Pseudo-Plutarch

Pseudo-Plutarch
Name	Pseudo-Plutarch
Birth date	circa 1st–4th century CE (varied)
Death date	unknown
Occupation	Ancient author (attributed)
Notable works	Moralia (spurious works), On Rivers (ascribed)
Era	Classical antiquity, Late Antiquity
Language	Ancient Greek, Latin translations

Pseudo-Plutarch Pseudo-Plutarch is the conventional name given to an anonymous author or authors responsible for works wrongly attributed to Plutarch of Chaeronea in antiquity and the medieval period. The corpus traditionally assigned to these hands includes essays and treatises on biography, ethics, natural history, and topography that circulated alongside authentic texts, influencing Byzantine, Arab and Western medieval readers. Scholarly assessment situates the Pseudo-Plutarch corpus within the textual networks of Alexandria, Rome, Constantinople, and the manuscript culture of Mount Athos and Monte Cassino.

Attribution and Identity

The label Pseudo-Plutarch serves as an editorial expedient used in editions of the Moralia and catalogues of classical literature to distinguish spurious works from those verified by textual critics such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Richard Bentley, and Jean-Pierre Maier. Attributional questions intersect with the careers of authors like Plutarch of Chaeronea, Sextus Empiricus, Dio Chrysostom, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and scribal practices in libraries such as the Library of Alexandria. Philological methods pioneered by Johann Jakob Reiske, Richard Porson, and Richard Bentley inform judgments about style, vocabulary, and intertextual echoes with authors including Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristotle, and Galen.

Works and Corpus

The spurious corpus includes texts variously titled in medieval catalogues: treatises on rivers and mountains, collections of maxims and biographies, and compilations of miracles and wonders attributed to Plutarch. Notable items commonly listed are On Rivers, On the Virtues of Women, and Lives of the Ten Orators, alongside miscellanies citing Homeric Hymns, Pindar, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander. Latin translators and editors such as Apuleius, Boethius, Cassiodorus, Gerard of Cremona, and Isidore of Seville helped disseminate these works in medieval and Renaissance contexts, where humanists like Poggio Bracciolini, Erasmus, Lorenzo Valla, and Petrarch encountered them in monastic libraries.

Manuscript Tradition and Transmission

Manuscripts preserving spurious Plutarchian texts are extant in collections from Vatican Library codices to the holdings of Bodleian Library, Bibliothèque nationale de France, British Library, Laurentian Library, and monastic scriptoria at St. Catherine's Monastery and Mount Athos. The transmission history shows contamination between genuine and spurious works, evident in the manuscripts collated by editors such as Henricus Stephanus, Henry Savile, Jacques Amyot, and modern critical editors linked to projects at Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and the Loeb Classical Library. Scribal practices, marginalia, and scholia recall the exegetical traditions of Zenobius, Eustathius of Thessalonica, John Tzetzes, and Photios I of Constantinople.

Dating and Authorship Debates

Dating proposals range from the late Hellenistic period through Late Antiquity and the early Byzantine era, engaging scholars including Theodor Mommsen, Martin West, E. R. Dodds, F. H. Sandbach, and M. M. Mayhoff. Linguistic evidence compares koine features with attestations in texts by Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Aelian, Pseudo-Callisthenes, and Pausanias. Intertextual citations of Christian Church Fathers like Origen, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine of Hippo raise questions about post-Christian interpolations, while references to Justinian I-era institutions or Justinian legal terms are used to argue for later dating.

Influence and Reception

The spurious corpus influenced medieval chronography, encyclopedic compilations, and Renaissance humanism, appearing in the libraries of Charlemagne, Alcuin, Frederick II, Charles V, and scholars around Niccolò Machiavelli and Galileo Galilei. Translations into Latin, Arabic, and later French and English facilitated echoes in works by Averroes, Avicenna, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, Maimonides, Hermann of Reichenau, and Roger Bacon. Reception histories trace impacts on genres associated with Plutarch such as parallel lives, ethical consolation literature, and natural lore used by Paracelsus, Giorgio Vasari, and collectors of curiosities in cabinets of curiosities across Venice, Florence, and Prague.

Modern Scholarship and Editions

Critical editions and commentaries appear in series like the Loeb Classical Library, the Bibliotheca Teubneriana, and national editions sponsored by institutions such as École Française d'Athènes, British Academy, Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and Deutsche Akademie. Contemporary scholarship by figures including Paul Veyne, Bruno Snell, Jacques Derrida (peripheral), Germain Lefèvre, Edward M. Harris, and teams at Harvard University, Princeton University, University of Cambridge, and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne has re-evaluated attribution, produced stemmata, and applied digital philology tools from projects at Perseus Project, Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, and Papyri.info. Ongoing debates engage codicology, palaeography, and computational stylometry, with recent articles in journals like Classical Quarterly, Journal of Hellenic Studies, and Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies refining our understanding of anonymous authorship and textual reception.

Category:Ancient Greek writers