History, in Plutarch, never quite stands still. It wavers between chronicle and dream, between civic instruction and private nightmare. Each life unfolds as if under a moral pressure chamber, where the soul expands beyond its tolerances and ruptures. One senses, reading him, that human beings are not destroyed by evil so much as by the internal excess of their own virtues. Courage becomes recklessness. Discipline curdles into cruelty. Vision hardens into obsession. The fall is rarely sudden. It is incremental, almost polite. And this is what makes it unbearable.
Plutarch’s figures move through history like sleepwalkers armed with ideals. They act decisively, often brilliantly, yet their actions trail consequences they neither foresee nor survive. The reader is never allowed the luxury of moral altitude. We watch these men – because they are almost always men – construct identities through action, only to discover that action corrodes the very self it was meant to affirm. Identity, here, is not essence but residue: what remains after decisions have stripped away alternatives. One becomes oneself by exclusion, and the exclusions accumulate like ghosts.
This is why the Lives feel less like biographies than like moral laboratories. Each figure is placed in a controlled environment of circumstance and temperament, then allowed to run to destruction. What emerges is not instruction but a diagnosis: the human animal is constitutionally incapable of sustaining the ideals it invents. Greatness is not an elevation but a stress fracture.
It is no accident, then, that this book becomes the secret scripture of the creature in Frankenstein. The monster encounters these lives as blueprints for selfhood, templates for what a being might become if admitted into the human story. And yet, even as he reads, exclusion thickens around him. The heroes of Plutarch belong to a world structured by recognition – by cities, fathers, laws, enemies. The creature belongs to none of these. He is formed without a polis, without ancestry, without even a stable name. He reads greatness from the outside, like a starving man studying menus.
What he learns, fatally, is not virtue but scale. Plutarch teaches him that to be human is to act on the world with transformative force, to bend history through will. But he also teaches him – though this lesson arrives later, and with cruelty – that such force presupposes belonging. One must already be recognized in order to be tragic. The monster understands the promise but not the precondition. His resentment is born precisely here, in the gap between aspiration and admission. He desires greatness not out of vanity, but out of metaphysical hunger: the need to be counted.
Shelley’s genius lies in recognizing that Plutarch’s moral universe, transposed into a modern key, becomes monstrous. The classical world could still imagine greatness as compatible with destruction, so long as it unfolded within a shared symbolic order. The modern world cannot. Its ambitions are private, unmoored, pursued in isolation. Victor Frankenstein does not conquer cities or reform constitutions. He locks himself in a room and violates the boundary between life and matter. His ambition is Plutarchan in scale but modern in method: solitary, secretive, ashamed. Where Alexander needs an army, Victor needs only a table, a lamp, and the willingness to stop looking away.
Like so many of Plutarch’s figures, Victor is undone not by failure but by success. He achieves what he sets out to do, and the achievement annihilates him. The moment of creation is also the moment of abdication. He flees from his own act, recoiling from the responsibility it entails. This is the modern twist Shelley introduces into the ancient moral drama: ambition no longer merely risks corruption; it produces abandonment. The crime is not overreaching but withdrawal. Victor’s sin is not that he creates life, but that he refuses relation.
Here, Shelley radicalizes Plutarch. In the Lives, the damage of ambition radiates outward – to cities, armies, republics. In Frankenstein, it turns inward, collapsing the distinction between creator and creation. The monster becomes the negative image of Victor’s will: all that he has summoned but refuses to integrate. Like the betrayed companions of Plutarch’s generals, the monster is what ambition leaves behind when it outruns loyalty. He is the remainder ambition cannot metabolize.
Reading Plutarch, the creature learns not only what men have done, but what they are permitted to do. He learns that violence can be meaningful, that domination can be ennobled, that suffering can be redeemed by scale. And yet, as he moves through the world, he discovers that none of these permissions apply to him. His body disqualifies him in advance. He is condemned to consciousness without legitimacy. This is not merely injustice; it is ontological cruelty. He understands the grammar of greatness but is barred from speaking it.
Plutarch’s heroes suffer from excess of recognition. They are seen too much, trusted too far, elevated beyond sustainability. The monster suffers from its absolute absence. And yet both trajectories converge. Excess and deprivation alike corrode the self. Alcibiades, brilliant and unmoored, betrays Athens because he can belong nowhere fully. The monster, excluded absolutely, turns against humanity for the same reason. Betrayal, in both cases, is not moral perversity but the logical endpoint of alienation.
This is why Plutarch refuses moral closure. His figures are not lessons but symptoms. They reveal that identity is always negotiated under pressure, that the self emerges not as coherence but as compromise. Brutus kills Caesar not because he is evil, but because he is divided beyond endurance. Friendship and principle tear him apart, and action becomes the only way to silence the contradiction. The knife resolves what thought cannot. But resolution is also erasure. After the act, Brutus becomes nothing but the act. He is fixed, simplified, destroyed.
Shelley understands this logic intimately. Victor’s life contracts around a single deed, just as the lives of Plutarch’s heroes contract around decisive moments. Action clarifies identity by annihilating possibility. One becomes what one has done, and nothing else. This is the true horror both Plutarch and Shelley disclose: not death, but reduction. To act absolutely is to become less.
The monster’s education is therefore tragic in the strictest sense. He learns too much, too well. He understands the grandeur of human striving and the inevitability of its failure. He internalizes both, without access to the mitigating illusions – honor, legacy, remembrance – that soften the blow for Plutarch’s heroes. His violence is not the eruption of instinct but the conclusion of reflection. He kills because he has learned what history teaches: that recognition is wrested, not granted.
Plutarch pairs lives to show that identity is relational, that no action stands alone. Shelley does something crueler. She places the monster in relation to history itself, only to deny him reciprocity. He can read the past, but the past will not read him back. He can imagine himself into greatness, but greatness has no space for him. This asymmetry generates not merely despair, but rage – the cold, lucid rage of one who understands the rules and knows they will never apply.
The ethical danger Plutarch exposes – the seduction of heroism – becomes, in Shelley, an existential catastrophe. To admire greatness is to court self-annihilation. To aspire without belonging is to become monstrous. Creation, conquest, mastery: these are not neutral acts but accelerants, intensifying whatever fractures already exist within the self.
Plutarch’s restraint – his refusal to preach, his willingness to let contradiction stand – becomes, across centuries, a kind of ethical provocation. He trusts the reader to endure ambiguity. Shelley takes that ambiguity and pushes it into horror. She asks what happens when a being absorbs the ideals of history without the social structures that make them survivable. The answer is not villainy, but tragedy without redemption.
In both Plutarch and Shelley, hope is the most dangerous affect. It drives men to act, to build, to transcend. And yet it is hope that blinds them to consequence, that persuades them that this time will be different, that the pattern can be escaped. The pattern never is. History does not repeat; it metabolizes. Each new act adds weight to the accumulation of ruin.
To read Plutarch alongside Frankenstein is therefore to encounter a continuous meditation on the violence of ideals. Not the violence done in their name, but the violence they do to those who hold them too closely. The human soul, both works suggest, is not built to sustain transcendence. It fractures under the strain.
And yet we continue to read. We continue to admire. We continue to aspire. Perhaps because, even in failure, there is a terrible beauty in the attempt. Plutarch does not deny this beauty. Shelley does not extinguish it. But neither allows it to console.
What remains, after the heroes have fallen and the monster has spoken, is a bleak lucidity: that to be human is to act without guarantees, to desire beyond one’s capacity to bear the cost, and to construct meaning from materials that will not hold.
Greatness, seen clearly, is not an escape from mortality.
It is one of its most elaborate expressions.
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