11:00 am – 1:00 pm
5th Floor Seminar Room, Italian Academy for Advanced Study, 1161 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY, 10027
The Paradox of Humane Imperialism: Revisiting Plutarch’s On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander the Great
Sulochana R. Asirvatham
Montclair State University
No ancient Alexander-text has wielded more influence over the modern imagination than Plutarch’s two-part speech On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander the Great (= De Alexandri Magni Fortuna aut Virtute = De Alex. fort. I and II). This is true especially of De Alex. fort. I: here Plutarch argues that Alexander was more of a “philosopher” than traditional philosophers because, unlike the latter, the Macedonian king put action to (mere) words. Floods of ink, in fact, have been spilled over a single section (329A-D) in which Plutarch claims that Alexander, defying the advice of Aristotle, created a harmonious world-state ruled by Greek norms—something that Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, would merely dream of in his Republic. The passage is famous not only among Alexander-scholars, but also among philosophers due to its tantalizing reference to early Stoicism, for which there are no extant contemporary sources. The interests of these two modern audiences do not fully overlap, but I address both by steering the discussion away from the historical personages upon whom they fixate—Zeno, Aristotle, Alexander—towards Plutarch’s more obvious inspiration in De Alex. fort.: Rome.
The argument requires taking seriously the speech’s genre, which most scholars (including myself in previous studies) have failed to do: it is an encomium of the paradoxical type (παράδοξον ἐγκόμιον). The overt paradox, of course, is the figure of Alexander-the-true-philosopher, but I seek to demonstrate that the real target is Rome and its paradoxical rhetoric of humane imperialism. As idealistic as Alexander’s drive towards world-unification seems on the surface, readers cannot help but notice that the king “forced with weapons whomever he did not persuade with words” (οὓς τῷ λόγῳ μὴ συνῆγε τοῖς ὅπλοις βιαζόμενος: 329C). As I have argued elsewhere, numerous parallels between Plutarch’s description of Alexander’s actions and other texts dealing with Roman imperialism (such as those of Pliny the Elder and Tacitus) demonstrate that this Alexander is a Romanizing figure, but those parallels do not precisely explain the jumble of references to classical rhetoric and Greek philosophy in this text, which I here suggest is primarily designed to undermine Stoicism (of which Plutarch is generally critical) and, specifically Stoic ways of justifying imperial force. I conclude by considering why Alexander is uniquely suited to the game Plutarch appears to be playing here.
