Is it me or is this book frequently misunderstood in literary tradition / popular culture?

Is it me or is this book frequently misunderstood in literary tradition / popular culture?

>Plutarch
>popular culture

What?

Are you implying that virtually no one has heard of Plutarch outside of literary circles and that his Lives are not a universally recognized classic or do you mean something else?

I'm not him, but yes.

unless you've studied Plutarch in university you've probably never heard of him. And only bourgeois liberal arts universities study the Greeks any more. If you're in public uni you get required reading from "diverse" authors about postmodern inter-sectional feminist queer theory

I only picked it up because Frankenstein's monster read Goethe, Plutarch, and Milton, and there's no way that monster should have read great literature that I have not.

Weird.
Even if most people don't really know anything about Greek or Roman writers and philosophers or politicians and orators those are names that get thrown around a lot and are mentioned in any history or literature textbook so kids are bound to have heard them at least once.
I think most people should have heard the name Plutarch and the ones that read at least a book or two in their lives might even know that he wrote about "Alexander and Caesar or something". Which is precisely the issue I wanted to discuss.

you underestimate the stupidity of the pleb. Nobody reads anymore, not even meme books. I can't ever talk about books with my friends because they would be clueless as to what I was talking about, and I can't recommend any books to them either because they never started with the Greeks, and I'm not even going to bother trying to get anyone to do that. I probably wouldn't have either if it wasn't apart of my uni curriculum

misunderstood how?

Most people don't know the name Plutarch. Most of the people who do will confuse him with Petrarch, and most of those who know they're two people have read neither.

Most people would admire someone like Caesar and Alexander as a great person for their achievements. To put it simply they would admire someone because they think they are cool.
People will read Plutarch and think "Wow, those Caesar and Alexander are really cool guys". So the popular opinion about the Lives is that their purpose is to laud the cool deeds of cool people.
Plutarch wrote on morals and ethics. The purpose of the Lives was to teach how to (not) live a virtuous life.
Caesar and Alexander did not live very virtuous lives for the most part and Plutarch doesn't spare you that information.
I still have the impression that even many well-read people seem to believe that Plutarch idea was the former rather than the latter or maybe don't make a difference.
Is my impression wrong?

This is the truth. Anti intellectualism is rampant nowadays.

Frankly I don't know anyone else IRL who has read Plutarch, let alone all of the Lives, so I can't really relate to how he's (mis)perceived.

But what I can say is that most people, even otherwise "well-read" types who never read the Greeks/Romans, are not only unaware of who Plutarch is, but are typically unaware that antiquity is a treasure trove of moral guidance. You're right that
>The purpose of the Lives was to teach how to (not) live a virtuous life.
but where you seem to be wrong is thinking that this matters to people nowadays. When's the last time you heard the word "virtue"? People rarely think about being "good," and the ones who do are usually doing so within the boundaries of religious doctrine, often followed only habitually, in place of a conscious personal ongoing desire to be good. That reminds me of a relevant passage from Rose Macaulay's "Towers of Trebizond":

>You can say you would like to be a good writer, or painter, or architect, or swimmer, or carpenter, or cook, or actor, or climber, or talker, or even, I suppose, a good husband or wife, but not that you would like to be a good person, which is a desire you can only mention to a clergyman, whose shop it is, and who must not object or make dry answers like an unbribed oracle, but must listen and try to assist you in your vain ambition.

Also I think it's worth pointing out that Plutarch is surprisingly inaccessible. His casual style and the relatively short length of each of his lives makes him seem easy and digestible, but his parallel lives jump (obviously) between Greece and Rome, and also span hundreds of years, giving the reader no warmup or lead-in. He largely presupposes that you already know most of these stories, or at least the political histories. His role is (a) repackaging them, presenting individual lives as they cut across decades of background events, (b) bringing new emphasis to probably already-familiar moral lessons drawn from more typical "historians," largely with the pairings he makes between lives, and (c) offering anecdotes which would not warrant inclusion in "proper" history, but which fill out the corners of a "life" and help you see men not just qua statesmen and generals, but qua fathers, brothers, sons, husbands, lovers, men. He at a few points explicitly says something like "these are not histories, they are lives; to understand lives we need to know not only the big but the small, and the seemingly trivial stories which have been largely hitherto neglected by historians are precisely the materials by which we will come to know who these men really were."

Far from being an easy intro to antiquity, Plutarch requires a fairly significant background in the relevant histories to be able to follow the Lives and to understand and appreciate what they're doing differently. He's not a crash course; he's a reworking or a revisitation. Not a first step, but rather a new lens through which to look back once you've already neared the end.

hah! — an excellent standard.

>He Read the Lives
>He Didn't read the Moralia
>Übercausal

I read Plutarch years ago, who was the Roman who ended up betraying rome and led an army to its walls, but then turned around when his wife and mother begged him? I've been searching for that dudes name for a while

>When's the last time you heard the word "virtue"? People rarely think about being "good," and the ones who do are usually doing so within the boundaries of religious doctrine, often followed only habitually, in place of a conscious personal ongoing desire to be good.
So, what's the alternative? In the Meno, Socrates set out to prove that 'arete' was not teachable nor was it capable of being the object of JTB knowledge; rather, it was a divine gift that even virtuous people did not understand, but they lived. [Whether or not you buy anamnesis is another thing entirely.]

I haven't yet read Plutarch, but I've heard that he's not aiming to be a historian; your quotation seems to justify that. As long as you read with that context in mind, why wouldn't it be a good introduction to viewing ancient history as human history? The way in which you describe his aim reminds me of Tolstoy's W&P, which I read knowing next-to-nothing about Napoleon or the French Revolution.

As a footnote, I'm not saying that people who follow the rote commandments of habitual religion are admirable, I'm just suggesting that moral philosophy can't be taught in a straightforward way as I don't believe history (dates, ranks, etc.) can be.

Gaius Marcius Coriolanus
googled "roman general stopped attack mother"

I've literally never seen a complete Moralia collection on lit. I have one but haven't even gotten to it yet.

my interest in reading has inadvertently made me an ascetic. I can't get any reading done if I'm chugging alcohol and watching sportsball with normies

I'm mostly familiar with Plutarch through Montaigne and Shakespeare and have only read through Theseus, Romulus, and Lycurgus, but even if these men weren't entirely "cool guys" or "virtuous," they were damn good men (especially Lycurgus), and at least something partially to aspire to.

>virtually no one has heard of Plutarch outside of literary circles and that his Lives are not a universally recognized classic

Accurate. In the 17th18th century literate people had read him, in the 19th/20th Classicists and historians. Now you probably have a survey course, with a recap and a chapter or two if you're a Classicist.

>the ones that read at least a book or two in their lives
>Plutarch somewhere in there between Harry Potter, Twilight, and the Battle Royale Clone

user, I have some sad news for you...

In his introduction to Pericles he says that nothing inspires one to be virtuous quite as hearing of the virtuous deeds of others but I guess he should have said that nothing inspires one to seek glory quite as hearing of the glorious deeds of others.

most people can't even point to Rome on a world map let alone know who the fuck Plutarch is