  But because his writing is so fun and enchanting.  He's a natural storyteller, and his style is easy and rambling...quite unlike Thucydides whose writing was much more complex and convoluted.  Not that Thucydides wasn't great to read, because he was, but I don't get the impression he'd want to pound back many Margaritas.  But Plutarch, he seems like he'd be game, and would tell you a bunch of cool stories at the same time.

Of course it helps a lot that Plutarch's subjects are so damn interesting to begin with.  Several of the Lives included in this collection were dudes that played prominent roles in Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War".  Like Alcibiades, for instance, possibly my favorite ancient Greek.  This guy was a crazy narcissistic motherfucker, incredibly brilliant and incredibly self-serving, and I can't help but be fascinated by him.  He was incredibly good-looking, according to all the sources (which really says something), and Plutarch hammers it home that he wasn't just good looking when he was young, but that his looks never left him until he died in middle age from a volley of arrows. Many of his misadventures are described by Thucydides (such as his having to flee from Sparta after knocking up the Spartan King's wife...oops) but Plutarch has other sources and goes into more detail about Alcibiades, and also tells of his life after Thucydides' history breaks off, including his death by assassins.  Two other Lives in this particular collection that are also in Thucydides are Pericles, the great Athenian leader at the outset of the Peloponnesian War, and Nicias, the indecisive, waffling general, who commanded the Athenian forces in Sicily, as they suffered complete and utter defeat at the hands of the locals.  Nicias is a portrait in failure...a noble, well-meaning man who just can't take he initiative needed to make victory happen.  Ironically the name "Nicias" is from the Greek "Nike" meaning victory.  Although nowadays it means athletic shoes.

Other Lives in this volume include Lycurgus, Solon, Themistocles, Cimon, Agesilaus, and Alexander the Great.  Lycergus was the man who laid down the law in Sparta.  Sparta, now there's a fascinating place.  Hold on a second and I'll tell you all about it, but first I need to refill my Margarita.  Be right back.  Ahhhhh, much better.  I think it's also the salted rim that really makes the Margarita for me.  I love salt...I'm a salt monster.  It's amazing I'm not in some hypertensive coma right now, actually.  But I digress.  Anyway, Sparta...man those dudes were crazy.  Lycurgus, who may or may not have been a real person, set up many of the Spartan institutions, and in a way Plutarch's biography is more a description of Sparta's unique society than a biography.  Sparta was really a totalitarian military organization disguised as a society.  Per Lycurgus' reforms, all adult males were required to eat in mess halls, where they feasted on some sort of black gruel.  Mmmm.  All children over the age of seven were taken from their parents and sent to the agoge, which were basically military training camps.  They stayed there until they were 17 and could then join the real army.  Spartan society could support all male citizens being in the army because they had a population of slaves, called Helots, who farmed the land and raised food for the Spartans.  Life in Sparta was brutish and militaristic.  When Lycurgus came to power he found that wealth in Sparta was unequally distributed, and so he took everything and distributed it among the population in equal amounts.  Among the Spartan population, that is, not the Helots.  Sorry, Helots.  Let's face it, Sparta was weird, and totally unlike anything else in the ancient Greek world.  And Lycurgus started it all.  According to Plutarch, when Lycergus was done implementing all his reforms, he blew town, making the Spartans take an oath that they must not change his reforms until he returned.  He never returned, and purposefully died on the road, forcing the Spartans to keep to their word indefinitely.  I like his style.  I would definitely make Lycurgus a Margarita.  But he would probably refuse it in favor of a bowl of black gruel.

Then there's Agesilaus, to me one of the more poignant Lives.  Agesilaus was a King of Sparta after the Peloponnesian War, ruling from about 400-360BC.  Agesilaus was partly lame (the FDR of Sparta!) and short in stature, but lead many military campaigns for Sparta.  Unfortunately he suffered some significant defeats, and Sparta went into a long term decline.  His last days were spent as an old man in his 80s fighting as a mercenary in Egypt, and he died on his way home afterwards.  Plutarch's Lives are complex, with good men with noble intentions, like Agesilaus and Nicias, falling to defeat not through vanity or evil character, but through character flaws that in other positions in life wouldn't have mattered, or simply through the circumstances of their situations.  Fuck.  I'd love to give them both Margaritas.

The longest life in this collection was Alexander the Great.  We all sort of know who he was...the Macedonian King, son of Philip II of Macedon, who took Greek forces and smashed through most of the ancient world, conquering his way through the old Persian Empire, that old Greek nemesis, and all the way into India, before his troops rebelled and said "enough".  Alexander is depicted as a complex man, greatly ambitious (duh), fiercely loyal to his friends, but also quick to temper and quick to turn on people on a dime, especially if he'd been drinking.  And he seems to have been drinking a lot.  Many of the more violent anecdotes in his life occurred when he was drunk out of his mind.  Definitely not someone who I would have given a Margarita to.  But hey, the dude conquered the known world.  Then he died of illness at the age of 32.  Wow, way to make me feel insignificant.  I'm way older and no one's ever called me "The Great".  Sigh...where's my Margarita?

Anyway, I'm digging Plutarch, and I highly recommend reading some of his Lives.  They're entertaining, easy to read, and utterly fascinating.  If they were good enough for our great grandparent's generation's education, they're good enough for us!  I have more of his Lives to go...many more...but I think I'll take a break for a bit and read something more modern next.  Um, as soon as I finish this Margarita.  And the one after that.