Self-promotion and self-effacement in Plutarch’s Sympotic Questions

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Page 1 of 25 Self#Promotion and Self#Effacement in Plutarch's Table Talk

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The Philosopher's Banquet: Plutarch's Table Talk in the IntellectualCulture of the Roman EmpireFrieda Klotz and Katerina Oikonomopoulou

Print publication date: 2011Print ISBN-13: 9780199588954Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: Jan-12DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199588954.001.0001

Self‐Promotion and Self‐Effacement in Plutarch's Table Talk

Jason König

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199588954.003.0008

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter examines the tension between self-assertion and self-effacement in Plutarch's self-representation in the Table Talk. It opens with asurvey of uses of the first person in other ancient compilatory and scientificwriting in order to show that Plutarch is not unusual in steering a delicateline between authorial self-promotion and a more reticent approach to useof the first person. It also argues, however, that those tensions take on anunusual prominence in the Table Talk, in part because of the work's sympoticcharacter. Often Plutarch himself takes a dominant role in conversation, inline with the traditional obligations of symposium conversation. At othertimes, however, he retreats from view in order to give space to other voices,especially the voices of the authors of the past which are brought intoconversation through the act of sympotic quotation.

Keywords: symposium, ancient compilatory writing, scientific writing, self‐presentation, firstperson, quotation, self‐effacement

Introduction

One of the things which makes the Table Talk so remarkable and memorableis the fact that it offers us such a multi‐faceted portrayal of Plutarchhimself. Most obviously, it depicts Plutarch's own involvement in sympoticconversations stretching over many decades.1 Those conversations areno doubt idealized and creatively reimagined after the event, but they

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nevertheless offer us a vivid and tantalizing picture of Plutarch at leisure.We see him interacting with many different friends and colleagues, in citiesthroughout mainland Greece and even beyond, in Rome and Alexandria.We see him at different stages of his life—as precocious student as well asexperienced, middle‐aged authority‐figure. In all of these different cases,Plutarch regularly takes the starring role as the final and most incisivespeaker, showing his fellow guests new solutions to the problems underdiscussion. The figure of Plutarch as symposiast has been one focus forrecent scholarship on the text.2 Less often discussed, however, is thePlutarch whose introductory, scene‐setting comments and prefatory (p.180) addresses to Sossius Senecio frame those acts of autobiographicalreminiscence. My argument in this chapter is that if we want to understandPlutarch's self‐portrayal in this text we need to pay attention not only tothe voice of Plutarch the symposiast, but also to this (in its way equallydistinctive) guiding, narrating voice, and to the interplay between them.

To be more specific, I want to draw attention to a striking tension in thetext between Plutarch's foregrounding of his own involvement in many ofthe sympotic conversations he recounts, and his very self‐effacing attitudeto his own first‐person voice, which is apparent especially (though notexclusively) in the work's prefaces. In the first half of the chapter I discussa number of parallels for use and avoidance of the first person in otherscientific and miscellanistic and sympotic texts. In the second half I turnto a set of example passages from the Table Talk itself. I aim to show thatPlutarch has much in common with his contemporaries, but also that hemanipulates common practices of self‐depiction in original and unusuallyrich ways. In that respect, I argue, the symposium context of the work iscrucial. The symposium is a place for ingenious intellectual play, whereindividual ingenuity is important, but it is also a place where the individualspeaker may sometimes allow his sense of self to be subordinated to a widersympotic community, and at times even submerged in order to leave roomfor the authors of the past, whose voices are brought to life through theact of quotation, speaking through the mouths of the symposiasts in thepresent. Plutarch seems to be acutely aware of those possibilities, even as headvertises his own erudition and his own skills of sympotic display.

The first person in scientific and technical writing

In the past, studies of authorial persona have tended to focus especiallyon verse texts, in both Greek and Latin. However, recent scholarship hasbegun to reveal something of the importance and complexity of authorial

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self‐portrayal in the scientific, technical, historiographical, and philosophicalwriting of the ancient world. More specifically, a number of scholars havebegun to map out the range of ways in which use, or sometimes avoidanceof the first (p.181) person, contributes to authorial self‐characterizationin texts of these types. Lloyd, for example, writing of early philosophical,medical, and mathematical authors of the classical period, has shownhow the first person is used to draw attention to an individual's innovativeintervention in scientific debate, enhancing authority.3 Thomas, drawingon Lloyd's work, has made similar arguments for Herodotus.4 The agonisticcontext of much ancient scientific practice—in a world where an individualmight rely heavily on rhetorical skills to gain acceptance for his views,and where accreditation and peer‐review did not exist—goes a long waytowards explaining that importance.5 At the same time it is clear that theattraction of prose for classical authors lay partly in the fact that it offereda new kind of authority, very different from the divine inspiration claimedby poetic texts, based in part on careful, analytical argument, and usingthe language of likelihood and causality.6 That new model of authorityexpressed through prose did indeed place enormous weight on the figureof the researcher, more so in many ways than that of the poet figure, whotends to hide behind the idea of divine inspiration.7 At the same time,however, that foregrounding of individual innovation needed to be heldin balance with the impression of reasoned objectivity, and the rhetoricalcharacter of ancient scientific discourse was often muted by the pressure toavoid too blatant an impression of rhetorical sleight‐of‐hand and innovationfor its own sake (sometimes a difficult trick to pull off given that the claim tospeak the truth was itself a recognized technique of rhetorical persuasion).8That anxiety seems to have increased as the body of scholarship grew.The very assertive first‐person usage Lloyd charts (p.182) for the classicalperiod tends to be harder to find in later periods. And it becomes increasinglycommon for writers to align themselves at length with important intellectualpredecessors, to avoid the impression of recklessly throwing aside tradition—although that pose, again a rhetorical ploy in itself, was not necessarilyincompatible with genuine innovation.9 One common pattern is a tendencyfor the author's persona to be more obviously present within a work'spreface, where an author might typically explain his rationale for writingand his plans for the rest of the work, before dropping into more impersonallanguage once the preface is over.10 Even here, however, there is a tendencytowards self‐deprecation which is very much in line with the traditionalexpressions of modesty that we see in poetic writing, especially in Latin. Acommon motif here is the claim to have composed the current work onlyreluctantly, usually at the request of a friend, most often the dedicatee.11

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That motif tactfully contributes to the avoidance of any impression of stridentself‐promotion, even if in practice it is (again) not necessarily incompatiblewith highly ambitious intellectual goals.

These shared pressures stretched across compilatory writing in manydifferent disciplines, in both Greek and Latin. However, it is also clear thatindividual writers could manipulate these conventions of self‐portrayal indistinctive ways for their own purposes, and that the precise degree towhich technical writing was to be personalized by first‐person usage wasopen to debate, varying from author to author and genre to genre.12 Bartonhas examined the way in which a (p.183) range of different writers—inastrological, physiognomical, and medical texts of the Roman empire—approach the challenge of constructing their own authoritative ēthos.13 Theuse of that word ēthos (meaning ‘character’ or ‘persona’), which is drawnfrom ancient rhetoric, makes it clear that Barton views these processesas parallel to, and perhaps even influenced by, the processes of persona‐creation which were theorized in rhetorical treatises. Von Staden hasdiscussed Celsus' self‐portrayal, mapping out the way in which differentfirst‐person usages contribute to his creation of an authoritative persona,and identifying a number of different uses of the first person (including,amongst others, the ‘autoptic ego’, which makes claims about the writer'sown observation and research, and the ‘ego of dispositio’, where theauthor makes claims about his own ordering of the text).14 Hine, drawingon and extending von Staden's approach, has recently mapped out thevaried practice within a range of Latin technical writers (including Cato theElder, Pliny the Elder, Columella, and Seneca) all of whom use first‐personsingular expressions, and the various alternatives to them—for example first‐person plurals, expressions of obligation (‘next it is necessary to discuss’),expressions which describe common opinion (‘it is said’, ‘they say’, and soon)—and also second‐person addresses to the reader (which are equallyimportant in constructing an image of the authorial persona) in differentways and to different effects.15 One of the things his account brings outmost vividly is the wide stylistic variation between the different authorshe examines, some favouring one type (p.184) of expression and someanother. He uses his data to map out roughly the relative ‘subjectiveness’ ofthe various authors he examines, and also to draw attention to differencesin the ways each of them creates an impression of subjective or objectiveutterance. Cato the Elder and Columella, for example, repeatedly use thesecond‐person singular address to the reader, but the first‐person singularto refer to themselves only very rarely, whereas for most of his other, earlyimperial authors the pattern is exactly the other way round.

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Plutarch, in navigating a tricky course between self‐effacement and first‐person self‐description, is thus responding to common pressures, usingthe conventional resources of scientific, miscellanistic, and technicalself‐representation. His use of these techniques in many of his works isunremarkable—and as for most of the other authors I have mentioned mustbe largely unconscious or instinctive.16 In his Lives, for example, we seesigns of the author speaking in his own voice in the first person above allin the prefaces. In the main body of the biographies, by contrast, he tendsinstead to take a back seat, imposing his own personality on the work byhis discriminating filtering of information and his judicious asides about themoral implications of the lives he is recounting, but not in a way which drawsour attention to his own interventions.17 The Table Talk, however, stands outfrom that pattern through having a more unusual distribution of these motifs,partly because of the way in which it provides not just a narrating self, butalso a narrated self. Most strikingly, it resists common patterns of prefatoryself‐representation. Plutarch tends to be more self‐effacing in his prefacesrather than less, often resisting the first person altogether.18 All of his moststrident moments of self‐advertisement come rather in the main body of thequaestiones.

(p.185) Before we move on to examine those phenomena in the Table Talkin more detail, I want to pause here to look at just one specific example ofcompilatory, scientific self‐presentation, from Galen's work On the NaturalFaculties. I choose Galen partly in order to give a concrete illustration ofsome of the common techniques I have mentioned in general terms above,but also because Galen too is an author whose authorial persona is in someways unusual and unusually rich. His construction of an authoritative self ismasterful—and from what we can judge was very effective, contributing tothe dominance of his ideas not just in the centuries which followed but alsoin his own times.19 He is highly competitive, but also goes out of his way toavoid that impression of competitiveness, and often we are left a sense ofthose two priorities of self‐promotion and self‐effacement competing witheach other.20 The opening section of the work, for example, is packed withthe typical language of dispassionate scientific prose:

And we shall enquire (ζητήσομεν) in this work, from whatfaculties these effects, and any other effects of nature arise.First, however, it is necessary (χρὴ) to distinguish and makeknown each of the various terms which we are going to use(χρησόμεθα) in this treatise, and to what things we apply(φέρομεν) them. (On the Natural Faculties 1.2)21

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Here, Galen speaks in fairly typical terms about his own structuring of thework, but he mutes any impression of self‐aggrandizement through his useof the first‐person plural, which clearly refers to Galen as author, but alsoat the same time adds a note of communality between author and reader,implying a didactic relationship between them (although much less so thanit sometimes does in other contexts, for example in the work of Plutarch).22

His use of (p.186) the language of obligation has a similar effect, with theimplication that the various steps in his argument structure themselves.

Very soon, however, Galen's first‐person voice bursts into view moreprominently, as if he cannot for very long keep up the mask of dispassionateprose. Just a few lines later, for example, we hear him criticizing misguidedrivals, and speaking as follows:

If I were to turn aside from my argument and refute(ἐξελέγχοιμι) them, my digression would end up longer thanmy main discussion. For if they do not know all that has beenwritten (γέγραπται ) by Aristotle ‘On Complete Alteration ofSubstance’ and afterwards by Chrysippus then it is necessary(χρὴ) to beg (παρακαλέσαι) them to spend some time with theworks of those authors…It has been demonstrated by us (ἡμῖνἀποδέδεικται) elsewhere that Hippocrates' views were thesame as Aristotle's, despite the fact that he lived much earlier.(1.4–5)

The intrusion of the first‐person singular ἐξελέγχοιμι is abrupt. Galen, here,with a typically dismissive swipe, expresses his scorn for his intellectualrivals. That word stresses Galen's individual authority and reminds us thathe could crush them much more comprehensively if he chose, albeit in away which relies on the logical process of rational dialogue rather than adhominem attacks. Typically, too, he refers to his other writings, remindingus that this work is part of a much larger intellectual project, and thus againforegrounding his own position as pre‐eminent scientific authority, althoughat the same time he reminds us of his alignment with and understanding ofhis authoritative philosophical predecessors.

A little later he excuses himself for this outburst, again using the first‐personsingular:

I said, however, that I would not enter into dispute with them(τό γ' ἀντιλέγειν αὐτοῖς ἠρνησάμην); it was only becausethe example was taken from the subject matter of medicine,

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and because I need (χρῄζω) it for the current treatise,that I mentioned it (ἐμνημόνευσα). Therefore leaving aside(καταλιπόντες), as I said (ὡς ἔφην), the dispute with them—since it is possible, for anyone who wishes, to learn theopinions of the ancients from the investigations we ourselveshave conducted into these subjects (κἀξ ̑ὡν ἡμεῖς ἰδίᾳ περὶαὐτῶν (p.187) ἐπεσκέμμεθα)—we shall devote (ποιησόμεθα)the whole of the work which follows to investigating thephenomena we proposed at the beginning (ἐξ ἀρχῆςπροὐθέμεθα), namely…(1.6)

His slightly apologetic, defensive manner here suggests that he is consciousthat the outburst has interrupted the flow of the work as a whole. Throughoutthis whole opening section of the work the first‐person plural is never entirelyabsent, but it returns to its more dominant position in the last of thosequoted passages as Galen attempts to leave this dispute behind, resuminghis more even, didactic pose, and carrying the reader along with him intothe body of the argument. It is not the case, I suspect, that Galen's choicebetween the different possibilities of self‐expression available here is highlycrafted and self‐conscious. Nevertheless it does seem to be the case thathe is choosing between these options according to what view of his ownrelationship with his readers and his predecessors he wishes to emphasize inany one particular section of the work. Moreover he seems to be grapplingthroughout this passage with a tension between self‐advertisement andthe more dispassionate, self‐effacing language of the didactic treatise. Thattension is in itself entirely typical of compilatory writing, as I have alreadysuggested. The passage I have quoted from is not in itself particularlyremarkable—there are dozens of other passages within the work of Galenand others which might have demonstrated that point just as well. However,the cumulative effect of repeated and often ill‐tempered personal outburststhroughout Galen's work, along with his frequent appearance as an actor aswell as narrator, for example in his account of his own involvement in publicdissections and public debates, makes him an exceptional example of thephenomenon.23

Quotation and the symposium

Why, then, does Plutarch have such a heightened awareness in the TableTalk of the distinction between self‐advertisement and self‐effacement?Galen's oscillation between stridency and moderation is (p.188) explicable inpart by the context of professional disputation in which he was engaged. The

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same explanation cannot be said to apply to Plutarch, who was on the whole(with the exception of one or two works) uninterested in confrontationalGalenic debunking of intellectual rivals and predecessors (although as weshall see he is repeatedly interested in engaging with and assessing thearguments of previous writers). More promising is to view the Table Talk inthe context of Plutarch's explicit theorization of self‐representation in hiswork On Self‐Praise and elsewhere.24 There he lays out the principle thatself‐praise is acceptable only if it has protreptic or didactic aims, inspiringthe listener to moral improvement.25 That aim seems fully in line with thedidactic character of the Table Talk, one of whose aims is clearly to offermodels for conversation and philosophical inquiry.26 He also stresses thatone should include praise of one's listener as well as oneself27 (as Plutarchregularly does for his addressee Sossius Senecio) and that one should beready to include self‐deprecating details28 (as he sometimes does in drawingattention to errors or absurdities in his own contributions to discussion).Elsewhere, in his work Political Precepts, he tells of advice received fromhis father about always giving credit to colleagues in recounting one's ownachievement in public office, even if they have contributed nothing: ‘neversay “I went” (ᾠχόμην)…always say “we went” (ᾠχόμεθα); never say “Isaid” (εἶπον), but “we said” (εἴπομεν), and in all other things report yourcolleague to have been similarly involved and in partnership’ (20, 816d).29

The political context is of course very different from the conversationalone which concerns us here, but the general principle nevertheless hasresonances with the way in which Plutarch insists on giving credit to hiscolleagues in discussion.

In this chapter, however, I want to put theories of self‐praise to one sideand concentrate instead on the work's sympotic character, which (p.189)seems to me to be crucial to our understanding of Plutarch's self‐portrayalin the work. The symposium is of course a time for individual ingenuity andcompetitive speech. For example, sympotic speech and sympotic song hadalways relied heavily on capping, whereby speakers would aim to trump thestatements of their fellow‐ guests.30 At the same time, there is a parallelpressure in sympotic contexts to submerge one's own voice within that of awider community or a wider tradition. One of the most suggestive readingsof the Table Talk available is still that of Michel Jeanneret, who addressesPlutarch briefly in setting the scene for a long account of Renaissance table‐talk traditions.31 For Jeanneret, Plutarch's sympotic writing—like many othersympotic texts from the ancient world, especially the work of Athenaeus andMacrobius—is defined by its faceless accumulation of erudition:

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What is often said of Plutarch is also true of the others:they are basically eclectic. They neither judge nor criticize,but rather put things on show…The author melts into ananonymous collector and mediator; he lets the books, ofwhich he is a mere interpreter, speak for themselves. In thepolyphony of the banquet, questions of authority and origin arealways deferred.32

In many ways that formulation is misguided, or at the very leastoversimplified: the basic insights already referred to about the prominenceof Plutarch as a character in his own Table Talk are entirely ignored byJeanneret, and he takes at face value the claims about random arrangementof material which are commonly, but disingenuously, made in miscellanistictexts of many types. Nevertheless, despite his rather undernuanced readingof the subtleties of the text, the general principles Jeanneret outlines herehave some relevance. The idea of self‐effacement comes to have specialsignificance in the context of sympotic writing, which is so often concernedwith the idea of reactivating the voices of the past, drawing them intoconversation, allowing them to speak through the voices of the symposiasts.Mikhail Bakhtin's suggestions about the character of ‘Menippean’ writing(in which he includes sympotic miscellany as a sub‐category) describethat phenomenon well: ‘In these genres the heroes of myth (p.190)and the historical figures of the past are deliberately and emphaticallycontemporized; they act and speak in a zone of familiar contact with theopen‐ended present’.33 Past and present speak with each other particularlywithin the all‐embracing framework of the symposium. Athenaeus is a classiccase: I have argued elsewhere not only that the work's attraction lies partlyin its bringing‐to‐life of the voices of the library, but also that Athenaeus attimes leads us to lose sight of whether we are hearing the voice of one of hisdeipnosophists or the voice of one of the source texts they are quoting.34

Plutarch, as we shall see, draws on both of those competing strands—sympotic display of individual ingenuity, and sympotic community with one'sfellow‐symposiasts and with the authors of the past—grafting them ontothe tensions between self‐dramatization and self‐effacement in scientificand technical writing already discussed. The degree to which that moveis an innovative one is hard to be clear about, given the non‐survival ofso much earlier philosophical symposium literature, but it seems quitepossible that Plutarch at the very least took the sympotic miscellany in newdirections, even if he did not invent it: certainly he was very influential onlater miscellanists like Aulus Gellius and Macrobius.35

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Self‐promotion and self‐effacement in the Table Talk

How, then, do these pressures leave their mark on the detailed texture of theTable Talk? Let us start with an example, from the very opening preface tobook 1:

Some people, Sossius Senecio, think that the saying ‘Idislike a drinking‐partner with a good memory’, refers toinnkeepers,36 who are generally vulgar and tasteless whenthere is drinking going on…Others think that the saying grantsan amnesty to the things which are said and done (p.191)during drinking…Since you too think that forgetfulness ofstupid things is genuinely wise, as Euripides says, but thatforgetting completely what happens during drinking not onlyconflicts with the so‐called friend‐making character of dining,but also has the most highly regarded of philosophers tobear witness against it, Plato and Xenophon and Aristotleand Speusippus and Epicurus and Prytanis and Hieronymusand Dio of the Academy…and since you thought that it wasnecessary for us (ἡμᾶς) to gather together from the learnedconversations held, with table and wine cup, in various placesboth amongst you in Rome and amongst us (παρ' ἡμῖν) inGreece those which are suitable, applying myself to thattask I have sent you (πέπομφα) now three of the books, eachcontaining ten quaestiones, and I will send (πέμψω) the restsoon, if these seem not entirely unworthy of the Muses and ofDionysus. (1. Praef. 612c–e)

Much of the work which follows records conversations which try out a varietyof different possible answers to a single question, and in that sense thevery opening lines of the preface are entirely appropriate. It is striking,however, that Plutarch, while clearly implying that the second explanation ismore relevant, does not explicitly state his preference for that explanation,nor does he represent either explanation as his own innovation. Hereimmediately it is clear that the erudition of the preface is different fromthat of the quaestiones, removed from the combative atmosphere whichrequires individuals to espouse particular positions. If anything, in fact,the second explanation is ascribed to Sossius Senecio, Plutarch's Romanaddressee. Sossius' initiative, moreover, turns out to be important for thework: the decision to compose is represented as springing from him ratherthan from Plutarch. Moreover the body of memory on which Plutarch draws

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is represented as a common possession, rather than Plutarch's own. Thephrase ‘since you thought that it was necessary for us (ἡμᾶς) to gathertogether’, and what follows, makes that clear. The first‐person plural isoften used as a slightly more formal equivalent of the first‐person singular,especially in passages describing authorial activity, as we have seen alreadyabove.37 In this case, however, that meaning is implicitly supplemented bya rather different set of connotations: it presents the task of rememberingas a communal task, just as the original conversations were themselvescommunal events. The phrase ‘amongst us’ (παρ' ἡμῖν) gives an (p.192)added layer to that sense of communality, conjuring up a sense of anidealized community of educated Greeks. It is only in the final lines of thepreface that we see Plutarch speaking, very decisively, in the first person. Itis as if he holds back his own voice until he has established its relative lack ofimportance by comparison with the wider community he speaks for.38

Many of the moves Plutarch makes in this passage are quite conventionalones. I have suggested already that it is common for technical and scientificauthors to claim that they are writing at the request of friends, partly inorder to avoid the impression of excessive ambition. In that sense hisascription of the impetus for the work to Sossius Senecio is not at all unusual.Nevertheless the care with which Plutarch avoids first‐person usage in hisprefaces is remarkable even by those common standards. Repeatedly theLoeb translations miss his intricate circumlocutions, converting them tooreadily to first‐person singular expressions.39 In the preface to book 8, forexample, over the course of several hundred words, Plutarch criticizes thosewho omit philosophical conversation from their drinking‐parties and alsothose who allow conversation but let it become disorderly and undignified.Throughout all of this, there is no use of the first‐person singular. The nearestPlutarch comes to drawing attention to his own authorial role is in the finalwords of the preface, where he summarizes the content of the chapter whichis about to follow:

Well then, the first thing this book contains (πρῶτα τοῦτοπεριέχει τὸ βυβλίον) is the things which we happened to sayand to listen to (ἃ…καὶ ἀκοῦσαι καὶ εἰπεῖν συνέτυχεν ἡμῖν) lastyear at the birthday celebration for Plato. It is the eighth bookof the Table Talk. (717a)

The Loeb overtranslates: ‘what I happened to hear and say last year’.40 Thefirst‐person plural does indeed suggest Plutarch himself, but convertingit to a first‐person singular in English disguises the fact that Plutarch is

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clearly referring in addition to the wider sympotic community of whichSossius Senecio is a member. It is important to (p.193) stress that Plutarchis not straightforwardly self‐marginalizing in the preface as a whole. Hiscriticisms, stated without any hint of tentativeness, as if no sensible personwould dream of disputing them, are on the contrary highly authoritative—much more so, in fact, than many of the opinions expressed by individualsin the quaestiones themselves, where it is often clear that the speaker isspeaking tendentiously or making a deliberately speculative attempt todeal with a question whose solution is not at all clear. The important pointis that Plutarch wraps up that authority in the language of community,with reference both to the authors of the past and to the expectations andvalues he and his fellow symposiasts (and by implication the reader, who isimagined as part of that community) share.

We see similar effects throughout the work's other prefaces.41 The prefaceto book 7, for example, deals as so often with the question of what type ofconversation is best in the symposium. The only first‐ person verb in thepreface comes towards the end, and it is as so often a communal first‐personplural: ‘let us make a habit (ἡμεῖς δ’ ἑαυτοὺς…συνεθίζωμεν) of using wordswhich can be divulged by everyone and to everyone' (697e). The prefaceto book 3 is similarly sparing with first‐person usage. Plutarch presents usinstead with a series of quotations, drawing in turn on Simonides, Heraclitus,Homer (twice), Plato, and Aesop, allowing them to speak for him. Apartfrom a small aside at one point—‘it seems to me’ (645a)—there is no sign ofPlutarch as an individual until he draws attention, characteristically, to hisown authorial agency in the very final lines: ‘For that reason we have madefor you (πεποιήμεθα) this third collection of ten sympotic questions’ (645c).In this case the first‐person plural does seem to refer more unambiguouslyto Plutarch himself, and might more justifiably be translated as first‐personsingular than some of the examples examined above, but even here it ishard to miss the echoes of the text's repeated atmosphere of communaljudgement and communal endeavour. Here, then, Plutarch does not drawattention to his own agency except in relation to his authorial activity, whichis always presented in relatively functional terms. Instead, he allows other (p.194) voices—the voices of authors from the past, and the voice of sharedvalues and traditions—to speak through him.

How do the quaestiones themselves compare? As I have suggested brieflyalready, Plutarch often pushes himself forward in these narratives, describinghis own interventions, but even here there are prominent traces of thedesire for self‐effacement—or rather the desire to merge one's own first‐

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person voice with that of a wider intellectual and sympotic community. 1.1,for example, opens with the detail that ‘the question of doing philosophyin the symposium has been placed (τέτακται) first’ (612e). Once again,the Loeb overtranslates: ‘The question of philosophical talk over the cupsI have placed first of all, Senecio’.42 That difference on its own is fairlytrivial: the impersonal phrase ‘has been placed’ is typical of the way inwhich Greek tends to describe authorial decisions about structuring awork; English is more inclined to use the first-person singular than Greekin that circumstance. It gains significance, however, as part of a widerseries of effects, when we view it in the context of the work's cumulativeinterest in avoiding the first person. It also makes all the more strikingPlutarch's arrival as actor in the sympotic narratives he is about to recount.His own conversational voice bursts into view soon afterwards as we hearhis first contribution to discussion: ‘And I said…' (ἐγὼ δ’ εἶπον, 612f). Hemakes a second incisive contribution later on in the work, rounding off thequaestio with a speech which occupies well over half its total length, andwhich begins as follows: ‘I said first that it seems to me to be necessaryto consider…’ (ἔφην ἐγὼ πρῶτον ὅτι μοι δοκεῖ σκεπτέον ε̑ἶναι, 613d). Theself‐effacement of the preface, carried over into the opening mention ofwhat topic Plutarch has chosen to put first, drops away as soon as Plutarchbegins his account of the discussion itself, although even here the languageof obligation leaves some trace, with the implication that Plutarch is simplyfollowing where his argument leads him. He also makes it clear that hespeaks only because he is encouraged to do so by one of his fellow guests.

It is easy to come away with the impression that these individual speechesby Plutarch, which draw attention to his own authoritative position within hisgroup of companions, are the norm for the work. They are indeed common.When we look more closely, however, it (p.195) becomes clear that there arealso many exceptions. 1.3, for example, cuts out first‐person usage almostentirely, and presents us instead with a summary of discussion, withoutany mention of particular speakers: ‘Following on from this discussion,an inquiry arose about the places at a symposium’ (ἐκ τούτου περὶ τῶντόπων ἐνέπεσε ζήτησις, 619b); ‘three of the explanations given madean impression’ (τρία γε τῶν λεχθέντων ἐκίνει, 619c). 1.7 similarly lacksnamed speakers: we hear simply that ‘there was a discussion (ἐζητεῖτο)about why old men prefer their wine stronger’ (625a); and then a numberof anonymous opinions. There is clearly an implication here that the sumof discussion, conducted as a communal effort, is more important thanany individual contribution. At other times we see that kind of impersonalaccount supplemented by mention of a single notable contribution. In 1.5,

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for example, we see a typically impersonal account of the discussion—‘adiscussion arose’ (ἐζητεῖτο, 622c); ‘it was suggested’ (ἐλέχθη, 622c); ‘itwas also suggested’ (ἐλέχθη, 622d)—followed by a closing contributionby Sossius Senecio, the host of the banquet. Here Plutarch steps asidefrom his usual final position in the conversation to make way for his friendand addressee. Even where Plutarch does speak last, or take some otherprominent role in discussion, he sometimes stresses his own reluctance,going out of his way to avoid the impression of grandstanding. In 1.4, forexample, he is chosen as symposiarch, with responsibility for guiding thediscussion, but only when his fellow‐guests insist noisily and repeatedly(620a–b).

Citation in the Table Talk

That brief survey should suffice to give at least a sense of the texture ofPlutarch's self‐presentation in the work. He does indeed play a prominentrole, but his own argumentative prowess is always balanced with anacknowledgement of the wider communal endeavour of which it forms apart. Accordingly, his own involvement is often concealed behind impersonalexpressions, particularly so in the prefaces, but also often in the quaestionesthemselves. Clearly one of the driving forces for that usage is the idea thatPlutarch is part of the wider sympotic community composed of himself andhis fellow guests, who form a cosmopolitan intellectual elite, able to sit and (p.196) talk in the same way wherever they meet—the conversations takeplace in a range of cities in mainland Greece and even beyond—and despitetheir different philosophical and professional affiliations.

I have also suggested, however, that the idea of community with the authorsof the past is an equally important driving force. Most obviously, Plutarch andhis fellow symposiasts repeatedly quote from the authors of the past, gainingauthority by their erudition. In this section I want to supplement that fairlyself‐evident point by arguing, more innovatively, that the language Plutarchuses to describe practices of citation in the symposium itself reinforcesthe impression that the authors of the past may sometimes be broughtinto the conversation almost in their own right, in a way which sometimesdrowns out the individual agency of the symposiasts who quote from them,and which may in turn help to explain the way in which Plutarch's ownfirst‐person voice often takes a back seat. Of course Plutarch's utterancesin the prefaces, where that self‐concealment is most obvious, are not inthemselves sympotic, but it is as if the lessons of the quaestiones, the senseof communality with the voices of the past that the symposium teaches,

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has left its mark on them nonetheless, shaping the way in which Plutarchcommunicates there with his addressee, and with us his readers.

Bréchet has recently published a fascinating article on Plutarch's use ofdifferent words to describe the process of citation, drawing many of hisexamples from the Table Talk.43 He points out that Plutarch (like many otherancient authors) oscillates between a range of different usages. Sometimeshe uses language which implies engagement with the text as a written,physical object (for example, the language of ‘placing’ or ‘bringing in’ aquotation, in a way which implies that the quotation is an act of writing).Sometimes he uses the language of memory (one ‘remembers’ or ‘recalls’quotations, or quotations ‘come to mind’). At other times he uses auditorylanguage (‘listen to the words of…’, ‘I have heard so‐and‐so saying’).44 Thelast of those is of particular interest to me here. As Bréchet makes clear,the prevalence of that usage (not in itself particularly unusual for ancientlanguage of citation, but still strikingly common in Plutarch's (p.197) work)fits well with Plutarch's view that proper listening is a key philosophical skill,and with his (conventional but strongly held) assumptions about philosophyas an activity to be conducted above all in an oral environment. Significanthere is Plutarch's insistence on the importance of personal response tophilosophical listening. However, Bréchet seems to me to miss the obviousfurther step of exploring the possibility that this use of ‘auditory’ languagefor citation sometimes implies a kind of agency for the quoted author, whichat times even stands in tension with the active model of quotation Plutarchfor the most part works with.45 My aim in this last section is to examine thatpossibility in a little more depth, and to suggest that this kind of implicationis particularly prominent in the sympotic arena of the Table Talk, much moreso than in any of Plutarch's other works.

Let us look then at some examples of the language used for citation in theTable Talk. Most frequent are the expressions κατά + accusative, meaning‘according to’, and various phrases meaning ‘as x said’, most commonlyὡς φησί. Common also is citation without specific attribution where thesymposiasts quote from an author by simply incorporating the words ofthe source texts into their own, expecting their hearers to recognize thequotation. None of these is individually remarkable, and all are standardmeans of introducing citations in non‐sympotic works by Plutarch and others.It seems likely, however, that for some of Plutarch's readers they would insome cases have left an impression of the quoted author entering into thediscussion in person, in the light of the more explicit references to that ideain passages like the ones quoted below. In addition, that impression might

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be enhanced by the fact that the words of quoted authors are sometimesintroduced where we might expect a contribution from a symposiast, orvice versa, with the result that the unwary reader might even in somecases be momentarily unclear about which of the two we are hearing. Thatsaid, Plutarch uses that technique much less frequently than Athenaeus(discussed briefly above) and on the whole it is mitigated by Plutarch'sfairly consistent use of tenses: aorist (‘x said’) to describe the speech ofsymposiasts and present (‘y says’) to introduce quoted texts.

(p.198) More striking for our purposes are those passages where the idea ofa personal relationship between symposiasts and quoted author is paradedmore blatantly. Some of these passages even conjure up a picture of theinvolvement of the author in the symposium itself. Plato in particular is oftentreated in these terms, appropriately enough given his own commitmentto dialogue as a philosophical form and his own interest in reactivatingthe voice of Socrates and bringing it into dialogue with his readers. Myfirst example comes from 8.2. This quaestio records a conversation heldon the same occasion as 8.1, at the birthday celebration for Plato alreadymentioned. 8.2 opens as follows:

After this, when silence had fallen, Diogenianus, making a newstart (πάλιν…ἀρξάμενος) said, ‘If you are willing let us invite in(παραλάβωμεν) Plato himself as a participant (κοινωνόν), giventhat this is Plato's birthday, and, since the conversation hasturned to the gods, let us examine in what sense he intendedthe claim that “God is always doing geometry”—if indeed thatclaim is to be attributed to Plato. (8.2, 718b–c)

Diogenianus is the speaker who fills the silence—making a new start (πάλιν…ἀρξάμενος)—but he does so by bringing Plato forward as a contributor,as if to join in with the discussion and with the communal endeavour ofphilosophical analysis, as the word ‘participant’ or ‘partner’ (κοινωνόν)implies. Admittedly it is not easy to hear or interpret Plato's voice—Diogenianus acknowledges that there is some doubt about whether theseare the words of Plato himself—but even the attempts at deciphermentwhich Plutarch and his fellow guests make seem to have assumptionsof personal interaction lying behind them. For example, Plutarch himselfsuggests near the beginning of the quaestio that the statement ‘ischaracteristic of Plato’ (τοῦ Πλατωνικοῦ χαρακτῆρός ἐστιν, 718c); andlater Florus suggests that Plato may have been ‘riddling without beingspotted’ (αἰνιττόμενος λέληθεν, 719a), in a way which suggests that he

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himself has listened more carefully, and judged Plato's tone more effectively.In 9.5, similarly, Plutarch tells us that ‘Lamprias was flustered, but then, afterjust a brief pause, said that Plato often makes fun of us (ἡμῖν…προσπαίζειν)by his use of words’ (740b). Here, Plato joins in with the light‐heartedexchange of the symposium. That sense of Plato as participant is madeparticularly pointed by the fact that it has been immediately preceded byother examples of teasing, and (p.199) specifically by two uses of the verbπαίζειν in the previous sentence (740a–b), where Ammonius asks Lampriashimself to stop playing around and to address the matter seriously. Teasingis in fact a constant motif for the Table Talk—discussed at length in theoryin 2.1, and then tested out in practice through lots of different examples inbook 2 and beyond.46

It is not just Plato whose conversation is envisaged as equivalent toor engaged with that of the symposiasts themselves. In 2.1, 629e, wehear that ‘Xenophon has in a manner of speaking placed before us (ἡμῖνπροβέβληκεν)’ the problem under discussion. That verb (προβάλλω) is oftenused for the guests raising new topics for discussion (in other contexts itrefers to the action of ‘proposing’ a topic for an orator to speak on). And at3.6, 653c, we hear that some of the guests ‘brought in’ or ‘invited’ Xenophon(παρέλαβον) (the same word used to describe the introduction of Plato in8.2). Similarly in 1.9, 627a, in the course of a discussion on why fresh waterinstead of sea water is used to wash clothes, the symposiast Theon tells usthat ‘this problem which you have proposed to us (προβέβληκας) Aristotlehas already solved (λέλυκεν) a long time ago (πάλαι)’, rebuking his fellowguests as one might rebuke someone who has not been paying attentionto the conversation. The word πάλαι (‘long ago’) signals the temporal gapbetween Aristotle and the symposiasts—a gap which is never lost sightof completely—but it is nevertheless clear that Aristotle has himself beenengaged in precisely the same debate as the symposiasts themselves. Afterlaying out Aristotle's thesis, Theon asks, ‘Does not Aristotle seem to youto speak plausibly (πιθανῶς λέγειν) in this matter?’ (627b), in much thesame way as one might assess the plausibility of the contribution of a fellowguest who has just spoken. In 8.3, 720d we hear of another question which,according to the speaker, has already been solved (λελύσθαι) by Aristotle.

The language of memory is also relevant here. As Bréchet has shown, it isnot uncommon for citations to be introduced with the claim that the speaker‘remembers’ a particular quotation, in a way which might imply memoryof one's reading, but also memory of oral, conversational transmissionof famous quotations. In a sympotic context, and particularly in a work

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where Plutarch spends so much time (not least in the preface to book 1already discussed) dealing (p.200) with the theme of remembering sympoticconversation, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are sometimesbeing prompted to see these memories as equivalent to the memories thesymposiasts have of each other's contributions on earlier social occasions.In 6.5, 690f, for example, Plutarch asks, ‘do you remember the saying ofAristotle?’ (εἰρημένον Ἀριστοτέλει μνημονεύεις;) In 8.6, 726a one of thespeakers ‘recalled (ἀπεμνημόνευσεν) a witticism of Caesar's jester Gabba’, inthe same kind of language he might use if he had been present himself andwas remembering that event. Similarly in the opening lines of the preface tobook 3 (644f), Plutarch reports a witticism of Simonides at a party. It is surelyhard to avoid the implication that the recall of this sympotic utterance isequivalent to Plutarch's recall of the sympotic utterances of Sossius Senecioand others, as discussed in other prefaces.

The text is full of other examples which similarly imply various types ofpersonal relationship with the authors of the past. In 3.6, 653b, for example,Plutarch describes a group of young men who have only recently begun to‘spend time with’ (προσπεφοιτηκότες) ancient texts, a word which can mean,more specifically, to ‘spend time with a teacher’. In 7.7, 710e Plutarch says‘even though Euripides is dear (φίλος) to me in respect of other things, hestill has not persuaded me at any rate (ἐμὲ γοῦν οὐ πέπεικε)’ on the topicunder discussion. In 8.10, 734f, Favorinus is described—an appropriatelysympotic detail—as a ‘lover’ (ἐραστής) of Aristotle.

It is important to stress that Plutarch does not use these images of personalrelationship and reactivation of voice evenly. Often the language he usesfor citation implies, on the contrary, that the symposiastic speaker isactively in control of the process of citation. In 8.10, 734f, for instance, itis striking that Favorinus ends up not quoting from Aristotle, but insteadfrom Democritus, and his relationship with Democritus' text is envisagedvery differently, as something very far removed from personal exchange:‘on that occasion, however, he took down an old argument (λόγον παλαιόν)of Democritus, as if blackened with smoke, and did his best to clean andpolish it’.47 This is just one of many similarly vivid metaphors which depictthe quoted text as an object in its own right, to be controlled and (p.201)mastered by the symposiasts. Later in 8.10, 735c, for example, Favorinusaccuses the other speakers of attempting to shadow‐box (σκιαμαχεῖν),and of being overconfident about their ability to ‘get a good hold on thisancient doctrine’ (δόξῃ παλαι̑ᾳ…προσφέροντας ἁφὴν), using the languageof wrestling.48 Here it is explicitly the words and opinions themselves which

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are being confronted, rather than their authors. Elsewhere the language ofwitnessing is common, as if the source texts are being brought in one‐by‐onewithin a court‐room context:49 that metaphor keeps more distance betweensymposiasts and quoted authors then the metaphors of conversation.

Nevertheless these images of personal involvement surface often enoughto form an important repeated motif for the work, in a way which potentiallyprompts us to think of more neutral citational language (‘x says’, ‘I heardy saying’) in similar terms. Of course this kind of imagery of entering intodialogue with the authors of the past is not confined to sympotic contexts.One can find similar examples of it in a great range of non‐sympotic authorsin both Greek and Latin. I have come across good examples in Plato,50 inVitruvius,51 and in Seneca.52 It is a fantasy Lucian indulges in in his TrueHistories 2.20, where the first‐person narrator questions Homer about hiswork. Nevertheless it is striking that these images surface much moreoften in the Table Talk than in Plutarch's other works. It is much harder,for example, to find similar instances in his On the Face in the Moon, atext which similarly recounts a conversational attempt to solve a scientificproblem, and is similarly packed with quotation from earlier authorities,but which tends (although with very striking exceptions)53 to confine itselfto more conventional citational imagery of the kind Bréchet discusses.The image of personal engagement with quoted authors is particularlyappropriate to the sympotic traditions of community, articulating a sensenot just of community with (p.202) one's fellow symposiasts, but also withthe Greek past. It is important to acknowledge that for Plutarch citationshould never be indiscriminate—we should never give free reign to sourcetexts without interrogating them, and without choosing those parts of themwhich are morally useful.54 At times in the Table Talk, moreover, the idea ofcitation as a process of personal engagement with the authors of the pastseems to encourage individual self‐assertion rather than suppressing it, asindividual speakers agree with or take issue with these authors.55 At othertimes, however, and despite Plutarch's commitment to the ideals of activequotation, the symposiasts of the Table Talk seem content to let those earliertexts find their own voice, stepping into the background even as they displaytheir own virtuoso mastery of the skills of memory and quotation.

Conclusion

Plutarch in the Table Talk gives himself a very prominent role, asauthoritative narrator and skilled sympotic conversationalist. He also,however, seems oddly reluctant at times, especially in his prefaces, but often

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also in the quaestiones themselves, to refer to himself in the first‐person.On one level that tension in his work is entirely typical of what we see inmany other compilatory works from the Roman empire and before, whichhave to balance the competing priorities of professional self‐promotion withappropriate modesty and objectivity. I have also suggested, however, thatthis tension is in the case of the Table Talk unusually acute, and explicablein part by the work's sympotic character, where individual display mustbe held in tension with communal endeavour. The sympotic community inwhich Plutarch participates is not just a community of fellow members ofan intellectual elite, it is also a virtual community with the great authors ofthe past. Often their words are used as resources, picked up by Plutarchand his fellow guests and inserted into discussion. At other times, however,Plutarch offers us an unusually vivid glimpse of how that relationship canbe envisaged as a personal one, which allows not (p.203) just quotationbut even a kind of (temporary and precarious) reactivation of those voices,which live on by their circulation within the philosophical culture in whichPlutarch moves. That tension—the vivid sense of a constant negotiationbetween the personal and the communal, between the personal ingenuity ofthe symposiast and the words of his long‐dead predecessors—is one of thethings which makes Plutarch's contribution to ancient miscellanistic writing inthe Table Talk so distinctive.

Notes:

I am grateful to Harry Hine for comments on a draft of this chapter.

(1) See Russell (1993b) for a discussion of Plutarch's self‐disclosure inhis work, esp. 430–1 on the QC and what it can tell us about Plutarch'sexperiences and the character of himself and his friends.

(2) e.g. see König (2007) 56–9; and Klotz in this volume for a new perspectiveon those issues.

(3) Lloyd (1987) 56–78.

(4) Thomas (2000) 235–47; her account is intended to complement thatof Dewald (1987), who views his first‐person voice as more tentative,stressing the difficulties of his task; on Herodotus' first‐person voice, see alsoMarincola (1987), de Jong (2004), Goldhill (2002) 16–30 (discussed furtherbelow).


http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199588954.001.0001/acprof-9780199588954-bibliography-1#acprof-9780199588954-bibItem-337

http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199588954.001.0001/acprof-9780199588954-chapter-5#acprof-9780199588954-bibItem-9






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(5) This phenomenon is discussed at length by Lloyd in many of his works onGreek science: for example, see Lloyd (1996), (1987) 83–102, (1979) 86–98.

(6) See Goldhill (2002).

(7) e.g. see Goldhill (2002) 11–13 with reference to the preface to Herodotus'Histories.

(8) e.g. see Lloyd (1996) 74–92, esp. 90–2; cf. Goldhill (2002) 28 on thecareful hesitancy of Herodotus' pronouncements as a ploy which in itselfenhances his authority and persuasiveness; also 31–43 on Thucydides'absence as an explicit commentator from much of his work, and his relianceinstead on the enumeration of fact; and 103–4 on the austerity of Aristotle'sself‐presentation; cf. von Staden (1994) 104–5 on the absence of first‐personusage in Aristotle as a phenomenon quite compatible with the originalityof his work; Van der Eijk (2005) 40 on the alternation between ‘rhetoric ofmodesty’ and ‘rhetoric of confidence’ in scientific and philosophical writing;and for further discussion of the tension between competitiveness and theavoidance of competitiveness in ancient intellectual self‐presentation seeKönig (2010).

(9) See Lloyd (1991) and (1987) 104–8; Barton (1994) 149–52 on Galen;and see Cuomo (2000), esp. 57–90, for a detailed illustration of how theprocesses of transmitting tradition and enhancing authorial authority canwork together in one specific example, the mathematical author Pappus ofAlexandria.

(10) Thucydides is an obvious example: see Goldhill (2002) 30–44 (discussedalready above in n. 8) and Rood (2004).

(11) See König (2009c); also Janson (1964) 116–24 on this motif in Latinprose prefaces (and cf. 124–49 for examples of a range of other prefatorytechniques for expressing the author's modesty).

(12) See de Jong, Nünlist, and Bowie (eds.) (2004) on the representationsof narrators and narratees in a wide range of Greek authors, discussedin turn in successive chapters, but strikingly with almost no examples ofscientific or technical writing included; that volume does, however, includea number of chapters on historiographical authors (including de Jong (2004)and Rood (2004) on Herodotus and Thucydides respectively, mentionedalready above). Other good discussions of related issues for historiographicaland geographical authors include Marincola (1997); Clarke (1997) on the
























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range of Strabo's first‐person usages and equivalents, and more generally94–8 for debate over the appropriate degree of ‘subjectivity’ and explicit self‐characterization in ancient geographical and historiographical writing andits parallels with modern debates on the same issue within the discipline ofgeography; Akujärvi (2005) 25–178, for exhaustive tracking of Pausanias'use of different kinds of first‐person expression, which raises a numberof intriguing insights (although without much attempt to contextualize inrelation to similar usages in other compilatory authors): for example in 131–65 she shows that while Pausanias refers regularly to his own role as narratorand researcher, he is relatively reluctant to refer to himself as traveller. Forone attempt to apply these principles to ancient scientific writing, which I donot mention below, see Van der Eijk (1997), esp. 115–19.

(13) Barton (1994).

(14) von Staden (1994).

(15) Hine (2009).

(16) See Russell (1993b) 427–8 on the conventional references to authorialactivity in Plutarch's work.

(17) See Pelling (2004); cf. Beck (2000) on Plutarch's enhancement of his owncredibility in the Lives, and the way in which this draws on rhetorical theoryand practice with particular reference to the way in which the presentation ofanecdotes of his biographical subjects contribute to his self‐characterization;also Russell (1993b) 428 for brief discussion of moments where Plutarch'sself‐description intrudes into the Lives.

(18) There are plenty of parallels for authors taking a low profile in theirprefaces: e.g. see Gray (2004) 129–30 on Xenophon, who absents himselfvery much more comprehensively than Plutarch, in the prefaces to hisAnabasis and Hellenica; however, the Plutarchan contrast between lowauthorial presence in the prefaces and higher profile in the main text isharder to match.

(19) See Nutton (1984).

(20) See König (2005) 254–300.

(21) Translations in this chapter are my own.













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(22) The use of the first‐person plural as a slightly less personal equivalentof the first‐person singular in Greek is so common, even more so than the‘we’ of English academic prose, that we should not read too much intoindividual examples of it; nevertheless the contrast with assertive first‐person‐singular usage elsewhere in the passage under discussion (as alsofor Plutarch) increases the likelihood that some readers will have seen itas a significant attempt to mute the intrusiveness of the author's voice atthis point. Cf. Pelling (2004) 411–12 on the first‐person plural in Plutarch'sLives: ‘It is indeed often unclear how that category of “us” is envisaged: “weGreeks”, “we cultured beings”, “we people of humane sensibility”, “we whoare interested in the past”?…But in any case it is evidently a category thatincludes narratee as well as narrator…The blurring is important in insinuatingthat of course narrator and narratee are people who think along similarlines’. See also Hine (2009) for a discussion of the range of connotationswhich can be attached to the first‐person plural in Latin.

(23) On Galen's foregrounding of his own personality and his ownachievements see, amongst many others, Barton (1994) 133–68 and vonStaden (1997).

(24) See Russell (1993b) for good discussion; cf. Gibson (2003) on Pliny'sself‐praise, esp. 238–45 for the wider context of thinking about self‐praise inGreek and Roman culture.

(25) e.g. see On Self‐Praise 547f, the closing sentence of the work, discussedby Russell (1993b) 427.

(26) See König (2007).

(27) See Russell (1993b) 435 on 542a–c.

(28) See Russell (1993b) 435 on 543f–544c.

(29) Discussed by Russell (1993b) 428–9.

(30) e.g. see Collins (2005).

(31) Jeanneret (1991) 65–8 and 160–71.

(32) Jeanneret (1991) 167.

(33) Bakhtin (1984) 108.
















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(34) König (2009a) and (forthcoming).

(35) See König (2007) 45 n. 5 for brief discussion. See also the Introductionand Chapter 1 in this volume, and Titchener's chapter.

(36) For this interpretation of the difficult word ἐπίσταθμοι see Teodorsson(1989) 31–2.

(37) See n. 22, above.

(38) For similar examples of (historiographical) authors holding themselvesback to the end of a preface or even later, see Clarke (1997) 94–5 onDionysius of Halicarnassus' Antiquitates Romanae and Arrian's Anabasis;these examples are rather different, however, in the sense that they involveformal announcements of the author's identity.

(39) Clement and Hoffleit (1969); Minar, Sandbach, and Helmbold (1961).

(40) Minar, Sandbach, and Helmbold (1961) 111.

(41) Of the other prefaces, those to book 4, 6, and 9 do not use the firstperson or refer to ‘I’ or ‘us’ at all; the preface to book 5 does so only oncein reflecting at the beginning on Plutarch's own relationship with SossiusSenecio; the preface to book 2 uses several communal first person plurals,but only one first person singular, included towards the end in describing adecision about structure that Plutarch has made himself as author.

(42) Clement and Hoffleit (1969) 9.

(43) Bréchet (2007). There has been much work on other aspects ofPlutarch's citation practices: e.g. see many of the essays in Gallo (ed.) (2004)and in d'Ippolito and Gallo (eds.) (1991).

(44) See Bréchet (2007) 102–5 for an outline of those various possibilities.

(45) He sometimes touches on that issue briefly, for example at Bréchet(2007) 104–5 and 118.

(46) See König (2005) 60. Similarly in 7.3, 701d, Alexio, Plutarch's father‐in‐law, mocks Hesiod (κατεγέλα τοῦ Ἡσιόδου).















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(47) As Teodorsson (1996) 285 explains, this passages alludes to Od. 19.7–20, where Odysseus tells Telemachus to fetch weapons from where they arehanging above the hearth.

(48) For a discussion of the difficult language and complex imagery of thispassage, see Teodorsson (1996) 288–9.

(49) For one good example (among very many others) see 4.4, 669c.

(50) Pl. Prot. 339a–347b.

(51) Vitr. De Arch. 9. Praef. 17.

(52) See Hine (2006) 54–6 on Seneca's use of imagery of forensic orsenatorial debate to describe his dialogue with the philosophers of the past.

(53) e.g. see De Facie 5, 921f for the image of entering into conversationwith an earlier author; 6, 923f where one of the speakers is said to havebeen persuaded of something by Aeschylus. In addition, the character in theDe Facie who puts forward the Peripatetic view (from De Facie 16, 928e ) iscalled Aristotle.

(54) See Bréchet (2007), esp. 114–31.

(55) e.g. see Bréchet (2007) 118 for the image of dispute between present‐day speaker and quoted author.







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