OUP (2025) h/b 567pp. 5 maps, 10 figs. £209 (ISBN 9780192865182)
A new commentary on one of Plutarch’s Lives is a scholarly event, as is one on any of the major ancient sources for Alexander of Macedon. In combining the two, Christopher Pelling (hereafter P.) offers a milestone in the study, not just of Plutarch and Alexander, but of ancient biography and Greek-imperial literature more broadly. P.’s comes over half a century after that of J. R. Hamilton (1969), to which P. pays tribute, while noting differences of emphasis, such as P.’s rewarding focus on Plutarch’s narrative techniques.
P. is unusually well qualified for the task. As his Preface states, his Oxford DPhil was a commentary (published in 2011) on the Life of Caesar with which Plutarch paired his Alexander. His commentary on Plutarch’s Antony (1988) is an outstanding staple. The enormous bibliography of his new commentary (505-49) lists 31 items under his own name, the earliest from 1973, the latest from 2024 (two items). Underpinning this study is well over half a century of reflection, fed by a huge amount of reading in the vast scholarship on its subject(s).
The book is in three parts. The first 64 pages (‘Introduction’) are sub-divided into ‘Alexander and Plutarch’s world’; ‘Structure and themes’; ‘What the Life leaves out: Plutarch’s Alexander elsewhere’; ‘What Plutarch does with history’; ‘Sources’; and ‘An Alexander for its times?’ P. then gives his own translation, following the Teubner, not the Loeb, chapter divisions. Next comes the commentary (129-503), organised around one or more words of the translation in bold, and sub-divided by Plutarchan subject-matter under headings like ‘11-13: Alexander in Greece, 335 BCE’. There are five clear maps of Alexander’s route, and ten figures, including (nos. 7-8) the so-called Porus coinage.
The introduction is a feast in itself. Plutarch wrote the Life probably in his sixties. By this time his own ‘savviness’ as a historian will have developed, along with his ‘antennae for falsehood’. Given that Alexander became a myth in his lifetime, P. concludes that, in trying to get his character right, Plutarch at least tried to screen out the legendary, albeit ‘not totally’ succeeding. In the pairing of Greeks with Romans in the Parallel Lives, there was the question of how fairly Alexander counted as Greek. ‘Greek enough,’ probably, P. thinks, although Plutarch might also have played down some Macedonian elements (6 n. 14). His narrative technique, P. argues, was to introduce traits of character and then show them becoming more complex, Alexander’s drinking being one example, beginning as a liking for good conversation. Overall, in Plutarch’s hands, Alexander’s mentality develops, as P. puts it, a ‘coarsening’. Plutarch opts to track this by means of ‘grand scenes’ such as the episodes of Philotas or the Indian philosophers, with a mounting impressionism in dealing with chronology and geography. Famously, he had claimed at the start to be writing, not ‘histories,’ but ‘Lives’ (1.2).
A strength of this commentary is its use of Alexander’s appearances elsewhere in Plutarch’s works to show ‘the many other ways in which the story could have been told’. For instance, Plutarch could have made much more of Alexander’s ‘divine affectations,’ given his awareness elsewhere of epigrammatic utterances like that of the Spartan Damis (Apophthegmata 219e). P. is surely right to be uncertain about Plutarch’s reasons for underplaying this major topic. Tact in the face of the Roman imperial cult might have been only one factor. That Plutarch deployed his expansive knowledge of Alexander-material in different ways for different genres remains sobering food for thought.
Although P. opts to devote less space than he might have to speculation about which source Plutarch follows at a given moment, there is an excellent discussion of the main sources, including those mentioned by Plutarch himself, and the form in which these might have come down to him, whether probably read first-hand (Callisthenes, for instance, or Cleitarchus), or taken over from an earlier writer (as with Ptolemy, perhaps?). There are valuable updates on problematic sources such as the Ephemerides (not necessarily worthless) and the Letters of Alexander (Plutarch was wise to take them seriously). P. is also illuminating on how Plutarch might have written or dictated his text: scrolls were hard to manhandle; he used notes, maybe; but ‘[h]e is likely to have relied more on memory than scholars have usually assumed’.
As for Roman colouring, debated in modern scholarship, P. notes that at the time of composition (late in Trajan’s reign), Alexander was a ‘hot topic’ thanks to that emperor’s imitatio Alexandri as he turned eastwards. But Plutarch had to take care, not least because Trajan might not match his model’s military successes, and the Alexander of the Life has his faults: so ‘a resonance, no more’. Plutarch’s other work, Alexander’s Fortune, was on safer ground. This might have invited in an ancient reader’s (or auditor’s) mind a broader comparison of Alexander’s civilising mission (as Plutarch represents it there) with that of Rome, to the latter’s advantage, since Roman rule included extending the conqueror’s citizenship to subjects (albeit, in the east, sparingly at first and through viritane grants, and with no overt ideology before the reign of Claudius).
Like the work as a whole, the translation caters to the Greekless reader by not printing the Greek original on which it is based; when the commentary that follows dwells on textual issues, these are expressed in transliteration or English (379 on 54.1). The commentary itself is predictably rich fare. The reader is constantly made aware of how the other ancient sources treat the same moment or theme, with insights into Plutarch’s literary choices, as with the Gordian knot (18.2-4), which ‘he could have done more with,’ preferring to delay a new instalment of personal drama until the next chapter, with its story of Philip the doctor.
Many readers will want to see how P. handles particular passages or topics, and, where there is modern debate, hope for insight into current directions of scholarly travel, not to mention the judgments of P. himself. This reviewer, for instance, turned to Plutarch’s treatment of Alexander’s so-called Persianising. P. maps Plutarch’s apparent approval of the political potential of this ‘policy,’ cautious at first but gaining in enthusiasm, although never as developed in the Life as in the two essays on Alexander’s Fortune, despite detail absent from the other Alexander-sources such as Alexander’s requirement that the Epigonoi, the 30,000 Asian boys to be trained in Macedonian warcraft, were also to be taught Greek (47.6). At one point (347) P. wonders if Plutarch ‘projects his own intellectual inclinations onto Alexander’s court’.
There is a comprehensive discussion of the thorny problem of exactly what Achaemenid clothing Alexander adopted and what it might have looked like, including (337) the meaning of mesoleukos, which P. takes (337, on 45.2) as a white stripe down the middle of a purple garment, ‘so not quite “purple shot through with white’’’ as in LSJ (and the new Cambridge Greek Lexicon). On obeisance, P. brings out all the nuance needed in weighing up what the authors of the ancient accounts, Plutarch included, might have thought was going on, what ‘Alexander himself intended or hoped for,’ and what light is shed by the counterpart of Caesar’s Lupercalia, ‘a similar hinge in the great man’s fortunes in the parallel Life’ (382 on Caes. 61.1-7).
The commentary ends with a fascinating discussion of whether the abrupt and ‘disappointing’ ending of the Life as we have it is as Plutarch intended. P. discusses modern theories and does not rule out that something has been lost. He gives (503) a translation of a passage in Zonaras, the twelfth-century Byzantine writer, a flashback to Alexander’s final days, but ‘hesitated to print the passage with the text’.
P.’s book is a tremendous achievement of deep scholarship. Serious students of Alexander will find themselves constantly referring to it. In repeatedly bringing out the possibilities open to Plutarch as he made his compositional choices, P. leaves this reader more aware than ever that the study of Alexander scarcely counts as historiography in the modern sense. It is literary history in all its baffling, and often insoluble, complexity.
Antony Spawforth
Brighton