house, in which Damon had died. He knows the whole story from his childhood, and knows that in this small matter Lucullus showed the same justice and courtesy which Flaminius had displayed in a great one. For it is only the strong who can be just; and therefore to the strong there falls in the end, without appeal, the reward, or the penalty, of doing justice throughout the world. That seems to be Plutarch's 'long answer' to those who question the justice of the Roman Empire. He gives it most fully in the life of Flaminius, taking, as I have said, a rare occasion in order to comment on the conclusion of a long series of events. First, he sums up the results achieved by the noble Greeks, many of whose lives he has written. For Agesilaus,' he writes, Lysander, Nicias, Alcibiades, and all other the famous captains of former times, had very good skill to lead an army, and to winne the battle, as well by sea as by land, but to turn their victories to any honourable benefit, or true honour among men, they could never skill of it'; especially as, apart from the Persian War, 'all the other wars and the battles of Greece that were made fell out against themselves, and did ever bring them unto bondage: and all the tokens of triumph which ever were set up for the same was to their shame and loss.' Having summed up the tragedy of Greece in these words, he turns to the Roman rule, and 'The good deeds of the Romans and of Titus Quintus Flaminius,' he says, ' unto the Grecians, did not only reap this benefit unto them, in recompense that they were praised and honoured of all the world; but they were cause also of increasing their dominions and empire over all nations.' So that peoples and cities. . . procured them to come, and did put themselves into

joine for t

their hands'; and 'kings and princes also (which
were oppressed by other more mighty than them-
selves) had no other refuge but to put themselves
under their protection, by reason whereof in a very
short time. . . all the world came to submit them-
selves under the protection of their empire.'

In the same way, he, a republican, acquiesced in
the necessity for Cæsar. Having told the story of
Brutus, the last of the thirteen Romans, he falls on
the other of my two occasions, and Cæsar's power
and government,' he writes, 'when it came to be
established, did indeed much hurt at his first entrie
and beginning unto those that did resist him: but
afterwards there never followed any tyrannical nor
cruel act, but contrarily, it seemed that he was a
merciful Physician whom God had ordained of special
grace to be Governor of the Empire of Rome, and to set
all things again at quiet stay, the which required the
counsel and authority of an absolute Prince.' That
is his epilogue to the longest and the mightiest drama
in all history; and in it we have for once the judg-
ment of a playwright on the ethics of his play. Yet
so great a dramatist was Plutarch that even his
epilogue has not saved him from the fate of his peers.
While some, with our wise King James I., blame him
for injustice to Cæsar,1 yet others find him a niggard
in his worship of Brutus and Cato. The fact is,
each of his heroes is for the moment of such flesh
and blood as to compel the pity of him that reads;
for each is in turn the brother of all men, in their
hope and in their despair. If, then, the actor chances
to be Brutus and the reader King James, Plutarch
is damned for a rebel; but again, if the reader be a

1 In his interview with Casaubon. See Ste.-Beuve: Causeries du Lundi, xiv. 402.

republican, when Servilia's lover wraps him in his cloak and falls, why, then is Plutarch but the friend of a tyrant. Thus by the excellence of his art he forces us to argue that his creatures must reign in his affection as surely as for a moment they can seize upon our own. Take an early hero of the popular party-take Caius Gracchus. We know him even to his trick of vehement speech; and, knowing him so intimately, we cannot but mourn over that parting from his wife, when he left her to meet death, and she, 'reaching after him to take him by the gown, fell to the ground and lay flatlings there a great while, speaking never a word.' Cato, again, that hero of the other side, lives to be forbidding for his affectation; yet who but remembers the clever boy making orations full of witt and vehemence,' with a 'certaine gravetie' which delighted his hearers and made them laugh, it did so please them'? One harks back to the precocious youngster, once the hope of the winning party, when Cato, left alone in Utica, the last soul true to a lost cause, asks the dissemblers of his sword if they think to keep an old man alive by force?' He takes kindly thought for the safety of his friends, reads the Phado, and dozes fitfully through the night, and behold! you are in the room with a great man dying. You feel with him that chill disillusion of the dawn, when the little birds began to chirp'; you share in the creeping horror of his servants, listening outside the door; and when they give a shriek for fear' at the 'noise of his fall, overthrowing a little table of geometry hard by his bed,' it is almost a relief to know that the recovered sword has done its work. And who can help loving Pompey, with his curtesie in conversation; so that there was never man that requested anything with less

6

ill will than he, nor that more willingly did pleasure unto any man when he was requested. For he gave without disdain and took with great honour' ? 'The cast and soft moving of his eyes . . . had a certain resemblance of the statues and images of King Alexander.' Even Even Flora the curtisan '-Villon's Flora la belle Romaine '-pined away for love of him when he turned her over to a friend. He is all compact of courage and easy despair: now setting sail in a tempest, for it is necessity, I must go, but not to live'; and again, at Pharsalia, at the first reverse 'forgetting that he was Pompey the Great,' and leaving the field to walk silently away. And that last scene of all: when on a desolate shore a single 'infranchised bondman' who had 'remained ever by the murdered hero, 'sought upon the sands and found at the length a piece of an old fisher's boat enough to serve to burn his naked body with '; and so a veteran who had been with him in his old wars happens upon the afflicting scene; and you hear him hail the other lonely figure: O friend, what art thou that preparest the funerals of Pompey the Great? Thou shalt not have all this honour alone.. to bury the only and most famous Captain of the Romans!'

There is sorcery in Plutarch's presentments of these politicians, which may either blind to the import of the drama they enact, or beguile into thinking that he sympathises by turns with the ideal of every leader he portrays. But behind the glamour of their living and the glory of their death, a relentless progression of political causes and effects conducts inevitably to Cæsar's personal rule. In no other book do we see so full an image of a nation's life, because in no other is the author so little concerned to prove

the truth of any one theory, or the nobility of any one sentiment. He is detached-indeed, absorbedin another purpose. He exhibits his thirteen vivid personalities, holding, mostly by birth, to one of two historic parties, and inheriting with those parties certain traditional aspirations and beliefs; yet by showing men as they are, he contrives to show that truth and nobility belong to many divergent beliefs and to many conflicting aspirations. Doubtless he has his own view, his rooted abhorrence to the rule of one man; and this persuasion inclines him now to the Popular Party in its opposition to Sulla, and again to the Senate in its opposition to Cæsar. But still, by the sheer force of his realism, he drives home, as no other writer has ever done, the great truth that theories and sentiments are in politics no more than flags and tuckets in a battle: that in fighting and in government it is, after all, the fighting and the governing which must somehow or another be achieved. And, since in this world governing there must be, the question at any moment is: What are the possible conditions of government? In the latter days of the Republic it appears from the Lives that two sets of causes had led to a monstrous development of individuals, in whose shadow all lower men must wither away. So Sertorius sails for the Fortunate Islands'; Cato is juggled to Cyprus; Cicero is banished; while Lucullus, out-metalled by Pompey on his own side, 'lay still and took his pleasure, and would no more meddle with the commonwealth,' and the unspeakable Bibulus 'kept him close in his house for eight months' space, and only sent out bills.' At last you have the Triumvirate; and then, with Crassus killed, the two protagonists face to face: 'whose names the strange