Plutarch on Phocion Chrestos

Plutarch, H.P. Blavatsky · Buddhas and Initiates Series · 34 pages

Plutarch's life of the Athenian statesman and general Phocion, in Bernadotte Perrin's translation from volume VIII of the Loeb Classical Library edition of 1919, where it is paired with the life of Cato the Younger. The Loeb editor's annotations are kept. Plutarch opens with Demades the orator, powerful at Athens because he managed affairs to please Antipater and the Macedonians, and who excused the measures he proposed by saying he was in command of a shipwrecked state — a line Plutarch judges too hardy for Demades but true of the administration of Phocion.

The theme of the opening pages is the fate of virtue in a violent time. Plutarch refuses to follow Sophocles in making virtue weak, but grants Fortune this much power in her conflicts with good men: that instead of the honour and gratitude due to them she brings base censure and calumny on some, and so weakens the world's confidence in their virtue. He then disputes the common view that a people is most insolent to good men when prosperous, arguing that calamity makes dispositions bitter and prone to wrath. Blavatsky's addendum on the difference between Χρηστός, Chrēstos, and Χριστός, Christos — the distinction that runs through this whole section — is appended, and the epithet Phocion carried is the reason the file sits here.

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