(below, pp. 667 ff.). Most of Plutarch's biographies took the form of parallel lives, in which an eminent Greek was compared with an
eminent Roman of the Republic. These were intended as character portraits (Plutarch specifically compares his work to both
sculpture and painting), in which small faults were to be toned down without being completely omitted, in order that the
requirements of truth should be fulfilled but the reader should not be distracted from the general outline of the man. To this end
Plutarch did not simply recount the lives of his subjects from birth to death, but included general descriptions of their behaviour in
certain contexts (it is here especially that, like Suetonius, he introduces anecdotes). The men are described and compared in terms of
ethical concepts derived from Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. Men should be brave, but not rash; modest, and not insolent in
success; moderate and scrupulous in their use of wealth; and they should control the passions of their subordinates while not being
themselves swept away by passion. The biographies seek to show the relative success or failure of great men in living up to such
precepts. Compared with this, Roman biography is ethically crude. The values of the Roman historians had arisen not so much from
a view of the good man, but from a view of the success of Rome, and utility to Rome was a narrow foundation on which to base
judgements on personality.
Why did the flow of Roman history dry up after Tacitus? It is significant that the next great history of Rome was written in Greek by
a Roman senator of Greek origins, Cassius Dio from Bithynia. This was a universal history of Rome up to the time of writing (the
early third century A.D.), which was intended to emulate Thucydides' work in its explanations and political generalizations. By
contrast, Roman explanations of their political history (in spite of Polybius' example) had rarely gone beyond the simplistic in
political terms. Thus, once the history of a period had been eloquently written by a Livy or Tacitus there was little call to rewrite it.
Since the Empire and the Principate were consolidated and apparently unlikely to change, the lives of the Emperors might be written
as a series of appendices to a story already well told. Later, in the fourth century, a Syrian from Antioch, Ammianus Marcellinus,
tried to make a new start by writing in Latin on the period from the end of Tacitus' work to his own day. The usual material is to be
found there-wars, geographic and ethnographic descriptions, trials, seditions in Rome and other cities, and, not least, digressions on
morals. Yet, in spite of the vivid and sensational presentation, little is said to explain the crises of the fourth century and the changes
in society. This is perhaps one reason why the Roman upper class had abandoned writing history in the traditional fashion. They
could find nothing new to say within the old framework.
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