Paulus Æmilius, the heroes of her equally successful foreign and colonial policy; while one only, Marcus Cato, is chosen as a constitutional politician from the few untroubled years between the assurance of empire abroad and the constitutional collapse at home. Turning from Italy to Greece, we find, again, that after the two legendary founders and Solon, the more or less historical contriver of the Athenian constitution, the remainder Greeks without exception fall under one or more of the three other categories: they beat back invasion, or they sought to extend a suzerainty, or they led political parties in pursuit of political ideals. Swayed by his political temperament, Plutarch exhibits men of a like stamp engaged in like issues. But, in passing from his public men of Italy to his public men of Greece, we may note that, while the issues which call forth the political energies of the two nations are the same, a difference merely in the order of event works up the same characters and the same situations into another play with another and a more complicated plot. Rome had practically secured the headship of the Italian States some years before the First Punic War. Her suzerainty was, therefore, an accomplished fact, frequently challenged but never defeated, before the Italian races were called upon to face any foe capable of absorbing their country. But in Greece, neither before nor after the Persian invasion did any one State ever become permanently supreme. So that, whereas, in Italy, the issue of internal wars and jealousies was decided long before the danger of foreign domination had to be met; in Greece, overshadowed in turn by the Persian, the Macedonian, and the Roman, that issue was never decided at all. It follows that the history of Italy is the history

of Rome, and not of the Latins or of the Samnites; but that the history of Greece is, at first, the history of Athens, of Sparta, and of Thebes in rivalry with one another, and, at last, of Macedon and Rome brooding over leagues and confederacies between the lesser islands and States. The Roman drama is single. The City State becomes supreme in Italy; rolls back wave after wave of Gauls and Carthaginians and Teutons; extends her dominion to the ends of the earth; and then, suddenly, finds her Constitution shattered by the strain of world-wide empire. Plutarch gives the actors in all these scenes; but it is in the last, which is the most essentially political, that he crowds his stage with the living, and, afterwards, cumbers it with the dead. The Greek drama is complex, and affords no such opportunity for scenic concentration. Even the first and simplest issue, of repelling an invader, is made intricate at every step by the jealousy between Sparta and Athens. Plutarch tells twice over 1 that Themistocles, the Athenian, who had led the allies to victory at Salamis, proposed to burn their fleets at anchor so soon as the danger was overpassed: for by this means Athens might seize the supremacy of the sea. The story need not be true: that it should ever have been conceived proves in what spirit the Greek States went into alliance, even in face of Persia. The lives of two other Athenians, Cimon and Aristides, complete Plutarch's picture of the Persian War; and after that war he can never group his Greeks on any single stage. Each of them seeks, indeed, to extend the influence of his State, or to further his political opinions; but in the tangle of combinations resulting from their efforts one feature

1 In the Themistocles and in the Aristides.

1

remains unchanged among many changes. Through all the fighting and the scheming it is ever Greek against Greek. The history is a kaleidoscope, but the pieces are the same. That is the tragedy of Greece: the ceaseless duel of the few with the many, with a complication of racial rivalries between independent City States. There is no climax of development, there is no sudden failure of the heart; but an agony of spasm twitches at every nerve in the body in turn. Extinction follows extinction of political power in one State after, and at the hands of, another; and in the end there is a total eclipse of national life under the shadow of Rome.

It is customary to date the political death of Greece from the battle at Charonea, in which the Macedonians overthrew the allied armies of Athens and Thebes. But to Plutarch, who had a better, because a nearer, point of view, the perennial virulence of race and opinion, which constituted so much of the political life of Greece, went after Charonea as merrily as before. The combatants, whose sky was but clouded by the empire of Alexander, fought on into the night of Roman rule; and, when they relented, it was even then, according to Plutarch, only from sheer exhaustion. Explaining the lull in these rivalries during the old age of Philopomen, he writes that 'like as the force and strength of sickness declineth, as the natural strength of the sickly body impaireth, envy of quarrel and war surceased as their power diminished.' Of these Greeks, other than the founders and the heroes of the Persian War, six were leaders in the rivalry, first, between Athens and Sparta and, then, between Sparta and Thebes. Of these, three were Athenians - Pericles, Nicias, and Alcibiades; two were Spartans-Lysander and

Agesilaus; one was Pelopidas the Theban. These six lives complete Plutarch's picture of the Peloponnesian War. Then, still keeping to Greeks proper, he indulges in an excursion to Syracuse in the lives of Dion and Timoleon. Later, in the lives of Demosthenes and Phocion, you feel the cloud of the Macedonian Empire gathering over Greece. And, lastly, while Rome and Macedon fight over her head for the substance of dominion and political reform, two kings of Sparta, Agis and Cleomenes, and two generals of the Achæan League, Aratus and Philopomen, are found still thwarting each other for the shadow. Plutarch shows four others, not properly to be called Greeks the Macedonians, Alexander and Demetrius, Pyrrhus the Molossian, and Eumenes, born a Greek of Cardia, but a Macedonian by his career. These four come on the stage as an interlude between the rivalries of the Peloponnesian War and the last futilities of the Achæan League. Alexander for a time obliterates all lesser lights; and in the lives of the other three we watch the flashing train of his successors. All are shining figures, all are crowned, all are the greatest adventurers of the world; and tumbling out of one kingdom into another, they do battle in glorious mellays for cities and diadems and Queens.

Taking a clue from the late reconstitution of the most moving scenes at Athens and Rome, I follow it through the Parallel Lives, and I sketch the political framework it discovers. Into that framework, which co-extends with Plutarch's original conception, I can fit every life in North's first edition, from the Theseus to the Aratus. I could not overlook so palpable and so significant a result of Plutarch's political temperament; and I must note it

because it has been overlooked, and even obscured, in later editions of Amyot and North. Amyot's first and second editions, of 1559 and 1565, both end with the Otho, which, although it does not belong to the Parallel Lives, was at least Plutarch. But to Amyot's third, of 1567, there were added the Annibal and the Scipion (major), first fabricated for the Latin translation of 1470 by Donato Acciaiuoli and translated into French by Charles de l'Escluse, or de la Sluce, as North prefers to call him. These two lives North received into his first edition: together with a comparison by Simon Goulard Senlisien, an industrious gentleman who, as 'S. G. S.,' supplied him with further material at a later date.1 For indeed, once begun in the first Latin translation, this process of completing Plutarch knew no bounds for more than two hundred years. The Spanish historian, Antonio de Guevara, had perpetrated a decade of emperors, Trajan, Hadrian, and eight more, and these, too, were translated into French by Antoine Allègre, and duly appended to the Amyot of 1567 by its publisher Vascosan. All was fish that came to Vascosan's net. The indefatigable S. G. S. concocted lives of Augustus and Seneca; translated biographies from Cornelius Nepos ; and, with an excellent turn for symmetry, supplied unaided all the Comparisons which are not to be found in Plutarch. The Charonean either wrote them, and they were lost; or, possibly, he paused before the scaling of Cæsar and Alexander, content with the perfection he had achieved. But S. G. S. knew no such

1 Professor Skeat, in his Shakespeare's Plutarch, leaves the attribution of these initials in doubt. They have been taken by many French editors of Amyot to stand for B. de Girard, Sieur du Haillan, but M. de Blignières shows in his Essai sur Amyot, p. 184, that they stood for Simon Goulard, the translator of Seneca.