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PENGUIN CLASSICS
FALL OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC
(c. 50-c. 120 was a writer and thinker born into
PLUTARCH ad)
a wealthy, established family of Chaeronea in central Greece. He
received the best possible education in rhetoric and philosophy,
and travelled to Asia Minor and Egypt. Later, a series of visits to
Rome and Italy contributed to his fame, and it was said that
he had received official recognition by the emperors Trajan and
Hadrian. Plutarch rendered conscientious service to his province
and city (where he continued to live), as well as holding a priest¬
hood at nearby Delphi. His voluminous surviving writings are
broadly divided into the ‘moral’ works and the Lwes of outstand¬
ing Greek and Roman leaders. The former {Moralia) are a mixture
of rhetorical and antiquarian pieces, together with technical and
moral philosophy (sometimes in dialogue form). The Lives have
been influential from the Renaissance onwards.
was a Professor of the University of Connecticut
REX WARNER
from 1964 until his retirement in 1974. He was born in 1905 and
went to Wadham College, Oxford, where he gained a ‘first’ in
Classical Moderations, and took a degree in English Literature.
He taught in Egypt and England, and was Director of the British
Institute, Athens, from 1945 to 1947. He wrote poems, novels and
critical essays, worked on films and broadcasting, and translated
many works, of which Xenophon’s History of my Times and The
Persian Expedition, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian
War, and Plutarch’s Lives (under the title Fall of the Roman
Republic) and Moral Essays have been published in Penguin
Classics. Rex Warner died in 1986.
is Honorary Senior Bellow in Classics and Ancient
ROBIN SEAGER
History at the University of Liverpool and the author of Pompey:
A Political Biography (1979; revised edition, 2001).
is Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford
CHRISTOPHER PEELING
University. He published a commentary on Plutarch’s Life of
Antony in 1988 (Cambridge University Press) and an English ver¬
sion of his 1997 Italian commentary on the Lives of Philopoemen
. i ^ \ • ' “ /H . “ t ' ''
and Flamininus (Rizzoli) is to be published by the Classical Press
of Wales. Most of his articles on Plutarch were collected in his
Plutarch and History (Classical Press of Wales and Duckworth,
2002).
PLUTARCH
Fall of the Roman Republic
Revised Edition
Translated with Introduction and Notes by
REX WARNER
Revised with translations of Comparisons and a Freface by
ROBIN SEAGER
With Series Freface by
CHRISTOPHER PEELING
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 8o Strand, London wczr orl, England
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 381
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
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(a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
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(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
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(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices; 80 Strand, London WC2R orl, England
www.penguin.com
This translation first published 1958
Revised edition 1972
Revised and expanded edition 2005
I
Copyright © Rex Warner, 1958
Notes copyright © Robin Seager, 1972
Corrections to text. Preface and Comparisons copyright © Robin Seager, 2005
Penguin Plutarch copyright © Christopher Pelling, 2005
All rights reserved
The moral right of the editor has been asserted
Set in 10.25/12.25 pt PostScript Adobe Sabon
Typeset by Rowland Phototypesetting Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk
Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
Contents
Penguin Plutarch, by Christopher Pelling vii
Preface to Revised Edition (2005) xi
Translator’s Introduction xiii
Introduction xvii
Further Reading xlvii
FALL OF THE
ROMAN REPUBLIC
1 MARIUS 3
2 SULLA 56
Comparison of Lysander and Sulla 105
3 CRASSUS no
Comparison of Nicias and Crassus 155
4 POMPEY 160
Comparison of Agesilaus and Pompey 249
5 CAESAR 254
6 CICERO 323
Comparison of Demosthenes and Cicero 374
Abbreviations 379
A Note on Roman Names 380
Glossary of Roman Technical Terms 381
Notes 383
s
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2018 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/fallofromanrepubOOplut_0
Penguin Plutarch
The first Penguin translation of Plutarch appeared in 1958,
with Rex Warner’s version of six Roman Lives appearing as
Fall of the Roman Republic. Other volumes followed steadily,
three of them by Ian Scott-Kilvert (Rise and Fall of Athens in
i960, Makers of Rome in 1965 and The Age of Alexander in
1973), and then Richard Talbert’s Plutarch on Sparta in 1988.
Several of the moral essays were also translated by Robin
Waterfield in 1992. Now only fourteen of the forty-eight Lives
remain. It is planned to include these remaining Lives in a new
edition,.along with revised versions of those already published.
This is also an opportunity to divide up the Lives in a differ¬
ent way, although it is not straightforward to decide what
that different way should be. Nearly all Plutarch’s surviving
biographies were written in pairs as Parallel Lives: thus a ‘book’
for Plutarch was not just Theseus or Caesar but Theseus and
Romulus or Alexander and Caesar. Most, but not all, of those
pairs have a brief epilogue at the end of the second Life compar¬
ing the two heroes, just as many have a prologue before the
first Life giving some initial grounds for the comparison. Not
much attention was paid to this comparative technique at the
time when the Penguin series started to appear, and it seemed
natural then to separate each Life from its pair and organize
the volumes by period and city. The comparative epilogues
were not included in the translations at all.
That now looks very unsatisfactory. The comparative tech¬
nique has come to be seen as basic to Plutarch’s strategy, under¬
lying not only those brief epilogues but also the entire pairings.
(It is true, though, that in the last few years scholars have
Vlll PENGUIN PLUTARCH
become increasingly alert to the way that all the Lives, not just
the pairs, are crafted to complement one another.) It is very
tempting to keep the pairings in this new series in a way that
would respect Plutarch’s own authorial intentions.
After some agonizing, we have decided nevertheless to keep
to something like the original strategy of the series, though with
some refinement. The reason is a practical one. Many, perhaps
most, readers of Plutarch will be reading him to see what he
has to say about a particular period, and will wish to compare
his treatment of the major players to see how the different parts
of his historical jigsaw fit together. If one kept the pairings, that
would inevitably mean buying several different volumes of the
series; and if, say, one organized those volumes by the Greek
partner (so that, for instance, Pericles-Fabius, Nicias-Crassus
and Coriolanus-Alcibiades made one volume), anyone primar¬
ily interested in the Roman Lives of the late Republic would
probably need to buy the whole set. That is no way to guarantee
these finely crafted works of art the wide reading that they
deserve. Keeping the organization by period also allows some
other works .of Plutarch to be included along with the Lives
themselves, for instance the fascinating essay On the Malice of
Herodotus along with the Lives of Themistocles and Aristides
and (as before) several Spartan essays along with the Spartan
Lives.
Of course the comparative epilogues must now be included,
and they will now be translated and printed along with the
second Life of each pair, just as the prologues are conventionally
printed before the first Life. Each volume will now also usually
include more extended introductions to each Life, which will
draw attention to the importance of the comparison as well as
other features of Plutarch’s technique. This is a compromise,
and an uncomfortable one; but it still seems the better way.
The volumes will, however, sort the Lives into more logi¬
cal groups. The early Roman figures will now be grouped to¬
gether in a single volume entitled The Rise of Rome; the Life
of Agesilaus will migrate from the The Age of Alexander to
join the rest of the Spartan Lives, and the Life of Artaxerxes
will join the The Age of Alexander collection; the rest of the
