This potpourri of fifteen papers consists of engaging, thoroughly researched revisions of presentations first delivered to the 11th Congress of the International Plutarch Society. The collection is divided into two sections: ‘Plutarch and Philosophy’ and ‘Plutarch and Religion’, an artifice that detracts from thematic similarities clearly evident across that false divide. The volume is well indexed, complete with bibliography and a discerning introduction. It testifies to the superb state of European scholarship and especially the talented faculty at the University of Groningen who organised and participated in the 2010 programme. Written in English by non-native speakers, this volume could conceivably awaken Anglo-American scholars and, in particular, English-speaking philosophers from their repetitive compulsive dreams preoccupied with the same old texts and authors.
Several authors have written extensively elsewhere on topics they address here. Several papers, however, make only tangential use of Plutarch in their search for testimony on other issues. Discursive fragmentation is not uncommon in Plutarch studies, since encyclopedic breadth makes Plutarch a convenient, all too often incidental, source for assorted scholarly pursuits. Those who share other interests employ Plutarch anecdotally to supplement their topical conversations. Unfortunately, Plutarch's authorial voice can then get lost in a din of fragmenting discourses that drown out focused discussion of such lesser-studied ancients as himself.
That said, Bos makes ingenious work of an obscure passage towards the end of Plutarch's De fac. to illuminate Aristotle's double entelechy conception of the soul along the lines of the waking intellect, a metaphor drawn from Aristotle's dialogues and echoed in Alcinous, Philo of Alexandria, Hermetic texts and Gnosticism. Contemplative enlightenment arrives, Bos surmises, upon the active intellect waking up from instrumental thinking. Caballero uses a passage from De Stoic. repugn. as a springboard for a rather sweeping discussion, from Aristo and Arcesilaus to Chrysippus and Carneades, on the adventitious initiative of the soul to respond to randomly indifferent stimuli. Leão uses Plutarch to great effect to explore the politics involved with Alcibiades' notorious Hermokopidai and his sacrilegious parody as well as his subsequent piety towards the Eleusinian Mysteries. San Cristótal patches together passages from Plutarch to speculate on the status of the divinity Iacchus at Eleusis. Jiménez does the same for Egyptian folk beliefs regarding astral influences on plants and animals. Meeusen squeezes Plutarch into a discussion of how eleventh-century Psellus drew upon anathematised pagan Hellenes in the service of orthodox Christianity. Cacciatore writes an entertaining piece on the ‘evil eye’ in an operetta by Valletta, by drawing upon an assortment of ancient sources, including Plutarch's Qu. conv. M.G.'s delightful essay, ‘The Colors of the Souls’, closes the collection with a collation of passages, from the Apocrypha, Origen and Plutarch, regarding how virtues and vices display themselves as colours of character. Engaging as these scholars are, their discussions fragment and scatter the reader's antiquarian attentions in diverse directions.
The core papers on Plutarch proper are more directly engaging. A model of taciturnity and precision, Becchi's paper explores the deep psychology of Plutarch's historical villains when measured against Plutarch's more theoretical De virt. mor. with the suggestion, following Plato, that the mental illnesses of those with distorted passions and obsessions are born of failures of ignorance and flaws of mental laxness. This account of native wickedness (emphutos kakia) defends the role of the passions (pathē) either in inducing or inhibiting such wickedness. Becchi's discussion is quite suggestive when one reflects upon the comparable complexity of Augustine's formative views on original sin.
Pursuing this theme of decadence, Roskam tells the tales of two Platonists (Plutarch and Proclus), each writing on the relationship between Socrates and Alcibiades. The first wrote primarily as an archivist, the second as a metaphysical philosopher, but both come to the comforting conclusion that it was Alcibiades who failed to be edified by his mentor, offering a somewhat dubious consolation for philosophy professors.
Scannapieco provides an exegesis of Plutarch fr. 257 (Sandbach), a fascinating titbit quoted by Eusebius on the deconstruction of religious myths into scientific, cultural and grammatical aspects. Scannapieco then extends the discussion into Plutarch's De Is. and Amat. and pursues leads elsewhere in an essay overburdened with detail in so short an allocated space. As a priest of Apollo (see Casanova's contribution) and a pious Platonist, Plutarch does not at all anthropologise for religion, but tries to demonstrate the fecundity of faith in folk beliefs, ritual, allegory and the linguistics of worship.
Van Kooten takes up this theme by exploring the epistemic usage of pistis in Plutarch and its application in assessing the role of ‘faith’ – or as Van Kooten prefers, ‘belief’ – in Plutarch as well as the Pauline epistles. Van Kooten argues (p. 217): ‘It is apparent that according to Paul's pagan contemporaries faith is not itself anti-philosophical; there are two kinds of belief, an “unskilled faith” … and a “strengthened faith” (cf. Plut., Qu. conv. 725C)’. Plutarch vigorously resists the anthropologically dismissive tendency of Euhemerus and his ilk to atheitise mythology as entirely untrustworthy (apistis). Instead, ‘Plutarch takes care to distinguish pistis from mere superstition’ (p. 221). In doing so, Plutarch establishes criteria and contexts for warranting belief, strengthened by reason and testimony, to be distinguished from atechnos pistis, or un-argued conviction, as Aristotle previously defined the difference (Rhet. 1355b35). In this way, a certain sort of magical realism enters into both philosophical and religious belief, in which faith is not blind but dependent on trustworthy testimony, including those who, say, have embraced miraculous or surprising occurrences. Some of this testimony may come from the senses, but much of it ‘derives from the myths of the poets, the laws of the legislators and the rational explanations of the philosophers’ (p. 213), according to Plutarch. It all comes down to a matter of trust strengthened by the weight of testimony, a view very much à la mode in contemporary epistemology.
Brenk presents an ethnographic survey exploring pagan monotheism, elegantly situating Plutarch as effecting a crucial transition where the God of the Cosmos fused with more personal aspects of a cult's divine persona. In this way, Middle Platonism effects the philosophical apotheosis of the divine into a personal God. R.L. tidies up this emerging portrait of Plutarch's God by adroitly using De Her. mal. in conjunction with other texts to illustrate that so-called vices of the divine, phthonos as a case in point, are not seen as divine displays of petty human vices, like envy, but rather as countervailing divine ressentiment towards human failings. In this way the God of Middle Platonism acquires traits familiar from Hebraic texts and judgmental Christianity, as one tradition merges into another.
