'... a man who occupies himself with servile tasks proves by the very pains which he devotes to them that he is indifferent to higher things. No young man of good breeding and high ideals feels that he must be a Pheidias or a Polycleitus after seeing the statue of Zeus at Olympia or Hera at Argos'
Just before I left Cambridge, I was very struck by a notice pinned up in my college listing where that year’s graduates were going. As I read down the one hundred or so names and future occupations a clear pattern emerged; some were moving on to an academic position, many were moving into the financial sector, almost none were going into manufacturing. Here was the supposed cream of Britain's youth voting with their feet, away from manufacturing and into service industries. During my time at two British universities I received two very clear impressions, a high regard of a 'Classical Education' and a near contempt in certain quarters for Science and particularly Engineering. Are these two linked? I wonder how much uncritical study of the classics by certain sections of the British population has instilled nonsense like the quote above into the British psyche?
Plutarch was writing a set of morally bettering histories and so Lives are in no sense objective history; Plutarch did not let anything get in the way of a good story. And this collection is full of good stories. Despite my suggestion above that Plutarch's ideas may not always have had a positive influence on modern society I thoroughly enjoyed these biographies; from the just and upright Aristides to the fast and loose Alcibiades these are all terrific stories. The characters may have lived from ca 640 to 395 BC, but so much of what happened has a modern ring about it. For example, Solon the great Athenian law-giver getting involved in what was in effect insider trading and later on trying to get Athens out of dept by using inflation. Or Pericles presenting the renovation of the Acropolis as a job creation scheme, and a touch of 'jobs for the boys' in giving the role of 'chief creator' to his mate Pheidas. Incidentally this all rebounded rather badly when the rumour began to circulate that Pheidas was arranging assignations for Pericles with free born Athenian women who were coming to the Acropolis on the pretext of 'looking at the works of art'; certainly a step up from 'come up and see my etchings'!
Penguin Classics, 318 pages
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