So Plutarch is one of the things filling me back up.
The first thing I did when I started this project was to look for a free, "readable", online copy of Thomas North's translation of this life.
Well.
That was easier said than done. A lot of the Google ebooks are fine for personal reading, but they are "scanned copies", not actual text documents, and when you try and resort to text identification software {as I did}, it gets a little tricky, especially if there are pullout quotes in the margins.
Which there were.
Oh, there were copies of Dryden's translation galore, and I did look at those, only to realize why it was that Charlotte Mason preferred North.
So I've been typing up my own copy of North. In the process, I've been reading it aloud to myself, as well as modernizing spelling {but not wording}, changing names to the modern version if possible {i.e., the Oracle at Delphi rather than Delphus}, adding annotations and paragraph breaks, and basically any other footwork that should be done prior to trying to write any lessons for it.
If I groaned a little at the commencement of this typing project, I have fully repented by now. I'm finding that the best way for me to become intimate with this work is exactly what I felt forced to do: type it, read it slowly and aloud, check to make sure I did it right. I'm getting a great first look at the "Life".
This summer I'll probably be chatting about Plutarch off and on because that is where my mind is going to be. This ties in to my why-fight-it philosophy of blogging.
What has been fascinating to me is that in this life, more than any of the others I've read {granted, I've only read four or five of them}, Plutarch is explaining his work as a historian. He tells us exactly who his sources are, and why he deems them credible {or not}. He admits that when we try and reconstruct the lives of very ancient persons, such as Theseus or his Roman counterpart Romulus, it is hard to know exactly what is true. So he gives the various versions he has discovered, and then speculates as to which version he likes best.
Today I felt like a light flipped on in my brain in regard to sociological and archaeologically evidence. In the past, I've thought of the latter as merely all the buildings being in the right place. For example, when we say there is "archaeological evidence" for the Bible--or that there is "not" archaeological evidence for some other religion's major work "ahem"--we mean {or at least "I" mean} that the cities, buildings, and monuments are "there". If the Bible says there was a big city somewhere, we find a big city there. Make sense?
Essentially, the geography is right.
But Plutarch is taking archaeological--and by extension sociological--evidence to a different level. Over and over again, Plutarch says things like:
...the names of the places which continue yet to this present day to witness it...After reading variations of this statement 37 times, it finally dawned on me that this was significant. {Quick I am not, apparently.} Why does this matter? Well, here is the exciting thing: this culture had a habit of naming a place--or a temple or an altar or what have you--after a major event. We see this sort of thing in the Old Testament over and over as well. The Israelites experience something of significance, and they build an altar or dig a well or what have you, and the "name" of the place tells us about what happened there. The unfortunate thing about the Israelites is that "sometimes "they did this while wandering in a desert in which they were lost, making those specific monuments very hard to find. But Plutarch is able to say in regard to Theseus, "Hey look: we know that this happened because the city named after this event is still with us, bearing that name, "even to this day"."
This is amazing! I suppose a thousand years from now, when someone is doubting whether George Washington was ever a real person, the existence of multiple cities named after him might provide a similar sort of evidence.
Similarly, there are semi-religious feasts that are produced as evidence. This is what I meant by "sociological" proof. Plutarch uses these feasts in the same way he uses architecture, even though they are technically intangible things and much more easily lost than entire cities. At the time Plutarch was writing, the people in these areas had feasts they had been celebrating for centuries. Sometimes, he offers two possible reasons for the feasts, and then explains logically which one is most probable. But the more important point he makes is that the feasts exist, therefore "something "happened.
It's sort of like how Hanukkah exists because something happened. Hanukkah does "not" exist because someone made up a fictional tale and thought it'd be fun to design a holiday around it.
Here's what I'm getting from this: the Greeks did "not" name their cities after, and by extension did "not" invent feasts celebrating, persons and events that "didn't "happen. That just wasn't done. It is because of this cultural practice that Plutarch can produce evidence of certain events in the life of Theseus, the founder of Athens.
The interesting thing to me is that a lot of tall tales grew up around the person of Theseus over the hundreds of years between when he lived and when Plutarch wrote history. As Plutarch is trying to sift out fact from fiction, these place names and feasts are considered huge evidence. If you read a child's story of Theseus, you will think it fiction, and for good reason. His life sounds outlandish, to say the least. And yet, Plutarch obviously believes that Theseus was a real person, and makes a valiant attempt to reconstruct his life.
This life particularly has the spice of faerie in it, which is to say that it is going to be great fun.
