14 Plutarch, Lucian, and the Debate on How to Write History: A Matter of Paideia?
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Abstract
This paper analyzes some aspects of Plutarch’s treatise De Herodoti malignitate in the light of the early imperial debate about historiography. The reflection about the historians’ style and personality forms the background for Plutarch’s work, as well as for Lucian’s Quo modo historia conscribenda sit. In both cases, the ethical concern supersedes viewing historiography as a literary genre. Thus, historiography becomes a crucial turning point for the negotiation of Greek paideia in the context of the Second Sophistic, insofar as the discussion about the authors of the past moulds a paideutic model to be applied in contemporary circumstances. Under this aspect, Plutarch and Lucian show two different approaches to the problems of frankness of speech, the moral education of the young, and the role of the intellectual in the Roman empire.