[Chapter titles are listed at the end of the review]
The well-known Plutarch scholar Frederick E. Brenk passed away at the age of 93 on December 3, 2022. The editor of the volume under review, Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta, writes in his preface that just a month earlier Brenk had received the first proofs for it and was in the process of checking them. Thanks to the editor the publication process was completed, and the volume came out in May 2023. This volume now stands as the capstone to a highly productive scholarly career of more than fifty years, which already comprised five collections of essays and over a hundred articles and book chapters, largely, though not exclusively devoted to Plutarch.[1]
Brenk’s scholarship has rightly been valued for its precision, nuance, and intellectual generosity. He frequently engages at great length with the publications of other scholars, well-established and less so, and writing in many different languages. Most salient, however, was Brenk’s wide range of expertise, and his openness to different methodologies: as well-versed in early Christian literature as in Plutarch, Lucian, and other non-Christian authors, and eager to wield not only the instruments of traditional philology but also, for instance, Genette’s structuralist literary theory. All of these qualities are, fortunately, on ample display in Plutarch on Literature, Graeco-Roman Religion, Jews and Christians.
The volume comprises sixteen chapters in total: fourteen previously published pieces, and two new ones. The chapters have been grouped in three parts, labeled “Literature,” “Graeco-Roman Religion,” and “Jews and Christians,” respectively. The re-published chapters were not edited or updated, and, because these are relatively recent (the oldest is from 2009, the newest from 2022), most of them are readily available.[2] The main and considerable value of this volume, then, lies in the opportunity to read these works of scholarship together and to gain access to the two original pieces. The front matter contains a one-page foreword by Tim Whitmarsh, who remarks on Brenk’s skill in contextualizing Plutarch in “an interconnected system of early Roman thought” (xiii), and a preface by the editor, containing brief summaries of all of the chapters (xiv-xx). The volume contains no fewer than four helpful indices: passages cited, historical names, subjects, and modern authors. In the remainder of this review I will discuss the two new chapters, and the volume’s final, standout chapter.
The first new chapter, ““None Greater Than in the Holy City:” Lucian, Pausanias, and Plutarch on Religious Shrines,” showcases Brenk’s interest in contextualizing Plutarch in the literary world of the first and second centuries CE. It considers Plutarch’s writing on Egyptian religion in Isis and Osiris and his descriptions of the oracular shrine at Delphi alongside Pausanias’ account of the same sanctuary, Lucian’s piece On the Syrian Goddess on Atargatis’ temple in Hierapolis, and (briefly) Lucius’ devotion to Isis in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. Brenk traces how the first three authors are both insiders and outsiders in these works. He considers Plutarch a hostile outsider towards Egyptian religion, which he continuously subordinates to Greek religion, and a hyper insider at the Delphic sanctuary, which he always defends and promotes. Pausanias and the narrator of On the Syrian Goddess fulfill both roles simultaneously: they are insiders to the religious cults they describe, perhaps even pilgrims, but they also take up the role of ethnographer, albeit a more sympathetic one than Plutarch. Brenk shows that it is indeed productive to read these three authors together, which happens surprisingly infrequently in existing scholarship.[3]
In the second new chapter, “A Name by Any Name? The Allegorizing Etymologies of Philo and Plutarch,” Brenk also takes up the task of comparison, this time focusing on allegory and etymology. In this lucid chapter on a complicated topic, he shows how Philo and Plutarch “share the same basic principles on similar sounds, symbolic connections, and hidden symbolic meaning” (230), but put them to different ends. Philo applied them to a primary text that was sacred to him, the Pentateuch, while Plutarch applied them (in On Isis and Osiris) to what he read about Egyptian religion in other sources, probably Manetho. Ultimately, however, both Platonic thinkers go “to great lengths to justify the correctness of the name by relating the reasons why the name was appropriate” (240). For Plutarch reason could be found also in the story of Isis and Osiris, in so far as he could bring it into line with traditional Greek religion and his Middle-Platonist theology.
The final chapter in the collection is titled “Plutarch on the Christians: Why So Silent? Ignorance, Indifference, or Indignity?” It was first published only very recently, in 2022, but Brenk notes that it builds on a chapter he published in Italian in 1996.[4] It asks and answers a seemingly simple question – why does Plutarch nowhere in his transmitted work discuss Christianity? – with great precision, taking the reader methodically through each step. Brenk argues persuasively that Plutarch must have acquired some basic facts about Christians through his personal network, which included several high-ranking Roman officials, and that these must have been interesting to him as an avid student of religions. This means that Plutarch either did discuss Christianity but in works that are now lost (such as his Life of Claudius or his Life of Nero), or, “he regarded them as a threat to Graeco-Roman culture” and “engaged in something like a conspiracy of silence against them” (310). Brenk leaves it up to the reader to decide between these two options, but only after having enriched them a with a much firmer foundation from which to do so: a very productive, learned aporia.
Reading through the collection of articles from beginning to end once again brings home the inspiring, impressive, and exemplary nature of Brenk’s scholarship. Following his example means to always read Plutarch’s works as literature, with attention to plot, characterization, and rhetorical devices, and to fully understand the author as rooted in the highly complex religious and philosophical landscape of the Roman Empire of the first and second centuries CE.
Contents
- Plutarch’s Flawed Characters: The Personae of the Dialogues
- “In Learned Conversation:” Plutarch’s Symposiac Literature and the Elusive Authorial Voice
- Space, Time, and Language in On the Oracles of the Pythia: 3,000 Years of History, Never Proved Wrong
- Voices from the Past: Quotations and Intertextuality: The Oracles at Delphi
- Sliding Atoms or Supernatural Light: Plutarch’s Erotikos and the “On Eros” Literature
- Looking at Conjectures (Guesses?) in Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love
- Plutarch the Greek in the Roman Questions
- Plutarch: Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics
- Plutarch and Pagan Monotheism
- “Searching for Truth”?: Plutarch’s On Isis and Osiris
- “None Greater Than in the Holy City:” Lucian, Pausanias, and Plutarch on Religious Shrines
- Philo and Plutarch on the Nature of God
- A Name by Any Name? The Allegorizing Etymologies of Philo and Plutarch
- Plutarch’s Monotheism and the New Testament
- “Most Beautiful and Divine:” Graeco-Romans (Especially Plutarch) and Paul on Love and Marriage
- Plutarch on the Christians: Why So Silent? Ignorance, Indifference, or Indignity?
Notes
[1] See G. Casadio, 2022. “Fred Brenk, a Man, a Scholar, a Jesuit (Professor Frederick E. Brenk, July 18, 1929 – December 3, 2022. In memoriam),” Ploutarchos 19: 117-123.
[2] I had direct access to all but three of them through my institutional library.
[3] For a recent exception see Gatto, M. 2024. “Lycurgus of Sparta in the Imperial Age: Plutarch, Pausanias, and Lucian,” in K. Jażdżewska; F. Doroszewski (eds.), Plutarch and His Contemporaries. Leiden: Brill, 254-265.
[4] Brenk, F.E. 2022. “Lo scrittore silenzioso: giudaismo e cristianesimo in Plutarco,” in I. Gallo (ed.), Plutarco e la religione, Naples: D’Auria, 239-262.