Plutarch’s Lives: Life of Sertorius

by Plutarch

Plutarch was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and Middle Platonist known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia . Thanks to his writings and lectures Plutarch became a celebrity in the Roman Empire. At his country estate, guests from all over the empire congregated for serious conversation, presided over by Plutarch in his marble chair. Many of these dialogues were recorded and published, and the 78 essays and other works which have survived are now known collectively as the Moralia .

Plutarch’s best-known work is the Parallel Lives , a series of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, arranged in pairs to illuminate their common moral virtues and vices. The surviving Lives contain 23 pairs, each with one Greek Life and one Roman Life , as well as four unpaired single Lives . Some of the Lives , such as those of Heracles, Philip II of Macedon and Scipio Africanus, no longer exist; many of the remaining Lives are truncated, contain obvious lacunae or have been tampered with by later writers. Extant Lives include those on Aristides, Pericles, Pompey, Julius Caesar, Cicero, Cato the Younger, Mark Antony, and Marcus Junius Brutus.

Plutarch also wrote a series of biographies, including the biographies of Demetrius, Pyrrhus, Agis and Cleomenes, Aratus and Artaxerxes, Philopoemen, Camillus, Marcellus, Flamininus, Aemilius Paulus, Galba and Otho.

32 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 26, 2011

About the author

Plutarch (later named, upon becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus; AD 46–AD 120) was a Greek historian, biographer, and essayist, known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia. He is classified as a Middle Platonist. Plutarch's surviving works were written in Greek, but intended for both Greek and Roman readers.

Reviews

[David Sarkies]

The beginning of the End
23 January 2019

Well, I have now officially started the second volume of Plutarch’s lives, and while this one seems to have less biographies than the first volume, it seems as if some of these biographies are much longer, but then again it does contain the lives of Caeser, Alexander, and others. Anyway, the first life happens to be a Roman that I hadn’t really heard of before, but in a way he seems to be one of those guys that forms a bridge between the age of Sulla and the Age of Caeser (not that there really needed to be a bridge that is).

Mind you, sometimes I wonder where Plutarch got his idea of noble from, because I’m not entirely sure whether some of these characters are actually good people, in the way that we would consider somebody to be a good person. In a way I’d probably feel that the collection tends to contain what I would consider to be famous civilian and military leaders, though of course they had to be Greek or Roman, which is why we don’t have a biography of Hannibul (but then again, considering that he was Cartheginian, and considered to be the enemy of Rome, then I’m not sure if Plutarch would have gone to any great extent to immortalise him as he has done with some others). Anyway, I’m getting a little side tracked because I should be writing about Sertorius.

Basically he was running around during the time of Sulla, but he had declared for the popularies, which would basically be the ordinary people, against the nobility. I’m actually not sure if we can really translate it into a modern political concept because our ideas of left and right seem to be a mix of both pandering to minorities, and pandering to the people. Consider Trump, a conservative, and leader of the Republican party, who tends to support the big end of town – he rode to power on a wave of popular support, reaching out to the ordinary people. However, those on the left seem to connect more with the intellectuals, that is the academics and university educated, however they also tend to come about on the shoulders of the minority vote.

The problem that Sertorius faced though was that Sulla wasn’t somebody that you messed with, and when Sulla returned to Rome, Sertorius was forced to flee to Spain, where he established his powerbase. In fact he would travel between Spain and North Africa (at the time known as Mauritania, from which we get the word Moor – I didn’t realise that), and due to a number of military successes, managed to entrench himself among the people. Mind you, Sulla eventually caught up with him, and things certainly didn’t end all they well for him, to the point that all of Sertorius’ writings were destroyed.

Another interesting thing was his travels about this part of the Mediterranean. Plutarch talks about desert islands, and a part of me wandered whether these islands are Minorca and Majorca, though I have a feeling that these particular islands are actually rather large, relatively speaking. However, he also met up with some people from some islands in the Atlantic, which I suspect were either the Azores or the Canary Islands. Dryden doesn’t actually tell us which islands Plutarch is referring to, but we are told that they are, well, blessed islands, at least from the descriptions that we are given. In fact, Sertorius was really keen on travelling there, though it ended up that none of his sailors really wanted to, so it ended up that he was stuck back here, having to deal with the political machinations of the Roman Republic.

[Dave Harmon]

All of Plutarch's lives are important to read, though some less than others. This was interesting, had no idea that was going on during sullas dictatorship. interesting but ultimately at the end inconsequential. His death was surprising and a bit hard to believe.

[Eric]

A great, little known man worth imitating