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RedditThe first years of the millennium have become, for interesting reasons, a golden age of popular political biography. The young British writer Simon Sebag Montefiore has just produced Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, a savagely intimate portrait of one of history's more impenetrable characters. In Grace and Power, Sally Bedell Smith has brought her impressive gifts as a reporter to bear upon the Kennedy White House. Ron Chernow, John D. Rockefeller's biographer, has written a brilliant new study of Alexander Hamilton. Doris Kearns Goodwin, biographer of the Kennedys and Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt, will publish a new examination of Abraham Lincoln next spring. Edmund Morris is taking a break from his Theodore Roosevelt sequence to write a book about Beethoven. Robert Caro's epic life of Lyndon Johnson, now running to three volumes, with more to come, is one of the great American biographies.
And so on. In the age of chaotic electronic information, there seems to be an indefatigable production line turning out big, solid biographies, written to the weight and bulk of footlockers. It is as if Thomas Carlyle's Great Man theory of history, a rather heavy 19th-century idea, had been genetically crossed with People magazine to create a genre of historical infotainment: retrospection compounded of scholarship, vivid period drama and soap opera at the highest levels.
The current harvest of popular political biography—a higher and more literate form, perhaps, of the TV and tabloid stories that reigned during the decade of O.J., Diana, John Jr., Columbine, and Elián González—comes to us, in part, courtesy of the end of ideology and of the idea of historical inevitability. Human nature has reverted to its love of gossip and personalities and stories—narratives that have not essentially altered since people started exchanging scandalous news about the activities of the gods.
If edmund morris, David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin and the rest of today's practitioners belong to a post-ideological order of public biography, their ancient progenitor, Plutarch, represents the pre-ideological origins of the form.
A Greek from a wealthy family born around a.d. 46 in east-central Greece, Plutarch lived in his own golden age, during the reigns of Nerva, Trajan and Hadrian. The author of more than 200 works, he is known primarily for his Parallel Lives, biographies that over the centuries have heavily shaped popular ideas of Greek and Roman history.
In his design of Parallel Lives, written in Attic Greek—the literary language used by the educated of the Roman Empire—Plutarch paired famous Romans with famous Greeks, presenting them side by side and then comparing them in a short essay. (Twenty-two such pairs survive.) Thus, for example, he contrasts the Greek orator Demosthenes with Rome's Cicero. He fetches far back sometimes into myth. He opens the Lives by comparing the Greek hero Theseus and Rome's co-founder Romulus—among other things indicting Theseus as a rapist (of Ariadne, Antiope, Anaxo the Troezenian and Helen) and giving some space to whether the so-called rape of the Sabines by Romulus was excusable as a kind of aggressive sociobiology.
Down the centuries, the same criticism has been aimed at Parallel Lives that is now directed at our biographical bestsellers: too much history by anecdote. The Victorian scholar Arthur Hugh Clough, who updated the poet John Dryden's superb translation of Plutarch to give us the best available version in English, remarked in an introduction: "It cannot be denied that [Plutarch] is careless about numbers, and occasionally contradicts his own statements. A greater fault, perhaps, is his passion for anecdote; he cannot forbear from repeating stories, the improbability of which he is the first to recognise."
Plutarch admits the impossibility of being accurate, opening his account of Lycurgus, the lawgiver of Sparta, by throwing up his hands: "There is so much uncertainty in the accounts which historians have left us...that scarcely anything is asserted by one of them which is not called into question or contradicted by the rest." Thus, one seeks not so much the historical fact as the exemplary story—the applicable anecdote, the usable history. But if life is anecdote, history is anecdote with life-and-death consequences, gossip enlarged to the scale of epic.
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