Plutarch (c.46-120 CE)

Plutarch's bust at
Chaeronea, his home town

Plutarch (c.46-120 CE), a greek historian and philosopher. Bom in Chaeronea in  Boeotia,  Plutarch  was  educated  in  Athens,  mainly by the Platonist Ammonius, who had an Egyptian name and  came to Athens from Egypt. Plutarch spent some time in Rome and  also in Alexandria, but the small town of Chaeronea remained his  permanent home. There, he filled various public posts and was a  priest at nearby Delphi. His family life was very happy; his wife Timoxena bore him five children, while a circle of friends  and pupils acted as a little academy under his lead.

Plutarch was a prolific writer, and his many biographical works  included  Parallel  Lives,  about  Greeks  and  Romans.  His  Moral  Essays covered a wide variety of themes, such as greed, flattery,  loquacity,  superstition,  education,  and  marriage;  his  style  was  popular, being both lively and instructive. In other essays a more  ambitious  approach  appeared,  in  that  themes  were  tackled  that  interested  Stoics,  Epicureans,  and  Platonists.  As  an  avowed  Platonist, Plutarch was in some ways open to Stoic influence; for  example, in his emphasis on Providence.

His intense interest in religious beliefs and practices in addition  to his vast reading on the whole field have led to the considered  claim by Jean Hani (1976) that Plutarch is antiquity's best historian  of religions. The claim is strongly supported by Plutarch's superb treatise On  Isis and Osiris (the De Iside et Osiride—although  written in Greek, the Moral Essays are traditionally called by their  Latin titles). In this work, a distinction should be made between  the  accounts  given  of  myths  and  rites  and  the  often  added  interpretations. The accounts showed, on the whole, a remarkable  reliability  when  compared  with  the  evidence  of  the  Egyptian  sources; the interpretations, in  contrast,  were  often  colored  by  Pythagorean,  Platonic,  Stoic,  Gnostic,  and  even  Iranian  ideas;  in  chapters  46,  47,  and  48  the  dualistic basis of Zoroastrianism was presented in an expose, which  has often been quoted as authoritative.

For evidence on the contemporary cult of the Egyptian deities,  Plutarch relied to some extent on his friend Clea, who held a double  priesthood at Delphi—that of Isis and that of Dionysus. His book is  dedicated to Clea. (It is possible, though not certain, that Plutarch  was  also  an  initiated  devotee  of  Isis.)  On  a  wide  range  of  information about Egyptian religion, Plutarch was greatly indebted  to a large number of Greek writers, whose compilations he probably  used.  Their  quality  varied,  but  most  important  among  them  to  Plutarch  was  Manetho,  a  bilingual  Egyptian  and  a  high  priest  at  Heliopolis under the first two kings of the Ptolemaic dynasty.

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