What Makes a Great Life?

Opening: character under construction

Alex: Volume XII selects several of Plutarch’s Lives, among them Pericles, Alcibiades, Demosthenes, and Cicero. Plutarch is not writing a modern archive of everything that happened. He selects scenes and patterns to make character legible. How should we read an argument built out of a life?

Peter: We admire or blame what someone did, then ask what sort of person could have done it.

Eric: But the move from an act to a stable character can be too quick. A memorable story is not automatically a representative one.

Gwen: And the people outside the portrait—the allies, laborers, families, and enemies—may experience the “great” life very differently.

Alex: Let us test those concerns against particular lives rather than making them a warning in the abstract.

Pericles and the price of a beautiful city

Peter: Plutarch’s Pericles looks like a statesman of unusual restraint. He stays above corruption and directs Athens toward magnificent building.

Eric: In Pericles 12–13, the building program provokes a precise dispute. Critics say Athens is using contributions from its allies to adorn itself. Pericles replies that the city protects those allies and need not give an account of every expenditure once that obligation is met.

Gwen: That reply assumes protection gives Athens the right to decide what the allied money should become. We can admire the buildings while asking whether those who paid had a voice.

Alex: Plutarch also describes how the program employs craftspeople in many trades. It makes the city beautiful and distributes work. Does that answer the allies’ objection?

Peter: It might answer an objection that the money is simply wasted. It does not answer the question of who authorized the spending.

Eric: Exactly. Plutarch’s account itself holds two standards together: impressive public creation and the contested power that funds it. If we pick only the Parthenon or only the accusation, we flatten his political scene.

Gwen: And even the claim about employment asks whose labor counts as part of the achievement. The leader is named; the craftspeople’s hands make the buildings possible.

Alex: The life invites admiration, but its own episode makes admiration accountable to the people outside the protagonist’s frame.

Alcibiades: adaptability or absence of principle?

Alex: Now consider Alcibiades. Plutarch presents extraordinary charm, courage, appetite, and talent for winning people over. Socrates tries to turn that energy toward virtue; the city repeatedly finds it irresistible.

Peter: His ability to adapt seems useful in politics. He can deal with unlike people and institutions.

Eric: Plutarch describes the darker side in Alcibiades 23: the man can adopt the customs of Sparta, Ionia, Thrace, or Persia with astonishing ease. Is that practical intelligence, or a sign that he has no settled allegiance beyond himself?

Gwen: Maybe both. Adaptability could be a means of survival after exile. But for a powerful person, it can also make every community an instrument.

Alex: The Sicilian expedition brings the issue into political focus. Plutarch shows the ambitions and fears around it, including the mutilation of the Herms and accusations against Alcibiades (Alcibiades 18–22). Private reputation, civic panic, religious suspicion, and war become inseparable.

Peter: It would be too easy to say one charismatic man caused every disaster. Athens itself wanted the expedition.

Eric: Right. Biography tempts us to give an institution’s choices a single face. Plutarch’s account gives Alcibiades agency, but the city that empowers and condemns him must remain in the story.

Demosthenes and Cicero: comparison changes the question

Gwen: Plutarch’s explicit comparison of Demosthenes and Cicero might help us see how selective his method is. Both are orators facing the loss of civic freedom, but they live in different cities and conflicts.

Eric: In the opening to Demosthenes, Plutarch says he is comparing their lives and characters as statesmen rather than ranking the beauty or force of their speeches. He chooses the criterion before the contest begins.

Peter: That seems fairer than pretending there is an objective score for greatness.

Alex: It is candid, though the chosen criterion still shapes the verdict. In the comparison after the two lives, Plutarch contrasts how they acquired eloquence, held office, handled money, and met their deaths. The same skill—speech—can mean courage in one situation and vanity or danger in another.

Gwen: I am uneasy when a death becomes evidence of a whole moral life. A person cornered by political violence does not get an ideal set of options.

Eric: Plutarch’s comparison may reveal his values as much as theirs. His praise of a particular manner of dying depends on a cultural ideal of courage and control. We can study that ideal without adopting it as the final measure of either man.

Peter: Yet comparison does help me define what I mean by a public speaker’s excellence. Is it verbal brilliance, judgment in crisis, restraint with power, or service to a city? I cannot say “great orator” and leave the rest unexamined.

Alex: That is the value of Plutarch’s method. The pairing is an experiment in standards. Its danger is that a sharp comparison can hide the distinct conditions under which each person acted.

An anecdote is evidence, not a verdict

Eric: What should we do with Plutarch’s small stories—the gesture, the conversation, the habit that supposedly exposes a person?

Alex: Ask three questions. Who tells the story? What larger pattern does Plutarch claim it supports? What evidence in the same life resists that pattern? An anecdote can open an inquiry, but it cannot close one by itself.

Gwen: And we should ask who appears only as scenery. The beautiful city and the successful expedition plan may look different from the standpoint of people who pay, work, or die for them.

Peter: That sounds like we are trying to read against Plutarch.

Gwen: Sometimes. But he gives us some of the material for it: opponents of Pericles speak, Alcibiades unsettles any tidy moral portrait, and the comparisons make his evaluative choices visible.

Alex: Critical reading does not require refusing admiration. It requires knowing exactly what we admire and how much a single narrative can establish.

Pulling the threads together

Peter: Pericles’ buildings are impressive; that does not answer the allies’ objection. Alcibiades’ talent is real; it does not absolve the city that makes him powerful. Demosthenes and Cicero show that “greatness” changes when we change the standard.

Eric: Biography can sharpen political judgment when we keep act, character, institution, and narrator distinct.

Gwen: And when we remember that the lives of celebrated people are interwoven with lives the book does not name.

Alex: Plutarch’s art is to make us judge. Our responsibility is to resist treating his memorable portraits as judgments that have already done all the work for us.

Reading note: This dialogue focuses on four of the lives included in Harvard Classics Volume XII; the volume also includes Themistocles, Aristides, Coriolanus, Caesar, and Antony. For the episodes discussed, see Plutarch’s Pericles, Alcibiades, and comparison of Demosthenes and Cicero. Section numbers are conventional; translation wording varies.

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