Plutarch's Lives, Vol. 1

“Let us hope that Fable may, in what shall follow, so submit to the purifying processes of Reason as to take on the exact character of history. In any case, however, where it shall be found contumaciously slighting credibility and refusing to be reduced to anything like probable fact, we shall beg that we may meet with candid readers, and such as will receive with indulgence the stories of antiquity.”

This statement at the beginning of Plutarch’s Theseus is important for two reasons: First, Plutarch’s reference to “Fable” submitting to the “purifying processes of Reason” reveals something about how history worked in antiquity, where myths could be turned into history by sifting through the fantastical details and producing an account of events that obeyed basic verisimilitude. Plutarch thus suggests, for instance, that Theseus’s battle with the half-bull, half-man Minotaur may have simply been a fight with a general named “Taurus.” Second, Plutarch’s statement here reminds us that his goal is not to write history and establish undisputed facts, but rather to explore the characters of historical individuals and shed light on The Influence of Character on History.

“However, it was not the design of Lycurgus that his city should govern a great many others; he thought rather that the happiness of a state, as of a private man, consisted chiefly in the exercise of virtue, and in the concord of the inhabitants; his aim, therefore, in all his arrangements, was to make and keep them free-minded, self-dependent, and temperate.”

The influence of character on history is a prominent theme throughout Plutarch’s Lives, with individuals often continuing to shape what happens to their state long after they die. In his biography of Lycurgus, Plutarch shows how Lycurgus’s own goals in reforming the Spartan constitution shaped the later history of Sparta: Lycurgus’s constitution, for all its strength, was not designed to enable a city to “govern a great many others,” and thus began to fail as Sparta increased its power and influence.