Plutarch’s Anthropology and its Influence on His Cosmological Framework

After decades of confidence that a consistent body of thought or system would be found behind the multifarious themes dealt with in Plutarch’s abundant literary production, recent years have seen such meritorious efforts replaced by a growing diffidence. Compared to the efforts of scholars during the 20th century to understand how diverse Plutarchean works relate to one another and, more importantly, the extent to which these reflect a unified body of thought, scholars nowadays are rather reserved regarding the possibility of finding such unity and tend to highlight differences instead of similarities. This concerns not only the analysis of the two main parts of Plutarch’s oeuvre, namely the Lives
and Moralia, but also and especially the study of the myths included in some tracts of the latter corpus. In his introduction to the text and translation of Plutarch’s De genio Socratis (2010), Donald A. Russell,
for example, affirms that even if Plutarch’s myths draw on a stock of religious, philosophical and scientific lore, this “fund does not amount to a coherent system, and it would be rash to assume that there is such a thing, and that Plutarch is just revealing parts of it to us, a bit at a time”
.