Chapter 15 - Plutarch in Byzantium

Summary

This chapter examines the transmission of Plutarch’s works from late antiquity to the fourteenth century and then looks at some striking examples of his appropriation. Although in the early centuries of this period over half his works were lost, a key factor ensuring the survival of the rest was the fact that their moral outlook was so compatible with that of orthodox Christianity. The watershed moment comes in the thirteenth century when Maximus Planudes devoted himself to collecting and copying the still existing works. Among the examples provided here to show his works were being closely read are the use Photius makes of them in his Bibliotheca; the influence of the structure and purpose of the Lives on the scholars at the court of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos and later on Michael Psellos; Anna Komnena’s knowledge of various Moralia treatises; and Theodorus Metochites’ self-fashioning as an early-fourteenth-century Plutarch.