Cultural Renegades in Plutarch’s Lives

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Copyright by Kenneth Ingram Mayer 1997

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Cultural Renegades in Plutarch’s Lives

Approved by Dissertation Committee:

line Log p. Supervisor Peter Green

'W/U Michael Maas

^ K M. Gwyn Morgan

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is overcome. 72Konrad 1994: 141 notes that “here the use of gaudy decorations is deliberately encouraged to make the change from native ways to Roman military habits more attractive.”

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B. Antony, the True Roman Reprobate Unlike the authors discussed in part II of this chapter, Plutarch does not apply the “going native” paradigm to Antony. He does not represent Antony wearing the dress of barbarian kings, although he does mention his throne and describes the barbaric costumes of Antony and Cleopatra’s children (Antony 54.56). Antony’s own costume is described without a hint of orientalism or luxury (Antony 4.2).73 There is a hint in the Synkrisis that Plutarch is familiar with the accounts o f Alexander dressing as Dionysus, but it is veiled and debatable.74 Plutarch often incorporates into the Synkrisis traditions that are passed over in silence in his main narrative.75 If the Synkrisis refers obliquely to Antony’s divine clothes, then the fact that the L ife does not mention this costume may indicate Plutarch’s reluctance to portray an orientalized Antony. Plutarch does not describe the dressed-up oriental despot of Velleius, Floras, and Dio.76 Instead he represents Anthony’s worsening behavior in Asia Minor not as an Eastern degeneration but a return to his former ways: 73Plutarch does not here present the alleged imitation of Heracles as orientalizing or un-Roman, but rather an expression of Antony’s ancestry. Pelling points out that while Plutarch ignores these issues, Antony’s styling himself as Heracles “would have deeply offended Roman sentim ent” (Pelling 1988: 124). Antony’s clothes at any rate are not presented as being untraditional. Brenk 198:4384 offers a few reasons for Plutarch’s relative lack o f emphasis on Heracles. 74 In Synkrisis 3.2 Plutarch says that when Demetrius “got ready for war, his spear was not tipped with ivy, nor did his helmet smell of myrrh,” which seems to imply that Antony did such things. 75Pelling 1986b: 89, Pelling 1988: 20. The Synkriseis seem to be Plutarch’s rhetorical reworking o f the same material as the Lives, added almost as an appendix. In my first chapter I discussed how Plutarch held the biographies proper to a high historiographical standard. The Synkriseis, like the speeches on the Virtue o f Alexander, are written more with an orator’s eye towards exploiting contrasts than evaluating material analytically. 76Socrates o f Rhodes, in his lengthy description of Antony’s Bacchic revelry at Athens, gives no desciption o f Antony’s dress (FGrH 192 F 2).

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•noXXrjv ccuToj ayoov axoXqv Kai etpfivriv aveicuKXeiTo T0T9 ■fra0£aiv elg tov auvrjSri jSt'ov. {Antony 24) He himself enjoying much leisure and rest, circled back in his passions to his accustomed lifestyle. Plutarch does inform us that Antony put aside his Roman insignia at home and wore Greek dress while serving as a gymnasiarch in Athens, but there are no words of censure: eyupvaaidpxEi 5 ’ ’A0r|va(oi5, Kai toc Tffc fiyepoviaj ira p d o rip a KaraXnrdov oIkoi. pexa tgov yupvaaiapxiK tav pa(38cov ev Ipaxicp Kai 901x001019 trpoqet. {Antony 33.4) He presided as gymnasiarch for the Athenians, and, leaving his official regalia at home, he went out in a mantie and white shoes carrying the gymnasiarchal rods. Appian also records that Antony wore the pallium and Attic shoes and that he ate in Greek fashion with Greeks.77 Dio, on the other hand, regards Antony’s officiating as a gymnasiarch for Cleopatra in Alexandria as further proof that Antony was debased: outgo y a p iTou a u ro v eSeBourXcoxo ooaxe Kai y u p v a a ta p x n a a i Ttelaai, ^aaiXis xe auxfj Kai Beortoiva Cnr’ eKeivou KaXelaSai, axpaxiGbxas xe 'Pcopaiouj ev xcp SopuqpopiKcp exEiv, Kai t o o v o p a auxrig trd v x a s 0 9 0 :9 xalg acrrrlaiv 6 -iriypa 9 6 iv. (Dio 50.5.1).

T0T9 ’AXe£av 8 peuai

For she enslaved him so much that she even persuaded him to be gymnasiarch for the Alexandrians, to address her as queen and mistress, and to get Roman soldiers in her bodyguard, and for them all to write her name on their shields. Plutarch and Appian do not condemn Antony’s cultural cross-dressing and Hellenism. Simon Swain notes that Plutarch does not view the Eastern Greeks as sources of luxury and corruption.78 As for Appian, Gowing notes that “It did not 77Appian BC 5.76. 78Swain 1990a: 154: “It is to be noticed that Plutarch does not condemn the Asian Greeks for

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suit the Alexandrian historian to suggest that Alexandria contributed to Antony’s moral disintegration; on the contrary, here Antony found a stimulating intellectual environment”79 Plutarch and Appian do not minimize Antony’s vices. Like other authors they present Antony’s love for Cleopatra as the main cause for his degeneration, followed by flattery, madness, or drags.80 Unlike Velleius, Floras, and Dio, Plutarch does not foreground cultural flight as the worst of Antony’s vices. He does not even present it at all. Plutarch makes Antony’s death an affirmation o f his Romanness. First Antony chooses to die by sword, which, as Pelling notes, is the suicide appropriate to a Roman soldier. Pelling also points out that Plutarch constructs this section as “the final assertion of A.’s Roman qualities,” rather than focusing on the romantic death of two lovers.81 Plutarch gives Antony a final speech in indirect discourse, which ends with a defiant assertion of his status as a Roman citizen:82 c c u to v 8e nq 0pr)ve!v etti tcxTs u a r d c r a i s pEra@oXcxts. aAAa

paicap(£eiv cov etuxe xaAcov, ETrupavEoraToj duQpcbircov yevousvog a(vopat with an predicate adjective or noun to mean either “appear to be” or “manifestly is.” He uses the passive aorist participle qxxvEis with an adjective to mean “appeared, but was not in fact” in Agesilaos 34.8, and Cato Minor 18.4. The same combination seems to mean “manifestly was” in Cimon 5.4, Coriolanus 28.1, Pericles 19.3. Other clear examples of

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interpret the passage to mean exactly that: A. was once