Plutarch Musing

 

Reading Plutarch demands that one navigate the tenuous interplay between history, myth, and moral philosophy, where every anecdote becomes a mirror reflecting not only the actions of long-dead heroes but also the uneasy truths of human nature itself. His Parallel Lives transcends the boundaries of mere biography, presenting a dramatic arena where inner conflict takes on political shape, and where every ambition carries the weight of potential self-destruction. Each life he chronicles feels suspended in moral ambivalence, as though greatness and ruin are interwoven threads in the same cosmic tapestry. Plutarch’s work draws the reader into a psychological engagement with history — one that Shelley channels in Frankenstein, exposing the catastrophic cost of idealism unmoored from responsibility. Both Plutarch and Shelley confront the terrifying paradox at the heart of human striving: to aspire is to invite ruin, to create is to risk annihilation.

Victor Frankenstein’s tragedy, like that of many of Plutarch’s figures, unfolds through an obsession with transcendence that demands the sacrifice of connection. Frankenstein's relentless pursuit mirrors Alexander the Great’s fevered conquests, where ambition’s ecstasy erodes human attachment. Frankenstein isolates himself from those who love him just as Alexander abandoned his generals and friends in his final, maddened campaigns. The monster, like the betrayed followers of Plutarch’s doomed heroes, emerges as the revenge of neglected humanity, a violent manifestation of all that ambition cannot contain. Frankenstein’s story dramatizes the disintegration of identity in the face of unbounded ambition, revealing that the desire to surpass mortal limits inevitably confronts the limits of the soul itself.

Shelley’s use of Plutarch in the education of Frankenstein’s creature is no literary accident. The monster, imbibing the lives of great men, recognizes in them both the promise of self-creation and the despair of exclusion. Plutarch’s heroes — Cato, Caesar, Pericles — become the monster’s fantasies of greatness denied, visions of a world where the monstrous outsider has no place. His reading of these lives cultivates not only ambition but also resentment, an existential bitterness reminiscent of Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment, where unfulfilled longing curdles into hatred. Just as Alcibiades, driven by his alienation from Athens, betrays his city, the monster seeks vengeance on Frankenstein, his creator. Shelley’s treatment of ambition, through this literary intertext, reveals the ethical dangers of heroism: the more one seeks to transcend ordinary life, the deeper the alienation from it becomes. Greatness and monstrosity are thus inextricably linked, each a distorted reflection of the other.

Plutarch offers not simple moral lessons but case studies in existential fragility. His heroes act, and in acting, they expose the precariousness of identity. Identity, as Søren Kierkegaard would later argue, becomes a performance—something we are constantly in the process of constructing, rather than a stable essence we possess. In Plutarch, this performance oscillates between virtue and hubris, never allowing the reader the comfort of clear moral distinction. The self is always fluid, always exceeding its own boundaries. Alcibiades shifts between allegiances with disquieting ease; Brutus, torn between friendship and principle, murders Caesar in a moment that defines but also destroys him. These characters perform their identities on a stage where the demands of action conflict with the desire for inner coherence, making each decision feel like both a fulfillment and a betrayal of the self.

In Shelley, as in Plutarch, action alienates the actor from himself, a phenomenon that psychoanalysis would later identify as intrinsic to human experience. Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage offers a profound insight into this dynamic. Just as the infant recognizes itself in the mirror as both familiar and alien, Plutarch’s heroes encounter their actions as both achievements and estrangements. Frankenstein’s monster, too, experiences this alienation upon reading Plutarch—he glimpses a version of himself in these ancient lives, yet knows that he can never fully inhabit their world. In both Shelley and Plutarch, self-recognition is always incomplete, haunted by the gap between aspiration and reality. The monster’s tragic education thus mirrors that of the reader: to understand greatness is to confront its unattainability, and to recognize oneself in history is to feel, paradoxically, like a stranger to it.

Plutarch’s method — pairing the lives of Greek and Roman figures — further emphasizes the instability of identity across time. These parallels do not offer easy equivalences but instead highlight the discontinuities and asymmetries that haunt every act of self-comparison. Gilles Deleuze’s concept of difference in repetition resonates here: even when events seem to repeat — when one life reflects another—they do so differently, with subtle deviations that destabilize meaning. The juxtaposition of Caesar and Alexander, or Brutus and Dion, does not invite neat conclusions but opens a field of tension, where each figure’s actions become intelligible only in relation to the other, yet never fully identical. This refusal of closure reflects the fundamental openness of history and identity, where every moment contains the potential for both fidelity and betrayal, for both continuity and rupture.

Plutarch’s heroes thus occupy a liminal space between the human and the divine, embodying the Nietzschean dilemma of the Übermensch — the one who strives to transcend humanity but remains, inevitably, trapped within it. In reading Plutarch, we encounter the tragic impossibility of pure transcendence: greatness, no matter how exalted, is always tethered to the flaws and contingencies of mortal life. Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave finds poignant expression here. The master — like Caesar or Frankenstein—achieves power only to become enslaved by it, trapped in a cycle of ambition that alienates him from those around him and from himself. Power, in both Plutarch and Shelley, reveals itself as a paradoxical form of dependency, where the very act of creation or conquest demands the negation of what it seeks to affirm. Frankenstein’s attempt to create life ends in death; Caesar’s pursuit of absolute authority culminates in his assassination. Every act of mastery thus generates its own undoing, as if power carries within it the seeds of its own negation.

The moral ambiguity that pervades Plutarch’s Lives speaks to the irreducible complexity of human motivation. No action, however noble, escapes the taint of self-interest, and no failure is without its redemptive possibilities. Sigmund Freud’s theory of ambivalence — the coexistence of opposing impulses within the same individual — captures this duality perfectly. Brutus loves Caesar and kills him; Frankenstein loves knowledge and destroys himself through it. In both Plutarch and Shelley, to act is to invite contradiction, to be torn between competing desires that can never be fully reconciled. This is why Plutarch’s narratives resist didacticism: they offer not moral clarity but psychological depth, drawing the reader into the messy, unresolved conflicts that define human life.

To read Plutarch is to enter into a dialogue with history and with oneself, a dialogue that offers no final answers but demands ongoing reflection. His lives remain relevant not because they provide models to emulate but because they expose the fractures within every aspiration, the dangers within every ideal. As Shelley’s Frankenstein shows, the pursuit of greatness — whether through knowledge, power, or creation — carries with it the inescapable burden of unintended consequences. The monster, like Plutarch’s heroes, becomes a testament to the inevitable failure of human striving, yet also to the strange beauty that arises from that failure. In their struggles, we find both the tragedy and the glory of being human. And in reading their stories, we are reminded that to live is to act without certainty, to create without control, and to hope without guarantee.