In this well-written, scholarly, and insightful monograph, Raphaëla Dubreuil argues that Plutarch used theatrical scenes, language, and metaphors to investigate and evaluate political behavior. As a Platonist, Plutarch might have simply condemned theater as removed from reality and because it “solicited the audience’s frantic emotions and robbed them of their reason” (9). Previous scholarship focuses on this negative attitude and on Plutarch’s Demetrius and Anthony, both protagonists obviously theatrical. But Dubreuil argues that this was not Plutarch’s only or even his main attitude. For example, Plutarch often connects theatrical and oratorical performance; Dubreuil often reads Plutarch’s use of theater in the light of Aristotelian theories about theater and rhetoric; and she finds cultural differences in the role of the theatrical in Plutarch’s Athenian, Spartan, and Roman Lives (summarized at 242). Although the theatrical and the tragic are admittedly connected, Dubreuil distinguishes her project from prior scholarship on the tragic in Plutarch. Finally, she focuses on democratic, oligarchic, and Roman Republican politics; she does not treat monarchy and thus does not consider, for example, the Lives of Pyrrhus, Demetrius, and Eumenes (or Cleopatra in Antony). Taken together, these choices and strategies result in a coherent, rich, and original work, only some of whose many arguments I can touch on even in this lengthy review.
The first chapter uses Plutarch’s Demosthenes to explore the relationship of acting and oratory (36) in both the theatrical advice Demosthenes receives early in his career and his death scene. First, whereas the actor Satyrus advised Demosthenes on the performative aspect of his oratory, Eunomus of Thria, a politician, offered ethical guidance (Plut. Dem. 6-7). This contrast provides an interpretive key to Demosthenes’ life and his failures: for example, he tries to imitate only the “form and shape” of Pericles’ oratory rather than his other noble qualities (45 on Plut. Dem. 9.2). Second, on the night before his death, Demosthenes dreams that he gives a better performance in a theatrical contest against his assassin-to-be, Archias, but he loses due to inferior paraskeuē and chorēgia. For Dubreuil, this dream too reflects a moral weakness of Demosthenes, his agonistic approach to politics, as if it were a contest in the theater (55-57). And, rather than just taking paraskeuē and chorēgia as standing for the military inferiority that dooms Demosthenes’ cause, Dubreuil advocates a more complicated interpretation. She adduces criticisms, both in actual speeches and among the Peripatetics, of speakers relying on preparation (paraskeuē), and she takes chorēgia as evoking Demosthenes’ love of money. Nevertheless, with his last words, Demosthenes redeems himself and, as a statesman rather than a performer, puts down the actor Archias (69).
Dubreuil next charts the decline of Athenian mores and democracy across four theatrical episodes in the Life of Phocion. Early in the Life, Phocion is walking outside the theater, where the Athenians sometimes held assemblies. Contrary to the expectations this setting might evoke, he is planning nothing theatrical and false, but rather the opposite: he is working on how he could make his speech more concise (Plut. Phoc. 5.3). Phocion, an exemplary statesman, continually rejects the theatrical in politics and even avoids laughing and crying, “iconic expressions of dramatic action” (75 on Plut. Phoc. 4.3). Second, a chorēgos publicly berates an actor, by comparing his corrupting and royally extravagant demands with the frugality of Phocion’s wife, who goes about attended by only one slave woman (Plut. Phoc.19.2-3). The audience applauds the put-down and “upholds Athenian values” (79). In contrast, Demades presents a chorus that included a hundred members, all of whom were foreigners, contrary both to the law and to norm of excluding foreigners, a central part of Athenian democratic ideology (84-5 on Plut. Phoc. 30.3). Last and most important, only Plutarch locates the trial of Phocion in the theater (87-8 on Plut. Phoc. 34.3). Plutarch may just be including an accurate detail, but Dubreuil stresses that a theater is again the scene for “the collapse of Athenian democratic values” (89). She also likens this assembly in the theater to the “theatrocracy” deplored by Plato in the Laws (93-96).
In her treatment of Lycurgus, Lysander, Agesilaus, and Cleomenes, Dubreuil persuasively finds a Spartan anti-theatrical tendency in various put-downs of actors or even of the whole idea of mimesis. For example, Agesilaus has no interest in a famous actor’s imitation of a nightingale, since he’s heard the bird itself (Plut. Ages. 21.4-5; cf. Lys. 18.4-5). This “is not reflective of a Spartan reality but rather Plutarch’s overlay of Platonic views on his heroes” (102). But outside of Sparta itself, even Spartans might stage dramas or other (vaguely) theatrical performances in other states as demonstrations of their power and wealth (e.g., Plut. Cleom. 12.3). Theater in a positive sense plays a role in an account of the decision to spare Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War. The victors admired and pitied the Athenians after hearing the first section of a chorus from Euripides’ Electra (Plut. Lys. 15.3-4). Only Plutarch reports this story, and it is not in Xenophon, on whom Plutarch drew for other details of the surrender (113). In Xenophon, it is Spartan admiration for Athens’ military bravery at the time of the Persian Wars that saves them (Xen. Hell. 2.2.19-20) whereas Plutarch’s version focuses on the saving power of Athens’ drama. But Plutarch’s “transformation of military admiration into a theatrical one” (117) shows Athens’ decline from its golden age. For, as we know from Plutarch’s The Glory of Athens, Plutarch considers Athens’ greatness more military than cultural. Lysander self-serving involvement with performance culminates in Plutarch’s theatrical, and thus critical, narration of his plot to overthrow and take over the Spartan government (131-9). A digression on non-dramatic poets and poetry among the Spartans (122-131) reinforces Dubreuil’s overall argument for their instrumental approach to culture.
Dubreuil then turns to the Roman Lives. Plutarch depicts Roman militarism as manifest in its gruesome monuments of conquest, a sight unpalatable to unmanly audiences, and perhaps to Greeks (Plut. Marc. 21.2): “rather than expressing his own preferences, Plutarch is echoing the Roman propensity to polarize Roman and Greek culture at the moral expense of the latter” (145). Actual war narratives also use theatrical terms when the war is viewed as a spectacle, when passivity in war is likened to the behavior of an audience, and when the active combatants are compared to performers in a theatrical competition (145-153). Dubreuil elaborates on her argument for investigating theater rather than tragedy (156), but when considering the triumph of Aemilius Paulus, she explores the use of both in the presentation of Perseus and his family during the triumph. She further makes the argument that Plutarch’s presentation of the audience’s reaction to them is informed by Aristotle’s theories of pity in tragedy and in the world (160-165).
When she turns from Roman warfare to Roman politics, Dubreuil finds a less theatrical world than in the Greek Lives (171). Marc Antony is theatrical but not while in Rome, and Cicero, the topic of the next chapter, is an exception. So, Dubreuil focuses on scenes within theaters and again makes a contrast between Plutarch’s Greek and Roman Lives: “Where the actual performance plays an important role in the spectators’ response to the Greek politician, the theatrical representation is irrelevant when the statesman is Roman” (173). A long section on “Seating in the Theater” (176-187) has as its backdrop the preferential seating for senators (194 BC) and then the addition of a similar right for equestrians (67 BC). The expulsion of Lucius Flaminius from the senate for immorality, narrated both in Plutarch’s Cato Major and his Flaminius, leads to a scene in the theater: he is allowed to sit again with the senators as the result of public pity and outcry. Dubreuil argues that Plutarch’s treatment of this episode indicates disapproval of the theater audience (177): they feel pity for a victim who richly deserves his fate, contrary to Aristotle’s description of the correct tragic hero, who does not deserve his fate (180-81). I worry here that though the invocation of Aristotle’s theory is ingenious, it is not necessary to explain the disapproval of Plutarch and his readers at the crowd’s misguided pity. Significantly, Cicero’s admirable resolution of popular clamor against the preferential seating of equestrians takes place in the temple of Bellona, not in the theater itself where the incident began (184). Finally, Plutarch’s Romans do not show much interest in Greek theater and their sponsoring of shows to please the masses can reflect political ambitions, or sometimes even ideals (201-203).
The last chapter treats Plutarch’s Cicero, a biography in which the theatrical and the tragic work together (208). It analyzes “the acceptability of emotion and performance in oratory and politics” (240). Dubreuil first shows that Cicero’s amusing yet malicious use of humor in his speeches connects his style with the low genres of comedy and mime (210-212). She brings back her opposition between oratory resembling good or bad theater in a contrast between Cicero and Antony: Cicero’s great success in persuading Caesar to forgive an exiled opponent was based on words; worse was Antony’s feat of rousing the Roman mob, which depended on sight and props, in this case Caesar’s blood-stained and torn clothing (221 on Plut. Cic. 42.3-4). Dubreuil’s reading of Cicero’s last hours gains from the comparison with Demosthenes’ death scene, discussed earlier, and represents Dubreuil’s most conspicuous use of Plutarch’s own pairings. Cicero falls short in this comparison, for the same reason that Antony was inferior before: “overreliance on gesture, rather than language . . . a sign of a theatrical orator” (229). Cicero faces death bravely, but says nothing, whereas Demosthenes dies after a biting put-down of his assassin. Dubreuil concludes that Cicero’s death is tragic, but too theatrical in its “reliance on a performance that encourages a theater-like reaction in the audience” (233).
Dubreuil succeeds in showing that the theatrical is important to Plutarch’s political thinking in the Lives and that it deserves treatment independent of the tragic, which she does acknowledge where appropriate. Even on Dubreuil’s own account, the theater is still invoked most often as a critique of bad politics and bad political actors, influenced by Plato on occasion. Her scholarship is meticulous and thorough: for example, the discussion of the advice of Satyrus to Demosthenes includes the detailed analysis of four different Greek words (39-44). Occasionally, this laudable tenacity goes too far: it may be the case that Plutarch’s treatment of Thales (of Crete) is informed by a fragment of Solon (126-7), but this suggestion contributes only very indirectly to understanding of theater in the Lives. Overall, Dubreuil’s treatment is rich, thorough, closely reasoned, and contributes significantly to our understanding of Plutarch. Scholars interested in the role that theater and theories of theater, as well as spectacle and oratory, play in Plutarch’s intellectual and conceptual world as well as in his literary art will find Dubreuil’s work valuable.