Defence of Seneca and Plutarch

If I were to choose two authors from all of antiquity to keep, and were forced to surrender the rest, I would keep Seneca and Plutarch without much hesitation. This is not the most fashionable choice. Cicero is more polished; Plato is more systematic; Thucydides is more imposing in his gravity. But Seneca and Plutarch give me more — they give me, above all, a sense of the use to which reading may be put, which is not the accumulation of information or the exhibition of eloquence but the continuous calibration of how to live.

Seneca is accused of contradictions — of preaching poverty while accumulating wealth, of praising tranquility while playing an active role in the dangerous politics of Nero’s court. His critics say he did not practice what he taught. I say: the man who teaches what he has found difficult to practice is a more honest teacher than the man who teaches only what comes easily. Seneca wrote about the temptations of wealth from inside his experience of them, not from the safe distance of a philosophy school. That gives his counsel a weight that detachment cannot provide.

“Plutarch, in his Lives, teaches by example what Seneca teaches by argument; together they form the completest education in human conduct that antiquity left us.”

Plutarch’s alleged historical errors — the anachronisms, the speeches invented for his subjects, the chronologies that do not always hold up to scrutiny — have been used to diminish him. I confess I do not find this diminishment compelling. He was not writing history in our modern sense, as an account of what happened when and to whom. He was writing the history of character — of what men were, how they bore themselves, what they valued and what they sacrificed. For this purpose, a well-chosen invention is more instructive than a barren fact. The speech he put in Brutus’s mouth at Philippi may not be the speech Brutus gave; it is certainly the speech a Brutus ought to have given, and that is the point.

What we owe these two writers is not only gratitude for entertainment — though they are endlessly entertaining — but gratitude for a model of what prose can be: full of a single mind, opinionated, specific, warm toward human difficulty, and addressed always to a reader who is presumed to be living a life that needs all the help it can get.