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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN LIFE WRITING
SERIES EDITORS: CLARE BRANT · MAX SAUNDERS
After Ancient
Biography
Modern Types and Classical Archetypes
Robert Fraser
Palgrave Studies in Life Writing
Series Editors
Clare Brant
Department of English
King’s College London
London, UK
Max Saunders
Department of English
King’s College London
London, UK
This series features books that address key concepts and subjects, with an
emphasis on new and emergent approaches. It offers specialist but acces-
sible studies of contemporary and historical topics, with a focus on con-
necting life writing to themes with cross-disciplinary appeal. The series
aims to be the place to go to for current and fresh research for scholars and
students looking for clear and original discussion of specific subjects and
forms; it is also a home for experimental approaches that take creative risks
with potent materials.
The term ‘Life Writing’ is taken broadly so as to reflect the academic,
public and global reach of life writing, and to continue its democratic tra-
dition. The series seeks contributions that address contexts beyond tradi-
tional territories – for instance, in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. It also
aims to publish volumes addressing topics of general interest (such as
food, drink, sport, gardening) with which life writing scholarship can
engage in lively and original ways, as well as to further the political engage-
ment of life writing especially in relation to human rights, migration,
trauma and repression, sadly also persistently topical themes. The series
looks for work that challenges and extends how life writing is understood
and practised, especially in a world of rapidly changing digital media; that
deepens and diversifies knowledge and perspectives on the subject, and
which contributes to the intellectual excitement and the world relevance
of life writing.
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Robert Fraser
After Ancient
Biography
Modern Types and Classical Archetypes
Robert Fraser
Department of English and Creative Writing
Open University
Milton Keynes, UK
Palgrave Studies in Life Writing

ISBN 978-3-030-35168-7 ISBN 978-3-030-35169-4 (eBook)
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Preface
Biography Ancient and Modern: The Shock

of the Old
In the concluding sentence of an incisive essay “on the interpretation of

late antique biography”, published in 2006, the Plato scholar John Dillon
remarks that, in addressing subjects as these, “we are involved in asking
what the real purpose and justification of biography is even now”. His
point is well taken. It is hard to contemplate an individual work of biogra-
phy or the work of an individual biographer, ancient or modern, without
broaching far-reaching questions about form, intention and what we now
call “genre”. The Greeks had no term for biography as such, and when
Plutarch, at the commencement of his thrilling Life of Alexander, wishes
to tell us what he is about, he says simply “I am not writing history but
lives”. His plural noun is bioi, and in deploying it Plutarch is conveying a
strong conviction concerning what he is doing and what he is not doing.
The statement implies a theory of classification, but it also implies a sense
of momentum and direction. Having made it, he gets on with the task
in hand.
Biography may indeed be a genre, but biographers worth their salt do
not proceed generically or not only generically. If, from the point of view
of the scholar, biography is indeed a distinctive form, from the point of
view of the biographer it is decidedly an activity, and the ways of tackling
it are almost infinite.
The readership for which this book is intended consists primarily of life-
writers: that is of practitioners of life-writing such as myself and of students
vii
viii PREFACE
and scholars of life-writing. Bearing this fact in mind, I have not assumed
a mastery on their part of any of the ancient tongues nor indeed any prior
acquaintance with the various authors from antiquity whom I selectively
discuss. This is not a history of biography in the ancient world; it is a book
about craft and the reverberations of craft. More specifically, it is about the
opportunities provided by ancient biography for writers and readers of
later periods, including the modern era. Its central point, in the broadest
of terms, is that ancient biography supplies narrative patterns for later
writers. Those among my readers who are classically versed will have to
forgive me if in its middle chapters I trawl across what may seem to them
familiar ground: it will not always be familiar to many among my intended
audience. That said, it is very clear that the reception of ancient biography
among professional classicists represents one essential strand in the after-
life of these texts, and to it I have therefore devoted one long chapter
(Chap. 2). The upshot of its argument is that, taking the long view, clas-
sicists and modernist have found themselves addressing the common and
fundamental questions implicit in all life-writing, from a vantage point
created by a shared cultural climate. For those who wish to delve further I
have supplied bibliographies and suggestions for further reading at the
end of every chapter, including a list of relevant classical authorities.
In a long and thoughtful essay on the teaching of biography collected
in his book The Long Pursuit, the self-styled “Romantic biographer”
Richard Holmes introduces a suggestive and useful term. “Comparative
biography” is what he calls it, and by it he implies two different processes.
The first is a comparison between sequential biographies of the same per-
son: a phenomenon that in a late chapter he applies to life studies of the
poet John Keats, the subject of quite a few. The second is a comparison
between ways of biographical writing prevalent in different ages (say, the
neo-classical and the Romantic periods).
The present work aims to be a contribution to the second of these exer-
cises. Life-writing is now a capacious and growing subject endowed with
many sub-specialisms and styles of approach, many voices and many ears.
Increasingly there has been a move to see across these divisions and draw
meaningful comparisons, including those between different “schools” or
periods of biography. One advantage of concentrating on life-writing from
times far prior to our own is that it opens the subject up along two com-
plementary trajectories. That is, it opens up ancient biography by demon-
strating just how far its problems, dilemmas and opportunities mirror
those which later biographers have faced, and it opens up modern
PREFACE ix
biography by exposing it to something one can only call “the shock of the
old”. In this book the periods covered are sufficiently far apart as superfi-
cially almost to have lost sight of one another. The first stretches from the
fifth century BCE to the second century CE and covers Graeco-Roman
biography, the Christian gospels and early lives of the saints; the second
covers the late eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth (and to a lesser extent
twenty-first) centuries. The range is deliberate, since I am endeavouring to
think outside the box.
Throughout I have adopted the dual perspectives of an academic critic
and an active author of lives: someone who wishes to conduct an argu-
ment, but also someone who wishes to tell a story. With an eye to a dra-
matic opening, the biographer in me has chosen for his narrative curtain
raiser a gory assassination in Paris in 1791 so as to demonstrate how one
particular passage in a classical author was able to incite political murder
fifteen centuries after it was written. Then I lead through a documented
discussion of issues raised by ancient life-writing for students of the classics
to a sequence of chapters in which I introduce non-classicist readers to
Plutarch, Suetonius, Procopius, the Christian evangelists and early writers
of saints’ lives. The purpose of these chapters is to inform the non-classicists
among my readers who these writers were, when and where they lived,
what they wrote, to what extent they can be thought of as biographers and
what is the critical consensus concerning them. Having provided this nec-
essary and varied background (which I need to do in some detail, for my
reader’s sake), I then turn to the impact of ancient life-writing on nine-
teenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century biography and, in the conclu-
sion, on modern fiction and film. This structure is not entirely conventional,
but it is deliberate.
The historical scope involved in this exercise is a mite ambitious but it
is necessary and, I hope, salutary. During the modern period (i.e., at least
since the end of the First World War and the elegant coup de foudre of
Lytton Strachey) we have somehow got used to a misleading and fore-
shortened view of the history of biography. A revealing expression of it
may be found in Virginia Woolf’s essay “The Art of Biography” from her
posthumously published collection The Death of A Moth (1942).
“Biography”, Woolf claimed, “compared with the arts of poetry and fic-
tion, is a young art. Interest in ourselves and in other people’s lives is a late
development of the human mind. Not until the eighteenth century in
England did that curiosity express itself in writing the lives of private
x PREFACE
people. Only in the nineteenth century was biography full grown and
hugely prolific.”
Wonderful author and critic though Woolf was, her very incisiveness
could at times mislead her. Woolf’s generation—which was also the gen-
eration of Strachey—was convinced that it had discovered biography anew,
an illusion similar to the one which causes generation after generation to
believe that it has discovered sex. Her essay was left unrevised at her death;
had she lived she might have toned down her generalisations about one of
the oldest of literary arts. Curiosity about the twists and turns of individual
nature is older than the Parthenon. It is the contention of the present
book, moreover, that the history of biographical writing has been
extended, continuous and self-referential. There exists a long-standing
biographical tradition, though it is not customary to call it by that name.
Biographers have for centuries learned from each other, echoed or else
reacted against one another: exercised and received what in the consider-
ation of other literary genres is commonly known as “influence”.
Whichever way they approach their task, all biographers possess a com-
mon starting line. There exists a shared biographical question, or perhaps
set of questions. How exactly does one relate the story of a given life—
especially another’s life—with justice, candour, freshness and flair? In what
order should a life be told? On whose evidence should one draw? Is “oral”
evidence as reliable as written? For whom is one undertaking this task, and
to what end? Should recorded lives serve as examples, either encouraging
or cautionary, to others? To what extent, to render the life described more
vivid or meaningful in the telling, is one entitled to tinker with the facts?
What are facts in any case? What is truth, and what is falsehood? Should
biography reflect all shades of society and opinion, all classes, professions,
both (or now all) genders, all religious or political creeds, all types of
behaviour? Should one aim to instruct, to amuse or to provoke? These are
dilemmas that faced Plutarch and Suetonius in their time as surely as they
faced Woolf in hers, and Holmes in his. The challenges involved in biog-
raphy are perennial, and the answers, if not fixed and finite, are at least
recognisably recurrent. If biography from diverse periods can profitably be
compared, it is at least partly because its practitioners are all doing the
same kind of thing, and facing the same array of problems.
Though there are common challenges, there are and have been various
solutions. In my survey of the ancient field I go so far as to suggest a four-
fold paradigm: biography as representation (in Chap. 3); biography as
censure (in Chap. 4); biography as persuasion (in Chap. 5) and biography
PREFACE xi
as inner drama (in Chap. 6). I have chosen these four archetypes not only
because they seem to me to exhaust the schools of ancient biography
addressed but because they recur in later biography, sometimes in combi-
nation. Nowadays we seemingly live in an age of censure: as my account of
nineteenth-century biography in Chap. 7 shows, it has not always
been thus.
The discussion of these problems has, it appears to me, very often been
held back by unavailing short cuts. Questions of definition, of course, are
inevitable. A recurrent bugbear, however, has been that those who con-
cern themselves with these issues have too often started out with a ready-
made rule of thumb, sometimes culled from a dictionary, which they have
then attempted to apply lock stock and barrel to the particular biography
or group of biographies in which they are interested. What they seem to
be looking for is a set of rules which they can then apply to the text or texts
in hand to see whether or not they comply. Yet, as Hermione Lee has
emphatically demonstrated, while a number of rules are customarily
adduced, the principal and overriding rule is that, in very many of the
most interesting biographies—ancient or modern—all or most of these are
broken. A far more constructive approach is to adjust the rules to the
plenitude of examples available and to expand our definitions to suit them.
Better to take a close look at the way in which classical or modern biogra-
phies, whether of men or women, soldiers, monarchs, saints or sinners,
crooks and/or politicians, or of Jesus Christ, recount these lives, and to
adjust our notions of biography accordingly.
Age answers to age. Throughout ancient biography moments occur
that take us aback with the appearance of what we might call modernity.
One such occurs towards the end of an eight-volume life of Apollonius of
Tyana, a neo-Pythagorean sage of the first century AD, written in the fol-
lowing century by Lucius Flavius Philostratus, one of the most versatile
authors of the Hellenistic world. Apollonius is revisiting Rome several
years after an earlier episode in which he niftily escaped the clutches of the
emperor Nero. This time his opponent is the new emperor Domitian, an
unscrupulous bully with a reputation for persecuting Christians amongst
others. Domitian wants Apollonius out of the way, so arraigns him before
the court on a trumped-up charge of wizardry. On the morning of the
trial, Philostratus invites us to eavesdrop on the tetchy Emperor as he
rustles through his papers in preparation for what he hopes will be a defini-
tive and damning case:
xii PREFACE
Let us now repair to the law court to listen to the sage pleading his cause,
for it is already sunrise and the door is open to receive the celebrities. And
the companions of the Emperor say that they have taken no food that day
because, I imagine, he was so absorbed in examining the documents of the
case. For they say that he was holding in his hand a roll of writing of some
sort, sometimes reading it with anger, and sometimes more calmly. And we
must needs figure him as one who was angry with the law for having invented
such as thing as courts of justice.
Here is a sort of verisimilitude, a graphic fly-on-the-wall vividness we

might associate with the cinema or with courtroom dramas on television
or Netflix (“Cut to the courtroom; subdued hum of voices; judge evi-
dently agitated and distressed”). The apparent familiarity of the scene of
course tells us more about ourselves—our hunger for life in the raw, our
resentment of authority, our appetite for legal conflict—than it does about
Philostratus. Nonetheless, the seeming recognition of a flicker from every-
day life demonstrates one of the many ways in which the biographical
writings of the ancients appeal to us. Our response is part of the story.
The passage quoted here is quite unlike anything else in the Life of
Apollonius of Tyana. The use of the present tense, the invitation to the
reader to pry into a semi-enclosed world of official procedure and then the
turbulent mind of one of the chief actors mark it out as a departure from
the chronological and dialectic modes in which the remainder of the nar-
rative is couched. Philostratus is trying out a new trick.
Biography involves a lot of preparatory sweat and toil, straining after
elusive facts, but the end result is always an art form. Being art, it is experi-
mental. All biographers, whether ancient or modern, take risks, involve
themselves in acts of daring, but so do we when reading them. Biography
is not a closed form nor does it succumb easily to definitions. This open-
ness is something we associate with our more adventurous contempo-
raries, but it is equally a feature of antiquity. This is another reason why it
is profitable to consider ancient and modern biography side by side.
Charlbury, UK Robert Fraser

Good Friday, 2020
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to a number of former teachers whose interests lay

across ancient and modern literature and who encouraged me early on to
think about connections between the two. Prominent among these were
Anthony Nuttall, a scholar equally at home with the Graeco-Roman clas-
sics, Shakespeare and twentieth-century writing, and David Daiches who
wrote about the modern novel amongst many other things but who long
ago had done his doctoral work at Balliol on the Bible, bringing to its
study a rich knowledge of Hebrew, Latin and Greek. “A clerk ther was of
Oxenford also”: Stephen Medcalf who features in my memory as the clos-
est the mid-twentieth century could supply to a medieval friar. A few for-
mer colleagues from Cambridge and elsewhere gave me the benefit of
their wisdom and learning. I have in mind Professor Adrian Poole who has
published on connections between Greek and Shakespearean tragedy and
the late Jeremy Maule, whose curious knowledge spanned the seventeenth
century and Medieval Latin. More recently Dr Jeremy Paterson, archae-
ologist and ancient historian, and Georgios Terezakis, cicerone and church
cantor, served as guides to Plutarch’s stomping grounds of Chaeronea and
Delphi. My appreciation of biography as a calling and form was greatly
enhanced by conversations with Jenny Uglow, Robert Crawford, Michael
Holroyd and Zachary Leader. I should like to thank Palgrave Macmillan’s
anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions, Clare Brand and Max
Saunders, editors of the Life-Writing Series, for their understanding and
imagination and the firm’s in-house editors, especially Lina Aboujieb and
Rebecca Hinsley, for their patience and forbearance. I hereby salute my
son Benjo Fraser and Ms Maria and Ms Sophia Thanasi for showing me
xiii
xiv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
what the Greek classics may mean to a younger generation, and to the
Thanasi family in general for their hospitality in Albania and Athens.
The staff of the London Library, the British Library and the Bodleian
Library were unfailingly courteous and helpful. The finishing touches
were put to this book during the coronavirus emergency of 2020, when all
of these facilities had to close their doors. Under these trying circum-
stances I was much obliged to the London Library for posting volumes
out to me. I also learned to appreciate the excellent services of AbeBooks,
the resources of which appeared to be inexhaustible. I owe an immense
debt, both emotional and stylistic, to the book’s dedicatee, biographer as
it happens of Pausanias’s most fetching twentieth-century translator. All of
these people and institutions have helped me along the way. Any faults
that remain are my responsibility alone.
Contents
1 Paris in Parallel: Classical Biography in an Age

of Revolution 1
2 Ancient Biographers and Modern Classicists:

“What Is Truth?” 37
3 Biography as Representation: Plutarch’s Parallel Lives 73
4 Biography as Censure: Suetonius and Procopius 99
5 Biography as Persuasion: The Christian Gospels129
6 Biography as Inner Drama: Athanasius’s Life of Antony163
7 Heroic Biography: Carlyle & Co189
8 Caustic Biography: Strachey & Co.221
9 Conclusion: “Beauty Is Terror”255
Index265
xv
CHAPTER 1
Paris in Parallel: Classical Biography

in an Age of Revolution
Who does not know David’s painting of Marat in the bath? Done from the
life—or rather from the death—it depicts the prolific author, one-time
physician (MD, St Andrews) and now revolutionary journalist and self-
styled “friend of the people” just a few hours after his assassination by the
twenty-four-year-old Charlotte Corday in July 1793. Marat is lying on his
side, a towel around his head, a quill in his dangling right hand. (Marat’s
works included a Treatise on Light, An Essay on Slavery, and a helpful
work on the treatment of gonorrhoea.) Before him is an improvised desk,
a cloth-covered board on which he wrote while steeping himself in a
medicinal salve of his own concoction. As a qualified and somewhat opin-
ionated doctor he had decided that the skin complaint contracted in the
sewers of Paris while hiding from his political opponents necessitated these
ablutions for much of the day. In his left hand he holds a letter of intro-
duction that Corday had brought under the pretext of exposing the ene-
mies of the government. His face is so serene that he might be sleeping.
There is more than a touch of the Christ from Michelangelo’s Pietà about
him. His skin is smooth and white: no sign of the ravages of skin disease
there. The light source is high up to his left and, again, it seems a sort of
celestial beam. Here is a fit object for veneration as much as for lament: a
martyr to the French Revolution then a mere four years old. A revolution-
ary icon, no less.
What are the messages implicit in this image? Since, depend on it,
Jacques-Louis David, an associate of Robespierre and a vocal member of
© The Author(s) 2020 1

R. Fraser, After Ancient Biography, Palgrave Studies in Life Writing,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35169-4_1
2 R. FRASER
the Jacobin Club, intended his work to be didactic, and thus—despite

earlier misgivings about this eccentric intellectual entertained by the
Jacobin leadership—was it immediately received. That Marat died unjustly,
certainly. That he was a thinker, a scholar, a hero probably, a martyr cer-
tainly, maybe even a secular saint. But it is the sculptural, clean-limned,
neo-classical style of the picture that commands attention just as surely as
its subject. Nineteen years earlier, David, then a student at the Académie
royale, had won the academy’s coveted Prix de Rome with a depiction of
a scene from Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius: “Eristratus Discovering the
Causes of Antiochus’ Disease”. (Antiochus was in love with his mother-in-
law, who had already borne him a child.) It had been David’s fourth
attempt, having failed a third time the previous year with an equally lurid
scene from Suetonius’s “Life of the Emperor Nero”: the suicide of the
philosopher Seneca (also featuring a bath, but this time a foot-bath). The
authorities at the Académie, naturally, chose the subject prescribed each
year. Since 1775, when Louis XV1 had appointed Charles-Claude Flahaut
de la Billaderie, Comte d’Angeviller as the new director with the instruc-
tion to found a new school of historical painting, preference had been
given to classical themes.1 In David’s case, this had often involved hunting
for suitable sources in ancient biography. His eventual victory would far
from exhaust his preoccupation the classics. After spending four years in
Rome, he had painted a succession of episodes from Graeco-Roman litera-
ture. “The Oath of the Horatii” of 1784 drew on a scene from Livy; “The
Dedication of the Eagles” copied images that the young David had
observed on Trajan’s Column in the Forum. “The Death of Socrates” in
1787 derived its story from Plato, while in 1789, the year of the outbreak
of the Revolution, “The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons”
had extended a dramatic episode from the life of a founder of the Roman
republic who features both in Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita and in Plutarch’s
“Life of Poplicola”. In 1730 Voltaire had written a play about this particu-
lar Brutus, Lucius Junius Brutus, a remote ancestor of the more famous
Marcus Brutus, the assassin of Julius Caesar. When revived in 1790, it gave
rise to a fanatical wave of Republican enthusiasm and even a hairdo, la
coiffure Brutus, copied from the curly crop sported by the actor who had
played one of the fated sons. When in June 1820 an aspiring young painter
asked the mature David how to choose a subject for a new canvas, the
1
Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knoft,
1989), 171.
1 PARIS IN PARALLEL: CLASSICAL BIOGRAPHY IN AN AGE OF REVOLUTION 3
veteran master replied in three words “Feuillez votre Plutarque”: “Browse

through your Plutarch”.2 Understandably so, since it had been the lives of
those designated, in Bishop Amyot’s sixteenth-century French translation
of Plutarch, “hommes illustres Grecs et Romains” which had provided the
most dependable source for his paintings.3 Which brings us back again to
Marat and his young murderess Charlotte Corday.
Marie-Anne Charlotte Corday d’Armont had been born in 1768 in the
village of Saint-Saturnin-des-Limoges in the commune of Écorches near
Caen in Normandy. Her people were decayed gentry, royalist in sympathy,
who had seen better days. The playwright Pierre Corneille (1606–1684),
as she was only too aware, was a remote ancestor. He had drawn several of
his plots from classical sources, frequently highlighting the dynamic role
of his women characters. His first tragedy to be staged, Medéé (1635), had
taken its story from Euripides, and it had stressed Medea’s plight and
decisiveness. The storyline of La Mort de Pompeé (1642) showcased the
would-be assassin Cornelia: it was derived from Plutarch, who had depicted
her as a geometer, philosopher and expert player on the lyre. The plot of
Oedipe, the Sun King’s favourite among his works, came from Sophocles.
One of his last plays Tite et Bérénice (1670) drew on the Lives of the Twelve
Caesars by Suetonius and vividly evoked the desolation of Berenice, the
Jewish queen, who was banished from Rome by the Emperor to placate
the xenophobia of the populace.4
So Corday had grown up beneath an ample shade of literature, much of
it ancient and biographical, which she was disposed to read in a proto-
feminist light. She had extended this debt to the classics in early adoles-
cence. After her mother and elder sister died, her grief-stricken father had
sent her to the convent of L’Abbaye des Dames in Caen, in the library of
which she discovered works by Voltaire, Rousseau and Plutarch. Rousseau,
as she would have read in his Confessions, had enjoyed an enthusiasm for
Plutarch’s Lives as a young man.5 Since there is no evidence that she had
been taught Greek, Corday must have read them in the sixteenth-century
translation by Bishop Jacques Amyot, rendered from a manuscript in the
Vatican. It was an internationally famous version on which even the
2
Anita Brookner, Jacques-Louis David (London: Chatto and Windus, 1980), 182
and passim.
3
See footnote 19 below.
4
Pierre Corneille, Théâtre Complet texte prefacé et annoté par Pierre Lièvre; edition com-
plétée par Roger Caillois (Paris: Gallimard, 1957).
5
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions (Paris: Flammarion, 1958), i, 47.
4 R. FRASER
Englishman Sir Thomas North had relied for his translation of 1579–1603.
(North knew no more Greek than did Shakespeare who, consequently,
had taken all of his Plutarch-derived plots from him.)
Corday had been twenty-one, and still at L’Abbaye des Dames, when
the Revolution erupted. Two years afterwards, she left the Convent and
lodged with her aunt and cousin in the centre of the town, where she
imbibed a local, and distinctively provincial, view of national politics. She
had never been to Paris, where the revolution was fast adopting a more
extreme course.6 The local newspaper covered the whirlpooling events:
the Tennis Court Oath, the calling of the Estates-General, the splitting of
the Third Estate into factions. Notably among the cliques was La
Montagne (The Mountain, thus named since they sat at a high bench)
including the vocal Jacobin Club which championed the cause of the
urban proletariat and insisted on the guillotining of the King. Against
them were ranged the Girondins, provincial based, who counselled less
desperate measures. Charlotte was strongly influenced by the Girondins,
who were very active in Caen. Her aunt’s house where she now lodged
overlooked l’intendance, their headquarters in town, and she had met
some of their ring-leaders, notably Charles Jean-Marie Barbaroux. She was
just twenty-two when news arrived of the execution of the King and
Queen in the newly renamed Place de la Révolution, previously la Place
Louis XV, now and ironically La Place de la Concorde. Though Charlotte
had grown up in a royalist family, she now regarded herself as firmly repub-
lican. The Girondins offered a middle way, epitomised for her by the wife
of one of their leaders, Madame de Roland, born Manon Philipion7 whose
political education, like Corday’s, had owed much to Plutarch. At the age
of nine she had carried a copy of his works to Mass each Sunday, and later
wrote “It was at that moment that I date the impression of ideas that were
to make me a republican”.8 Both women were very conscious that the bal-
ance of power in the Convention in Paris was shifting in favour of Les
Montagnards. Robespierre was their ring-leader, Marat their mouthpiece:
his newspaper L’Ami du Peuple was easily to be acquired in the streets
of Caen.
6
Michel Corday, Charlotte Corday tr. E. F. Buckley (London: Thornton Butterworth,
1931), 103.
7
Chantal Thomas, “Les exemples de Charlotte Corday et de Madame Roland”, Po&Sie 49
(Bicentenaire de, 1789), 1989, 82–91.
8
Madame Roland, Lettres ed. Claude Perroud (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1802), 512.
The climax to the story is related by Jean Epois in his L’Affaire Corday/
Marat: Prélude à la Terreur.9 In the second week of July 1793 Corday told
her widowed father that she was going to pay a visit to England. Instead,
on Tuesday 9th, her cousin saw her off on the Paris diligence. As she
entered the carriage she held a copy—presumably an octavo, one-volume
edition—of the Amyot Plutarch to allay the tedium of the two-day jour-
ney. At five o’ clock on the afternoon of the 11th she alighted in the capi-
tal. Then she and her Plutarch checked in at the Hôtel de Providence in
the Rue des Augustins, where she slept for fifteen solid hours. On Friday
morning she composed an Address to the French People, arguing that she
was acting in the interests of Res Publica, the Public Thing, la République.
She spent the rest of the day, in the words of Jules Michelet, “quietly read-
ing that Bible to personal fortitude, Plutarch’s Lives”.10 The following
morning she purchased a 5 inch kitchen knife from a shop near the Palais
Royal. She had intended to confront the Friend of the People at the
National Assembly. Instead, learning that his skin complaint nowadays
confined him to his home in the Cordeliers neighbourhood, she presented
herself at his house, only to be turned away by Marat’s sister-in-law,
Cathérine. That evening, having sent another note pleading her pure,
revolutionary intentions, she turned up again at the flat, whereupon Marat
called out that she should be admitted. She handed over to him a list of
Girondin contacts in Caen. Marat promised her that these people would
promptly be guillotined. Then she drew the knife from her dress and
struck him through the chest.
She knew what her punishment would be. The following day she wrote
to Barbaroux from the Abbaye prison, stating “Those who disapprove of
my actions will be pleased to see me at rest in the Elysian Fields with
Brutus and some few of the ancients”.11 Did she mean Brutus the founder
of the Roman republic or his notorious descendant, the assassin? Both
were Republic icons. In front of the tribunal she defended her actions, re-
iterating her apologia from her Address, arguing that she had acted in the
9
Jean Epois, L’Affaire Corday-Marat: Prelude à la Terreur (Paris: FeniXX réédition
numérique, 1980), passim.
10
Jules Michelet, Les Femmes de la Révolution (Paris: Editions Adolphe Delahays, 1854),
Chap. 8.
11
Letter headed “Charlotte Corday à Barbaroux. Aux prisons de l’Abbaye dans la ci-devant
chambre de Brissot, le second jour de la préparation de la paix, quoted in Couet-Gironville,
Charlotte Corday. Décapitée A Paris, Le 17 Juillet 1793 ou Mémoire Pour Servir à l’Histoire de
la Vie de Cette Femme Célèbre (Paris: chez le Citoyen Gilbert, 1796), 140.
6 R. FRASER
interests of the Republic, which she hoped to save from the extremes of
bitter men. She was Marcus Brutus, risen against an impish, pock-
marked Caesar.
Corday was guillotined on July 17 and ever since has divided opinion.
When the tide turned against the Enlightenment during the nineteenth
century, the poet Lamartine dubbed her “l’ange de l’assassinat”, the angel
of assassination. She became a sort of counter-revolutionary Jeanne d’Arc.
In the post-modern twentieth century, her intervention was surrealistically
and gruesomely staged in Peter Weiss’s morbid Marat/Sade play in which
Danton’s murder was re-enacted by the inmates of a lunatic asylum under
the direction of The Marquis de Sade. Filmed under the direction of Peter
Brook, it was the perfect illustration of the principles of Theatre of Cruelty
as further explained in Brook’s book The Empty Space. The result however
told one more about the disturbed mind of central Europe in the post-war
period than about the French Revolution, the versatile and afflicted Marat,
the determined and clear-sighted Corday, or indeed the libertine and mas-
turbatory Marquis. The prevailing impression conveyed by Charlotte
Corday’s behaviour at the time remains one of resignation and calm delib-
eration. She was very conscious of what she was doing and fully prepared
to face the consequences. In the hours before the tumbril arrived to take
her to her place of execution, she caused her portrait to be painted, demure
and serious beneath her lace cap. Hers was an existential choice made with
neo-classical determination and grace (at least, as she perceived these qual-
ities). Her experience had prepared her for this sacrifice. But so, it should
be emphasised, had her reading of ancient lives.
The Last of the Romans

Revolutionary assassination was one public parallel to be derived from
reading of classical biography; a second was a political model of democracy
copied from the Romans, a third was paganism, a fourth was revolutionary
suicide. A fifth, eventually, was to be their seeming opposite:
counter-revolution.
Paganism was a side-effect of the de-Christianisation, and more specifi-
cally de-catholicisation, which the Revolution required in order to purge
itself of the remnants of royal and ecclesiastical control. Its prime progeni-
tor and hit-man was Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, the twenty-eight-year-old
President of the Commune and a leading opponent of the Girondins, who
had changed his apostolic first name to Anaxagoras after the pre-Socratic
philosopher whose views are set out in Plutarch’s Life of Pericles. Richard
Cobb has outlined the effects of the consequent secularisation, which
invariably took the form of a substitution of classical, mostly Roman, ste-
reotypes for traditional Catholic forms:
In May 1793 the Commune stopped the payment of clerical salaries and
publicly tried to prevent the public exercise of Catholicism. It closed the
churches in Paris and forced over 400 priests to abdicate. Chaumette
demanded that the former metropolitan church of Notre-Dame be re-
consecrated to the cult of Reason. The Convention hastened to comply and
on 10 November a civic festival was held in the temple, its façade bearing the
words “To Philosophy”.12
One result of this alienation from—and obliteration of—every vestige of

l’ancien régime was the institution late in 1793 of the Republican Calendar.
It was devised by a committee of three headed by the mathematician
Charles-Gilbert Romme, who presented their findings to the Committee
of Public Instruction that September. With the help of the head gardener
from the Jardin des Plantes, the months were renamed along botanical
and meteorological lines, and each month was divided into three weeks of
ten days each. The traditional saints’ days gave way before commemora-
tions of great men of the past. December 25 became a feast for Newton.
This was the high tide of Jacobinism. By late 1794 the Jacobins were in
retreat. Marat’s body was disinterred from the Panthéon—where it had
replaced Mirabeau’s—dragged through the streets and chucked into a
common grave. On 29 Priarial of the sixth year of the Revolution (June
17, 1795, according to the old calendar), Romme and two comrade
Jacobins, Pierre-Amable Soubrany and Jean-Marie Goujon, were arraigned
on the orders of the Diréctoire. Condemned to the guillotine by a revolu-
tionary tribunal, the “last of the Montagnards” as they became known
elected instead to take their own lives on their way out of the courtroom.
With Victorian distaste, Thomas Carlyle later described the scene in The
French Revolution: A History: “Hearing the sentence, Goujon drew a
knife, struck it into his breast, passed it to his neighbour Romme; and fell
dead. Romme did the like; and another all-but did it: Roman dead rushing
on there, as in an electric chain, before your Bailiffs could intervene! The
12
Richard Cobb et al. The French Revolution: Voices from a momentous epoch 1789–1795
(London: Guild Publishing, 1988), 202.
8 R. FRASER
Guillotine had the rest.” “They”, concludes Carlyle, “were Ultimi

Romanorum”, the last of the Romans.13
Suicide had long been a talking point for the Enlightenment. There
were plenty of exempla in classical life-writing, especially in Plutarch’s
Lives. Marcus Brutus and Marcus Antonius, sworn enemies to one another,
had both fallen on their swords. The Church had anathemised the practice
so, partly for this reason, it had become fashionable action for intellectual
freethinkers to defend it. In 1777, in Edinburgh, that “Athens of the
North”, David Hume wrote an essay “Of Suicide” that remains in manu-
script since its publication was suppressed.14 His argument is simple, and
apparently derived from Christian, or more strictly Deistic, principles. All
occurrences are governed by divine law; suicide is an occurrence, and
therefore it too is divinely ordained. The cosmos is Lucretian and indiffer-
ent; it does not care. It follows that “the life of man is of no greater impor-
tance to the universe that that of an oyster”. It appears to have been a
matter of no account to Hume that the same argument might be used to
exonerate murder.
The philosopher Montesquieu, a few decades previously, had long
wrestled with this dilemma. In his Lettres persanes (1721) he had imagined
a flow of correspondence from two oriental visitors to the Paris of Louis
XV1. Writing to associates back in Isphahan, they report on the oddities
of western Christian society, among which is an entrenched prejudice
against self-destruction. In Letter 76, Usbek, who is writing to his friend
Ibben, inveighs against this prejudice, represented by him as a tyrannical
imposition on free will: “It appears to me today … that these statutes are
quite unfair. When weighed down with pain, misery or misunderstanding,
why do they stop me putting an end to my misfortunes and cruelly rob me
of a remedy that lies in my own hands.”15 As if to illustrate the point, the
work ends with the mass suicide, back in Isphahan, of most of the harem.
In his Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur
décadence (1734) Montesquieu considers the frequency of suicide in
ancient Rome, drawing extensively on Plutarch, specifically the deaths of
13
Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History [1837] (Oxford University Press,
1907), ii, 440. In Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, V. iii, the “last of the Romans” are Cassius and
Licinius, and the words in English are spoken by Marcus Brutus. In the singular, the Latin
phrase had been applied by Julius Caesar to Brutus himself.
14
David Hume, “Of Suicide”, National Library of Scotland Ms. 509.
15
Montesquieu, Oeuvres de Montesquieu avec Les Remarques des Divers Commentateurs et
Les Notes Inédites. Seul Edition Complète (Paris: D’Antoine Bavaux, 1825), 517.
Brutus and Cato. “Several causes may be adduced for so general a custom
among the Romans as this of administering one’s own death”, he remarks,
“the progress of Stoicism which encouraged it; the institution of triumphs
and slavery, which made a number of great men reluctant to survive a
defeat; the advantage gained by those accused through disposing of their
own lives rather than submitting to an indictment that would sully their
reputation and cause their property to be seized; a subtle point of honour,
arguably more reasonable than that which prompts us to eviscerate a friend
for a mere gesture or word; lastly a grand pretext enabling each person to
complete the role he had played on the world’s stage, each man putting an
end to the part he played when and just as he chose”.16 In De l’esprit des
lois (1750), he remarks cryptically that, in contrast to the English, who
often seemed to top themselves irrationally, the Romans invariably pos-
sessed clear-sighted reasons why they thought it appropriate to take their
own lives.17
Suicide then was a socially conditioned act which changed its complex-
ion from one culture to another and between historical periods.
Montesquieu remains an outstanding early example of a cultural relativist.
By the 1790s, half a century later, when society and its laws were in a state
of dangerous flux, the way lay open for parallels with ancient Rome, on
which so much, aesthetically and politically, was now being modelled.
Brutus and Cato, it could be argued, had destroyed themselves in reaction
against the erosion of the Republic and the growing threat of despotism.
As in Paris the revolution grew more and more extreme, seemingly eating
its own children, eventually giving itself over to the control of a supremely
gifted tyrant, analogies with a Rome confronted with the menace of the
Caesars became increasingly uncomfortable and compelling. Romme’s
last recorded words, before he plunged in the knife, were “I die for the
Republic”.18
16
Montesquieu (1825), 419.
17
Montesquieu (1825), 370.
18
Jules Claretie, Les Derniers Montagnards: Histoire de l’Insurrection de Prairial An III
D’Après les Documents Originaux et Inédits (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1865). See also
Marc de Vissac, Un Conventionnel du Puy-de-Dôme: Romme le Montagnard (Clermond-
Ferrand: Dilhan-Vivès, 1883) and Gilbert Romme (1750–1795) et son temps Jean Ehrard and
Albert Sobeul eds. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966).
10 R. FRASER
Plutarch as a Textbook for Life

Taking one’s personal bearing from the writers of ancient lives was already
an established habit in France. In Biography and the Question of Literature
in France (2007), Ann Jefferson alludes to the “pragmatics” of biography,
the convention in accordance which early modern readers turned to
authors like Plutarch for models as to how to behave. These Greek and
Roman lives were held to be exemplary, fit objects for imitation. In sup-
port of this view Jefferson quotes Jacques Amyot, Bishop of Auxerre
(1513–1593), who had set out his purpose in rendering Plutarch into
French in the Preface to the first edition of his translation, published
between 1554 and 1560.19 Plutarch’s lives are worth perusing for a variety
of readers, Amyot had declared, but principally “because [examples] do
not only declare what it to be done but also worke a desire to do it, as well
in respect of a certain natural inclination which all men have to follow
examples, as also for the beautie of virtue, which is of such power, that
wheresoever she is seene, she maketh herself to be loved and liked”.20 Two
years later, much the same argument was voiced by Cruserius in his Latin
translation of 1561. As Jefferson insists, this repeated claim for the benefi-
cial potential of reading the ancient lives was in conformity with what
Plutarch himself had twice stated to be his objective: once in his life of
Pericles and once in the life of Aemilius. Both of whom, one might add,
are distinguished in his accounts by their almost total lack of personal
blemish.
So persuasive a view is this that it can blind the modern reader to just
how odd, over-determined and in some ways lopsided, a view of the whole
run of Plutarch’s Lives it actually represents. There are fifty lives in all, and
many of them are far from exemplary or blameless. These mini-biographies
are not self-sufficient entities but paired—one Roman against one Greek.
What unites or divides the pairs is just as often the weakness or vices of the
individuals concerned as their strengths. Coriolanus and Alcibiades, for
example, are combined because, misled by public admiration, they each
betrayed their country. Demetrius and Anthony “were insolent in prosper-
ity, and abandoned themselves to luxurious enjoyments”. Phocion and
19
Plutarque de Charonée, Les vies des hommes illustres Grecs et Romains comparéés l’une à
l’autre translatées de Grec en François par Monsieur Jacques Amyot Abbé de Bellozane, Eveque
d”Auxerre etc. (Paris: Michel de Vascosan, 1554–1560.)
20
Anne Jefferson, Biography and The Question of Literature in France (Oxford University
Press), 32.
Cato the Younger were self-willed, stubborn and humourless. Themistocles

and Camillus forfeited the trust of their fellow citizens, and both ended in
exile or disgrace. In other cases, the burden of the comparison lies in the
superiority of one partner over the other. Cato is boastful; Aristides is not.
Cato’s is profligate and ruins his descendants; Aristides is careful and hands
on his wealth. Nicias’s fortune was got by honest means, Crassius’s was
gained through usury. Demosthenes’s oratory was direct and unstudied,
“not smelling of the lamp”, while Cicero’s was deliberate and showy.
Dion’s rebellion against the tyrant Dionysus II was justified, while Brutus’s
disloyalty to Caesar was peevish: “It was not the same thing for the Sicilians
to be freed from Dionysus as for the Romans to be freed from Caesar”.
And so on and so forth.
From the reader’s point of view, the inventory of virtues and vices
involved in these parallels is frequently less striking than the continuity
between them. In practice, as with Alexander the Great and Caesar, the
failings of the individuals concerned often represent the flip-side of their
virtues. It is this consistency within disparity, the psychological laws under-
lying and governing the contradictions of character, that overall seems to
interest Plutarch most.
Once he had been translated from the rare Greek manuscripts, this is
certainly the impression made by Plutarch on his Renaissance readers. Of
no one was this truer than the author who, more than any other, popula-
rised Plutarch among the French. In 1580, a couple of decades after
Amyot’s influential translation, we find the philosophical writer Michel
Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592) lauding its excellences in lavish
terms in his Essay “A demain les affaires”. Montaigne confesses his igno-
rance of Greek, but then praises the late Bishop and translator, not simply
for the purity and directness of his style (qualities which Montaigne is
anxious to emulate) but for opening his eyes to the wisdom to be found in
the Lives which he recommends to his own readers as “nostre bréviaire”:
“Ignorant people like us would have been lost if that book had not brought
us up out of the mire: thanks to it, we now dare to live and write—and the
ladies teach the dominies; it is our breviary”.
Montaigne cites Plutarch no less than five hundred times in the Essais;
if Sarah Bakewell is right indeed, The Moralia may even have suggested
the form the Essais took. He cites him on the ambivalence of weeping,21
21
“Comme nous pleurons et rions d’une même chose”, Essais, Book 1. Ch, xxxviii, citing
Plutarch’s “Life of Timoleon”.
12 R. FRASER
on Latin style22 and on the subjectivity of apprehension.23 He cites him on

the universal obligation of benevolence,24 on the detection of false flat-
tery25 and on overlooking the minor faults of the great.26 He cites him on
the necessity of self-discipline,27 on the benefit of experiencing opposite
extremes28 and on the obligation to honour the dead.29 He is most sensi-
tive to him when his observations are most paradoxical, most open to the
flow and counter-flow of life. Manifestly, Plutarch and Montaigne took to
one another: something polymathic, almost polymorphic, in the Greek
author’s temperament clearly appealed. Montaigne’s Plutarch is an author
less of precepts than of curiosities, odd insights and off-the-wall observa-
tions. In general, he is as interested in Plutarch the psychologist as in
Plutarch the moralist.
Take, for example, a theme of some relevance to Corday, Romme and
the “last of the Montagnards”, and also to the young Napoleon: stoicism.
I mean stoicism in the practical sense of the term—fortitude, or patience
under duress—rather than in its strictly philosophical sense, of which
Plutarch writes more specifically in the Moralia. Though Plutarch does
not always the word as such, he often brings the subject up, especially in
relation to a clutch of lives depicting eminent men of Sparta. In these
cases, Plutarch is writing many centuries after the deaths of those con-
cerned, whom he may in consequence have over-idealised.
It is to Plutarch, more than any other authority, that we owe our idea
of Spartan restraint. In Moralia he treats such fortitude as a virtue, as
when in De Ira he praises the emperor Nero for his self-control when
learning that an expensive octagonal tent he had ordered has been lost at
sea. (Seneca, his tutor, had advised him under such circumstances to
22
“In “Que Philosopher, c’est apprendre a mourir”, Essais, Book 1, Ch xx, citing The Life
of Cicero.
23
In “Que le gout des biens et des maux depend en bonne partie d’opinion que nous
en avons”, Essais, Book 1, ch. xiv” citing The Life of Brutus.
24
In “De la cruauté”, Essais, Book 11. Ch, xxxviii, citing Plutarch’s “Life of Timoleon”.
25
In “Apologie de Raimond Sebond”, Essais, Book ii, ch xii, citing “Quomodo adulator
ab amico. internoscator” (“How to distinguish flattery from friendship”) in Plutarch’s
Moralia.
26
From “De plus excellents hommes”, Essais, Book 11, ch. xxxvi, citing “The Life of
Alexander”.
27
In “De la vanité”, Essais, Bk 111, ch. ix, citing “The Life of Solon”.
28
In “De l’expérience”, Essais, Bk 111 ch. xiii, citing “The Life of Philemon”.
29
In “De l’expérience”, citing “The Life of Pompey” (and quoting Amyot’s translation),
and “The Life of Julius Caesar”.
remain calm.) In the Lives, and especially the Spartan lives, by contrast,
self-control is more often treated as a form of human behaviour objec-
tively observed, irrespective of moral or didactic comment.
Montaigne mentions two examples of such forbearance in his essay
“Défence de Sénèque et de Plutarque”. Here Montaigne is protecting
Plutarch’s reputation against criticisms levelled a few years earlier by the
jurist Jean Bodin in Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem. Bodin
had taken Plutarch to task for his credulity and lack of realism when por-
traying self-control in others. In the “Life of Lycurgus” Plutarch tells of a
Spartan lad who allowed a stolen fox cub he had hidden under his tunic to
eviscerate him rather than owning up to his theft. In the same life he men-
tions another Spartan boy serving as a thurifer at the altar of Diana who
refused to cry out when a cinder from the smouldering incense ran down
his sleeve and burned his whole forearm.
In reprising these anecdotes, it is clear that Montaigne is far more inter-
ested in the reflexes demonstrated by these young stalwarts than in the
morality of the tasks they are engaged in. One is a thief, the other a dili-
gent altar boy. In Montaigne’s eyes (and, I would argue in Plutarch’s too),
what is most interesting is that they are equally obstinate or brave, these
two mental states being akin. Montaigne expands on this point by adduc-
ing experiences within his personal knowledge. Some of these involve
people who have refused to abjure their religious or political convictions
under torture, as on the rack; others are instances of mere petulant cussed-
ness. In Gascony especially it appears, “I have known hundreds of
women … who would rather bite into red-hot iron than abandon an opin-
ion they had conceived in anger”. Bearing in mind the thoughts about the
necessity of controlling one’s rage expressed by his mentor Plutarch in De
Ira, it is doubtful that Montaigne regards the intransigence of these
women folk as being in any way exemplary, since ironically their anger is
the source of their self-control. They are motivated by pique, where those
in his earlier example are supported by faith. For Montaigne, however,
they illustrate the same psychological law: whether from pride, from deter-
mination or from cussedness, people under stress do not like to give up.
This is the multivalent humanist vision of Plutarch inherited by
Shakespeare, who draws on him in all three of his Roman plays and Timon
of Athens. The protagonists of each of these tense dramas are bitterly torn:
Caesar between duty and ambition, Brutus between loyalty and liberty,
Antony between discipline and desire, Cleopatra between Egypt and
Rome, Coriolanus between fealty and arrogance, Timon between
14 R. FRASER
munificence and spleen. Shakespeare conjures up his characters, he does

not judge them. For all their Plutarchian freighting, there is no absolute
right and no wrong in any of these plays.
Despite this, a political reading of these Shakespearean dramas is always
available for use, and critics and directors across the ages have not been
slow to take advantage, including in France. If James Shapiro is right,
Julius Caesar, first produced in 1599, served as a focus for the conflicting
responses to the Earl of Essex’s botched campaign in Ireland—where one
of its commanders was Sir Thomas North—and his insubordination
towards Queen Elizabeth (who had just finished Englishing Plutarch’s De
Curiositate).30 In 1735, drawing on Plutarch, Suetonius and Shakespeare,
Voltaire created a version of the story in which Marcus Brutus, aware that
he is Caesar’s son, struggles with filial affection before ridding the republic
of the peril posed by his dad. (In this version of events there is no comeup-
pance, and Brutus does not die.) In the 1960s, Julius Nyerere, President
of independent Tanzania, wrote a Swahili version of Shakespeare’s play
that converted it into an anti-colonial putsch. Between 1951 and 1953
Berthold Brecht re-worked Coriolanus as a play about the class struggle.
It is not difficult to turn Timon of Athens into an anti-capitalist fable.
The original plays outstrip any such loaded understanding. Their mes-
sage, insofar as they have one, has to do with the complex and irreducible
nature of human affairs. Of this there are few better examples than their
treatment of two themes of much concern to the French revolutionaries:
the action of suicide and the idea of nobility, for his presentation of both
of which the playwright is indebted to Plutarch. The most famous suicide
in all of Shakespeare is Marcus Brutus’s after the Battle of Philippi in Act
V, Scene V of Julius Caesar. The source here is Plutarch’s Life of Brutus,
which gives us two alternative versions of the same event. This is how in
1579 North had rendered them, translating from Amyot. Facing defeat at
the hands of the triumvirate, Brutus takes his old school mate Strato
aside. Then:
He came as neere to him as he coulde, and taking his sword by the hilts with
both his hands and falling downe up on the poynte of it, ran him selfe
through. Others say, that not he, but Strato (at his request) held the sword,
30
James Shapiro, 1599, A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber,
2005), 182–92.
and turned his head aside, and that Brutus fell downe upon it: and so ranne
himself through, and dyed presently.31
Shakespeare follows the second version, except that he interprets the verb
“ran” or “ranne” in an intransitive as well as a transitive sense, since his
Brutus literally runs into the extended blade. In Plutarch, in Amyot, in
North and in Shakespeare, the death at Philippi is regarded as sublime,
which is at least part of what Mark Antony, much given to eulogies, appears
to mean when a few lines later in the play he calls Brutus “the noblest
Roman of them all”, though he is of course also referring to his disinter-
ested motives in slaying Caesar. His speech opens up the question of what
Shakespeare and his sources, let alone successive readers, understand by
the adjective “noble”. In her recent biography Brutus The Noble
Conspirator Kathryn Tempest takes up this point: in Roman usage, “nobi-
lis” meant that you were eminently born, specifically that one member of
your family at least had held a consulship.32 That is how Plutarch’s Latin-
speaking contemporaries would have understood the word nobilis, roughly
equivalent to Greek aristos, which is Plutarch’s term. By the time of
Shakespeare, the aristocratic connotations of nobility were held in precari-
ous balance with a universal concept of heroic virtue not entirely separated
from rank but theoretically distinct from it. When his verbally resourceful
Anthony calls the recently dead Brutus “noble”, therefore, he is indulging
in a pun between these two senses of the word, a pun that also works in
Latin and Greek. Brutus is indeed well born, being descended from the
Julius Brutus whom the revolutionaries admired so much. Like his great
ancestor, he is from the top drawer of society, but his sympathies are with
the people. As Tony Nuttall remarks in Shakespeare The Thinker, “Brutus
in Shakespeare’s play is that mildly paradoxical thing, an aristocratic
republican”.33 In which respect, one should add, Shakespeare’s portrayal
of him is in line with Plutarch’s.
31
Plutarch, “Life of Marcus Brutus”, 52, as rendered in The Lives of the Noble Greeks and
Romans Compared, Translated out of Greek into French by James Amyot, Abbot of
Bellozane, Bishop of Auxerre, etc. and out of French into English by Thomas North
(London: Thomas Vautroulier and John Wright, 1579), Vol. 6, 235. Compare The Daily
Telegraph, Thursday 28 March 2019, headline to page 1: “May falls on her sword”.
32
Kathryn Tempest, Brutus The Noble Conspirator (Newport, CT: Yale University
Press, 2017)
33
A. D. Nuttall Shakespeare the Thinker (Newport, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 172.
16 R. FRASER
Gilbert Romme and his co-conspirators were only interested in one of

these meanings. To be “nobilis” in the original sense would for them have
been, not simply anathema but actively dangerous. In 1795, blue blood
almost certainly took you to the scaffold. Their reading of Plutarch—in
line with the nobly descended Corday’s—thus did not simply disregard
hierarchy but needed actively to oppose it. As Frederick Raphael has
recently observed, Brutus and his fellow conspirators had regarded them-
selves primarily as liberators34: it was in this light that the French Revolution
chose to interpret them exclusively. Thenceforth, in France, Plutarch’s
Lives became a revolutionary text, a literary foundation stone of
Republicanism, which is what, through all the political twists and turns of
the period, they would remain for the whole of the nineteenth century. To
put it succinctly, Plutarch (and, along with him, Shakespeare) was radi-
calised. Or, to use a term that was just coming into use in 1795, they were
subjected to an “ideology” which, as Nuttall also shrewdly observes, “is an
Enlightenment or post-Enlightenment word. Its life began in Paris in the
1790s.”35 From now on Marcus Brutus was noble because he had paid a
political sacrifice. As for the gentle and pious Plutarch, he came to be
regarded as some ferociously committed citoyen, some harbinger of the
Marseilleise.
In Search of a Hero: Plutarch and Stendhal

By the late eighteenth century, Plutarch, mostly in the Amyot translation,
was a staple of the French educational system. Marie-Henri Beyle
(1783–1842), better known as the writer Stendhal, absorbed him in the
1790s during his youth in Grenoble. By 1812, when he joined Napoleon’s
invading armies in Russia, the impression had already bitten deep. The
following year, when he settled in Italy, we find him writing to his younger
sister Pauline reprimanding her for not having followed his advice to take
the works of Plutarch to heart.36 In his critical study Stendhal’s Parallel
Lives, Francesco Manzini has charted the extent of this influence on the
mature Stendhal, both as biographer and as novelist. Nowhere is this more
manifest than in the Vie de Napoléon which he drafted in Milan in
34
Frederick Raphael, Antiquity Matters (Newport, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 167.
35
Nuttall, 171.
36
Geoffrey Strickland, Stendhal: The Education of a Novelist (Cambridge University
Press, 1974).
1817–1818, partly in repudiation of Madame de Staël’s virulently anti-

Bonapartist, and posthumously published, Considérations sur les princi-
paux événements de la révolution française.37 “I am”, the draft began,
“writing this life of Napoleon in refutation of a libel”.38
Who could fathom Madame de Staël? A child prodigy who was pro-
posed to by Edward Gibbon at the age of eleven, she had introduced
Goethe’s works to the French, had minted the term “Romanticism”, had
outraged Napoleon when they met because he could not stomach her
uppity spirit. (Napoleon could not take insubordination from anyone, and
in his eyes it was worse when coming from a woman.) In general, she said,
she preferred dogs to people. Her life was pretty well coterminous with
the dates of the French revolutionary period, her varied contributions to
which have been charted by Simon Shama. After her death at the age of
fifty-one, her last book was published: an account of the Revolution from
its origins in the ancien régime to the débâcle of Waterloo. Her work stung
the thirty-year old Beyle, not yet known as Stendhal, into a response. Like
hers it was published posthumously (in his case not until 1929), and it was
as much a product of revolutionary neo-classicism as hers was of the
Romanticism she helped bring into being.
That the manner of treatment suited the subject well is patently clear,
since Napoleon himself, though no great reader, had early aspired to the
condition of neo-classical hero. The most blatant evidence for this, apart
from his titles, his military tactics and the laurel crown he had worn at his
coronation, was the lofty column he had caused to be erected between
1806 and 1810 in the Place Vendôme to celebrate his victory at the Battle
of Austerlitz. It was consciously modelled on Trajan’s Column, raised
between 106 and 113 AD in Rome to celebrate the emperor’s conquests
in the Dacian war, as recounted for us by the biographer Suetonius. Like
Trajan’s archetype, it was of the Doric order and at its summit stood a
bronze statue of Bonaparte himself, carrying the staff of peace, and
wreathed in the aforesaid chaplet. On entering Paris in 1814, the allied
armies with some difficulty hauled it down with ropes.
37
Stendhal, Une Vie de Napoléon, texte établi et annoté avec un avant-propos par Louis
Royer; Préface de Albert Pingaud (Paris: H. Champion, 1929). The text to which I refer here
is the authoritative Une Vie de Napoléon and Mémoires sur Napoléon Edition établie et présen-
tée par Catherine Mariette (Paris: Editions Stock, 1998). For the inception of Une Vie de
Napoléon, see Mariette, iv–v.
38
Stendhal, Une Vie de Napoléon ed. Mariette (1998), 15.
18 R. FRASER
Stendhal sets out his neo-classical stall from almost the beginning. In
recounting the volley of victories by means of which the twenty-six-year
old general drove back the Austrian armies from Northern Italy in 1796,
he refers us to Alexander and Caesar as Plutarch had described them in
one notable double-life, then to Hannibal, described in “The Life of Titus
Flamininus” offering as instances of supreme generalship “either Alexander
or Pyrrhus, then himself”.39 “No general of either ancient or of modern
times”, Stendhal remarks, “had won so many great battles in so short a
space of time, and with such inadequate means and over such powerful
enemies. … In the course of a single year a young man of twenty-six finds
himself in the position of having surpassed an Alexander, a Caesar, a
Hannibal and a Frederick.”40 “Finds himself in a position of having
surpassed”—“se trouve avoir effacé”—there is a willingness to perceive
Napoleon’s precocious achievement as the man himself may well have
regarded it, partly because one of the narrator’s main focuses is this man’s
psychology, and partly because he is interested in plumbing the depths of
Napoleon’s sense of his own infallibility as the root of his subsequent fall.
His sense of infallibility but also what was nearly allied to it: his arrogance,
both as virtue and as vice. From that time on, Stendhal tells us, he regarded
mere politicians with marked contempt. “He usually”, we are told, “ended
by pointing out to his generals that, if a man could succeed in conciliating
the new way of life inside France with a military form of government, he
could easily make the Republic play the part of ancient Rome”.41
Societies are judged in this youthful work by the extent to which they
successfully duplicate imperial Roman fortitude. On his Egyptian cam-
paign of 1798–1799, we are told, Napoleon faced an enemy who “only
lacked aristocracy to be Romans”.42 When he peremptorily returns to
France in August 1799, he finds the Directorate in a condition of desue-
tude and assumes the position of first Consul, just as Caesar had in 60
AD. The Jacobins, meanwhile, have reduced themselves to a position of
public derision by unsuccessfully attempting to replicate the institutions of
the Roman Republic. Napoleon is not interested in discussion; like his
Plutarchan prototypes, he simply wishes to rule. “Imbued with Roman
ideas”, effective government for him is a product of command, so that
39
Plutarch, “Life of Titus Flamininus”, 21, 3–4.
40
41
42
Stendhal, Une Vie de Napoléon ed. Mariette (1998) 32.
“the greatest misfortune in his eyes, was to be conquered, not to be badly

governed and pestered in one’s own home”.43
We are approaching the apex of Bonaparte’s fortunes. His rapid advance
on Vienna in the Spring of 1809 is rehearsed in staccato prose, the rhythm
of which echoes the speed of his progress: “Napoleon left Paris on April
13th, 1809; by the 18th he was in Ingolstadt. He fought six battles in five
days and won six victories. On May 10th he was at the gates of Vienna.”44
On March 11 of the following year he marries Marie Louise, Archduchess
of Austria, and in so doing links himself formally with the Hapsburgs. “He
received”, as Stendhal phrases it, “the daughter of the Caesars. That day,
the most glorious of his life, he was as gloomy as Nero.”45 (For all of
which, Stendhal gets the date wrong.) Invading Spain, Napoleon sets up
his own brother Joseph as King under a constitutional monarchy. The
reluctance of the conservative Spanish to perceive the advantages of this
arrangement over their own corrupt oligarchy arouses Stendhal’s full-
throated disdain. To confound them, he draws on the words of the man
who was to assume the difficult role of Joseph Bonaparte’s first minister.
Mariano Luis de Urquijo (1669–1817) had been Prime Minister for a
little under two years under the previous constitution. He was a wily and
broadminded bureaucrat who had earlier translated Voltaire’s La Mort de
Caesar (based on Shakespeare’s play which itself had borrowed from
Plutarch) into Spanish. In April 1808, according to Stendhal, he was rep-
rimanded by the acolytes of the deposed Bourbon King for his emerging
support of the new Napoleonic regime. De Urquijo knew his classical
precedents only too well. He replied “Read Plutarch, and you will find
that all of those heroes of Greece and Rome only won their fame over
thousands of dead bodies. All that is now forgotten, while the results
remain to be contemplated with respect and astonishment.”46 Three
months later, de Urquijo was serving under Joseph.
At this juncture Stendhal himself enters the story. In August 1810 he is
appointed as an auditor under the conseil d’état and, two years later, at the
age of twenty-nine, he accompanies the army on its disastrous Russian
expedition. Stendhal witnessed the burning of Moscow from outside the
gates and was made partly responsible for securing supplies during the
43
44
45
46
20 R. FRASER
long retreat. Arguably, this is the clue to his whole approach: Stendhal
only ever observed Napoleon in defeat. Everything previous to that, he
has been obliged to re-construct. In his eyes, Napoleon is an overreacher,
and his destiny is tragic. Now he pauses and, as he does so, he surveys the
scene with Plutarchian detachment. Once again, Alexander provides the
compass:
Thirteen and a half years of success turned Alexander the Great into a kind
of madman. Good fortune of exactly the same kind produced the same dis-
order in Napoleon. The only difference was that the Macedonian hero was
lucky enough to die. What fame Napoleon the Conqueror would have left
behind had a bullet killed him on the evening of the battle of Moskowa!47
That gloss falls half-way between Menander’s “Those whom the Gods
love, die young” and the seventeenth neo-Latin century proverb “Quem
Juppiter vult perdere, dementat prius” (“He whom Jupiter wishes to
destroy, he maddens first”, based on lines 620–623 of Sophocles’s
Prometheus).48 Be that as it may, Stendhal is evidently attempting to lend
tragic grandeur to Napoleon’s predicament, which he sees as a product of
his temperament. From this moment on, he does not hesitate to correlate
the two. He is at pains to depict the great man’s failings: his vanity; his
inability to relate properly to women (which, shrewdly, he connects with
anticipation of their scorn); his deafness to public opinion; his political
ineptitude; his contempt for liberty; his suppression of the press; his inabil-
ity to delegate or to know when he is beaten. The last hundred pages of
Une Vie de Napoléon are in effect a summing up of his character that
reminds one of nothing so much as Plutarch’s resumés at the end of each
of his carefully balanced lives. Finally, after the Hundred Days, he leaves
him at Saint Helena, dignified in defeat.
He concludes “He was a man with amazing abilities and a dangerous
ambition; by his talents the finest man to have appeared since Caesar,
whom in our eyes he would have appeared to have surpassed”.49 Napoleon
was “no more prodigal of blood, no more indifferent to humanity than
men like Caesar, Alexander the Great or Frederick the Great, to whom he
will be compared and whose and whose fame will diminish daily”. In his
47
48
Menandri: Reliquae Selectae ed. Francis Henry Sandbach (Oxford, 1972), fragment 4;
Sophocles, The Plays and Fragments Richard Claverhouse Jebb ed (Cambridge, 1900), 256.
49
final exile he demonstrated a faculty for simplicity and renunciation quite

at odds with the view of him put about by his detractors. “In modern
times, it is perhaps this which puts us most in mind of Plutarch.”50
Madame de Staël knew Napoleon in his prime and detested him.
Stendhal saw Napoleon in decline and revered him. Plutarch, what is
more, taught Stendhal how to write. From him he acquired a style that
was brisk, rapid and direct. There are few frills in any of Stendhal’s works,
just as there are few frills in Plutarch’s. Instead, we meet in both of them
a manner of address that is forthright and subtle, rubato and yet crisp, lean
and yet unguent. That style served Beyle well, from La Chartreuse de
Parme through to Le Rouge et le Noir. Moreover, if Erich Auerbach was
right in his seminal work Mimesis in seeing Stendhalian austerity as the
foundation stone of French nineteenth-century realism, an argument
might even be made out for the realistic mode of writing, as inherited by
say Flaubert and Zola, as a very late, though in their cases unconscious,
after effect of the Plutarchian aesthetic paradigm.
A Counter-Revolutionary Diaboliad
In the long eighteenth century there was a growing fashion for collective
or group biography. To some extent this seems have been a product of the
Enlightenment, of a search for knowledge about human behaviour and
the laws that underlay it: the kind of omnivorous curiosity that underlay
Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728) and the Encyclopédie ou
Dictionnaire Raisonné Des Sciences Des Arts et Des Métiers compiled
between 1751 and 1766 by Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond and their con-
tributors. Early examples appear to have been attempts to define or limit a
literary movement or school. Hence literary encyclopaedias with a strong
biographical bias were compiled by Pierre Bayle in 1695, and by Charles
Perrault, better known for his collections of fairy tales, in 1695. The
organisational principles behind other collations were sometimes national,
sometimes dynastic and sometimes ideological, and a fair proportion
invoked Plutarch in their titles. The pioneering economist Thomas
Mortimer (1730–1810) collated The British Plutarch in six volumes in
1762.51 It depicted the lives of eminent Englishmen in every branch of
50
51
Thomas Mortimer, The British Plutarch, Containing the Lives of the Most Eminent
Statesmen, Patriots, Divines, Warriors, Philosophers, Poets, and Artists, of Great Britain and
22 R. FRASER
national endeavour who lived between Henry VIII and George II;
enlarged to six volumes in 1774, it eventually reached twelve. In 1785 the
intrepid Belgian baroness Cornélie Wouters (1739–1802) translated them
all into French.52
The revolution provided a fresh impetus to such activity, and those who
exercised it came from diverse and sometimes conflicting backgrounds,
though all to a greater or to a lesser extent harked back to the ancients.
Under the pressure of political events, classical biography as a model for
contemporary lives could now be used to different, even countervailing,
ends. Thus, just as there was a neo-classical Napoleon, so there was a
Romantic Napoleon. There was Napoleon the hero, and there was
Napoleon the monster. Both of these visions drew on the similar sources,
and both battened on classical biography. The salient theme of so many
Greek and more especially Roman lives had, after all, been one that
attracted Byronic Romanticism from its inception: the ambivalence of
greatness. But, whereas writers of a neo-classical temperament tended to
dwell primarily on Plutarch, the Romantics, possessed of a dark streak,
were just as preoccupied with the ancient biographer who for centuries
rivalled him at the bar of informed opinion: Gauis Suetonius Tranquillus.
And, whereas the young Stendhal, and other writers inspired by revolu-
tionary sentiment, naturally reached out to Alexander the Great and Julius
Caesar as points of comparison, there was an increasing tendency in reac-
tionary circles to view Bonaparte as akin to the heirs of Augustus—to
Tiberius, Caligula and Nero—as Suetonius had memorably described them.
In 1804 John Murray II, later publisher to Byron, Jane Austen and
Walter Scott, issued one of the most enigmatic literary productions of this
turbulent period: The Revolutionary Plutarch, Exhibiting the Most
Distinguished Characters, Literary Military and Political In The Latest
Annals of the French Republic, The Greater Part From The Original
Information of A Gentleman Resident in Paris.53 This work was in two
Ireland, From the Accession of Henry VIII to the Present Time, Including a Compendious View
of the History of England During That Period 6 vols (London: Edward Dilly 1762; second
edition 12 vols., 1774).
52
Cornélie-Pétronville-Bénédicte Wouters, Baronne de Vassé, Le Plutarch anglais 12 vols
(Paris: 1785–6). Settled in Paris, she completed her translation with the assistance of her
Anglophone sister, Marie Thérèse.
53
H. Stewarton pseud, The Revolutionary Plutarch: Exhibiting the Most Distinguished
Characters, Literary, Military and Political in The Recent Annals of the French Republic the
Greater Part from The Original Information of a Gentleman Resident in Paris (London:
volumes, to which in 1805 was added a third. Its author was anonymous,
and the text identifies neither him nor his Parisian informant, though the
first, for professional purposes and in correspondence with the publisher,
had adopted the pseudonym “H. Stewarton”. For the last two centuries,
all attempts to penetrate this intriguing alias have proved fruitless.54 At the
time, the work was briefly confused with that of Sir Richard Phillips,
author in 1797 of Biographical Anecdotes of the Founders of the French
Republic; the claim ended up in a libel court.55 More recently this mysteri-
ous writer has been confounded with Lewis Goldsmith (1763–1846),
turncoat, double-agent, and author of The Secret History of the Cabinet of
Bonaparte, though for a variety of reasons that identification is also
impossible.
The book, however, contains a fair share of clues as to his background,
since in its lurid and occasionally cantankerous pages there is almost as
much autobiography as there is biography. “H. Stewarton”, whether
French or British by birth, is a forceful, aphoristic writer who derives much
of his material from eye-witness accounts, including his own, and from a
copious documentation from contemporary sources. He also, perplexingly
and in his hide-and-seek manner, tells us quite a bit about himself. Like so
many of the idealistic young in France and England, he had at first been
an enthusiast for the revolution. In the early 1890s he had enlisted in the
Army of the Rhine, where he served for several years under General Victor
Moreau. There, according to his own account, he also made the acquain-
tance of Moreau’s commanding officer, General Jean-Charles Pichegru
(1761–1804). Both of these soldiers were fast losing faith in Napoleon, in
which attitude of disaffection they soon influenced their protégé. Moreau
John Murray, 1804, 1805, 1815). The Female Revolutionary Plutarch, Containing
Biographical, Historical and Revolutionary Sketches, Characters and Anecdotes, equally
pseudonymous, appeared from the same publishing house in 1805, with a second edition
in 1808.
54
For correspondence concerning Stewarton’s Identity, see Robert Fraser, “Mystery
Author”, The Times Literary Supplement, No. 6058, May 10, 2019, 6, and a reply under the
same headline by Christopher McKane, The Times Literary Supplement, No. 6059, 17 May,
2019, 6. McKane proposes Lewis Goldsmith (1763–1846) as an answer to the riddle.
Unfortunately, in 1804 Goldsmith was a committed Bonapartist. See also Simon Burrows’s
entry on Goldsmith in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; also his French Exile
Journalism and European Politics, 1792–1814 (Martlesham, Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer, 2000).
55
See Cobbett’s Political Register, August 6, 1808, cols 204–8, and The Trial at Large of An
Action Brought by Sir John Carr Against Hood and Sharpe … taken in shorthand by Thomas
Jenkins (London: Stewart and Jones, 1808), 71.
24 R. FRASER
was involved in a failed coup against the rising star of Napoleon in 1797
and exiled to America: he was to spend much of the rest of his life there.
Denounced by Moreau during an earlier attempted coup, Pichegru was
banished to French Guiana, from which in 1799 he escaped to London.
Meanwhile the author of The Revolutionary Plutarch, suspected of
complicity with reactionary forces overseas, had been incarcerated in the
Temple Prison in Paris. There in February 1797 he claims to have
befriended one of the most exotic and active among the émigrés, Antoine
Le Picard de Phélippeaux (1767–1799). A former officer in the pre-
revolutionary French army, Phélippeaux had studied with the slightly
younger Bonaparte at the Ecole Militaire in Brienne, where he had con-
tracted a permanent aversion towards his fellow student. Subsequently, he
had served in the anti-revolutionary Arméé de la Condé and been cooped
in the Temple gaol as a result. It was this resentful and prejudiced cell-
mate who became Stewarton’s principal source for Napoleon’s early life.
In March 1798, Phélippeaux and Stewarton assisted in the escape of the
rogue British Admiral Sir William Sidney Smith who had been gaoled in
the Temple following a botched raid on Le Havre. The details of the
escape can be followed in the Dictionnaire Biographique. At first, a tunnel
was built but, this proving impracticable, Phélippeaux disguised himself as
a Commissioner of Police while several of his companions, including it
would seem Stewarton, dressed as fellow officers. Presenting false papers,
they secured Smith’s release, and made their way to the coast, travelling
onwards to London on false passports.
The following year, Smith and Phélippeaux were in Egypt, where
together they frustrated Napoleon’s siege of Acre before Phélippeaux suc-
cumbed to fever that May. Meanwhile, in London, Stewarton had again
met up with Pichegru, whose appearance and mannerisms he describes
minutely in his book. In 1803 Murray agreed to publish its first, two-
volume, edition. Early the next year Pichegru returned to France and was
immediately imprisoned. On February 28 he was found strangled in his
cell. The French government claimed this was suicide but much British
counter-revolution opinion suspected it had been murder.56 The third edi-
tion of The Revolutionary Plutarch was then in the press; published early
in 1805, it included a footnote reporting on Pichegru’s death. The first
chapter of its second volume is devoted to him; the rest consists of a
56
Stendhal accepted the official version, for which see Stendhal, Une Vie de Napoléon ed.
Mariette (1998), 54. For Bonaparte’s explanation, see 63 sqq.
c haracter assassination of the Bonaparte family, including Napoleon him-

self, compared throughout to the tyrants of early imperial Rome.
If The British Plutarch demonstrated the comparative biographical
impulse as instilled by patriotism and curiosity, The Revolutionary Plutarch
illustrates the same instinct spiked with divisiveness and malice. Dedicating
his work to the combined shades of the executed French monarch Louis
XVI and Edmund Burke, the Irish philosopher who a year after the out-
break of the disturbances in Paris had in his Reflections on the Revolution
in France warned his English readers against the excesses of insurrection,
Stewarton makes no bones about his conservative sympathies, or his ad
hominem intent. From the very beginning, his avowed intention is to lay
bare “the ambition, intrigue, tyranny, and the ferocity of Napoleon
Bonaparte”.57 Stewarton is strongly aware of Napoleon’s rising cult and
equally determined to resist it. He is also aware of that cult’s classical
embellishments, which in his opinion cut two ways: “Who were those
praising and worshipping a Caesar, extolling and adoring an Octavius
Augustus?” he rhetorically asks. “Were they not the base slaves of an usur-
pation, and not the free citizens of a commonwealth who would as will-
ingly and as cordially have prostrated themselves before their rivals and
oppressors, before a Scylla, a Pompey, a Brutus, an Antony?”58
Stewarton devotes his first volume to portraits of Moreau and fellow
generals in The Army of The Rhine. Then he passes on to Napoleon’s
family before addressing his principal object of detestation. It is a Bonaparte
scarcely recognisable from Stendhal’s later account. Growing up in
Ajaccio, the young scamp haunts the operating theatres of the local hospi-
tal to observe the writhing contortions of unanaesthetised patients, which
afterwards he mimes before his callous classmates. At the military academy
in Brienne, the ambitious cadet adopts as his Plutarchian idols the twin
icons of Cato and Brutus. In December, 1793, after the capture of Toulon
from the English, he orders the artillery to open fire on the collaborators
herded onto Le Champ de Mars. Two years later, placed at the head of the
troops of the National Convention, he decrees the same fate for the popu-
lace of Paris. The successes of the Italian campaign are put down to a
combination of luck, Austrian incompetence and Bonaparte’s opportun-
ism. He sacks the treasures of the Republic of Venice, kidnaps the Pope
and exacts exorbitant financial penalties from the cities of Genoa and
57
Stewarton pseud, i, vii.
58
Stewarton, ii, 180.
26 R. FRASER
Naples. After an action near Salo on the western shore of Lake Garda, he
orders the wounded to be buried alive. He orders the devastation of
Switzerland, but decamps before it can be carried out. Revolted by these
decisions, one of his own, unnamed generals bears testimony against him.
Indicating as he does so the classical author who is evidently the author’s
own vituperative model, he accuses Bonaparte of “deeds of atrocity, at
which Nero himself would have blushed and which Suetonius would not
have dared impute to that monster”.59
Bonaparte’s politics, though, are those of Plutarch’s Julius Caesar. In
1797 he is about to cross the Rubicon between defender of the republic
and incipient dictator. His unnamed accuser carries on:
what I contend for is that Buonaparte is the most dangerous of all the
French citizens; that Buonaparte is a citizen after the manner of Caesar, that
it is in the manner of Caesar that he loves equality, and that it is with all the
contempt that Caesar entertained for the senate of Rome that Buonaparte
speaks of the government of France.60
Napoleon sets sail for Egypt, resolved to place his personal mark on the
East, in which objective he is inspired less by the interests of France than
by a “personal ambition to tread the ground which had been impressed by
the victorious footsteps of Alexander and Caesar”.61 Once landed, his
declared tolerance towards the institutions of Islam, like his restoration of
the forfeited rights of the Church and the Jewish community back home,
is instigated by classical example: after observing that the Roman pro-
tected all religions, he requested the soldiers to treat the Muftis and Imams
of Africa with the same respect that they had exhibited towards the bish-
ops and rabbis of Europe.62
In Egypt his cruelty, boastfulness and hypocrisy persist. Annoyed by the
overcrowding of the hospitals near Joppa, he finds an obliging apothecary
who agrees to distribute food relief to the patients; it is poisoned, and they
all expire. At Acre, thanks to the intervention of Smith and Phélippeaux,
his siege proves an abject disaster that Napoleon claims for a victory. He
abandons his armies and makes for France, where, posing as a defender of
the ideals of the Republic, he has himself elected First Consul. Posing
59
Stewarton, ii, 218.
60
Stewarton, ii, 218–9.
61
Stewarton, ii, 229–30.
62
Stewarton, ii, 233.
again as a proponent of peace, he approaches the English crown and is

repulsed.
Stewarton’s account advances no further than the end of the fragile
peace of 1802. He has, already done enough, however, to show how the
green bay tree of denunciatory biography might flourish when fertilised
by a rich compost of gossip. Near the beginning of his account he presses
into service a phrase from Pope’s Essay on Man describing Oliver Cromwell,
echoed more recently in A Diaboliad, a scurrilous broadsheet poem of
1777 by the hack writer William Combe: Napoleon, he says, is “doomed
to everlasting fame”.63 Bonaparte’s notoriety, he is certain, will never fade.
In the Preface to the Third Edition of 1805, newly revolted by his friend
Phélippeaux’s death which the authorities had attributed to suicide,
Stewarton rounds up his diatribe. In Suetonian sum, “the reigns of Nero,
Caligula, Domitian and Robespierre must appear less intolerable than the
usurpation of Napoleon Bonaparte”.64
At Napoleon’s Tomb: Two Phases of Chateaubriand

Nine years later, amid the smoke and din of the French capital, François-
Auguste-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) crouches over his
desk, pouring bile from his pen. France is almost on its knees, since
Napoleon has advanced westwards without realising that the armies of the
coalition ranged against him (Prussia, Russia, Britain) have crept around
behind him to the west and occupied central Paris. Too late, the Emperor
has come to his senses and rushed back to Fontainebleau, from whose
height he is now attempting a futile resistance. In the middle-aged person
of Louis XVIII, the Bourbon dynasty, spurned twenty years before, is
poised at the helm. Catholic, Royalist, and sick of totalitarian cant,
Chateaubriand is determined that they should succeed.
Chateaubriand had come a lot closer to Napoleon than had Stendhal:
in fact, several times face to face. Successively First Minister to the Holy
See and Minister to Valais, he had served his master with moderate
enthusiasm until in 1804 his loyalty had been sabotaged by the judicial
murder of Louis Antoine, Duc d’Enghien, scion of the Condés and thus
63
Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Man”, line 284. William Combe, A Diaboliad: a poem
dedicated to the worst man in His Majesty’s kingdoms (London and Dublin, 1777). The
British Library copy is misdated as 1677.
64
Stewarton, I, vii.
28 R. FRASER
a minor royal, shot down in the moat at Chantilly on the day of the
spring equinox. Breaking with the regime, he had voyaged in the Levant,
researching the early persecutions of Christianity and, returning, found
Napoleonic France tottering on the brink. He had always subjectively
identified with the Emperor, who was almost exactly of the same age as
himself. He had been briefly used, and his services rapidly discarded. His
disillusionment, on the humiliation of his country, was proportion-
ately great.
The result was a pestiferous pamphlet entitled Of Bonaparte and the
Bourbons and of the Necessity of Rallying Around Our Legitimate Princes
for the Happiness of France and That of Europe. Finished “under the roar-
ing of cannon”, it was immediately published “as it were, on the breach”,
and promptly translated into English. Once Napoleon had been temporar-
ily banished to Elba, Louis claimed that this bilious little book had been of
more use to him than one hundred thousand troops. Earlier in his varie-
gated life, Chateaubriand had read for the priesthood, and he had just
been immersing himself in Roman imperial history. He needed to appeal
to the intelligentsia of France and of England. Remembering the sorry
annals of Suetonius and his own researches into the travails of the church,
he reached for classic parallels. Napoleon had outdone even Diocletian:
It appears that the enemy of our race was bent on destroying France to its
very foundations. He has more corrupted men, done more mischief to the
human race in the short space of ten years, than all the tyrants of Rome put
together, from Nero down to the last persecutor of the Christians.65
Napoleon was perverted and he was vainglorious. He had ridden rough-

shod over his people, had no respect of liberty and bullied his subordi-
nates. In sober, Suetonian truth, “Tiberius never made such a mockery of
the human species”.66 To which one might add, each emperor spent their
dying days an island: Tiberius on Capri, Napoleon on Saint Helena.
In venturing to Egypt he was motivated by ambition alone, though his
terrestrial forays fell far short of his idol’s: “Any man may dream he is mak-
ing a conquest of the world”, sneers Chateaubriand, “but ALEXANDER
65
François-August—René, comte de Chateaubriand, Of Bonaparte and the Bourbons and
of the Necessity of Rallying Around Our Legitimate Princes for the Happiness of France and of
Europe (London: Henry Colburn, 1814), 16.
66
Chateaubriand, Bonaparte and the Bourbons, 24.
alone accomplished it”.67 He may half conquered half of Europe, but he

had quite a few legions to help him. With hundreds of thousands of men
at his disposal, a greater man could have accomplished more. Supreme
commanders have no need of such gargantuan armies. Besides, “the whole
Roman Empire was protected by one hundred and fifty thousand men,
and Caesar had but a few legions in Pharsalia”.68 Bonaparte preens himself
beneath the laurels of the mighty, but he has not their grandeur. What is
more, he is surly and tongue-tied: “Buonaparte is not a genuine great
man: he wants that magnanimity which constitutes heroes and true mon-
archs. There is not one of those sayings quoted of him which announce
ALEXANDER and CAESAR, HENRY IV and LOUIS XIV.”69 He lacks
the wit to say “L’état, c’est moi”. Besides, it isn’t, and wasn’t. Basically,
once you strip the pomp away, what you discover inside is a pygmy, and
“The man of little worth and of indifferent abstraction is discovered
beneath the mask of ALEXANDER and CAESAR”.70 Finally,
Chateaubriand turns to Napoleon and addresses him direct. You are an
impostor, a fraud, and you should now step aside. Your publicity is mod-
ern, but your misdemeanours are antique:
The voice of the universe proclaims you the greatest culprit that ever
appeared upon earth, for it is not upon a barbarous people or upon degener-
ated nations that you have poured so many calamities; it is in the midst of
civilization, in an enlightened age that you wished to reign by the sword of
ATTILA and the maxims of NERO71
This tract was not biography, of course. It was agitprop and diatribe, a
clarion call to resistance. Chateaubriand never retracted it—the damage
was already done—but after the Hundred Days, after Saint Helena, after
Napoleon’s lonely death in 1821, he thought again. He had already started
on his memoirs and was to work at them for forty years. Finally, they were
published in instalments following his own death in 1848 as Mémoires
d’Outre-Tombe, (Memoires From Beyond the Grave). They contain (rather
as a coffin does a body), his final, considered thoughts on Napoleon.
67
68
69
70
71
Chateaubriand, Bonaparte and the Bourbons, 54–5.
30 R. FRASER
The Mémoires are life-writing in a double sense. In relation to their

author, they are autobiography; in relation to their subject (who, for much
of the time, is Napoleon) they are biography of a certain, Romantic kind,
a biography laced with appreciation, identification and remorse. “My
admiration for Bonaparte”, he now tells us, thinking back to 1814 when
he penned his passionate assault on his leadership, “has always been great,
even when I attacked [him] with the greatest ferocity”.72
What emerges is a complicated piece of portraiture, compounded of
puzzled wonderment, and something approaching adoration: Napoleon
in three dimensions. It centres around two themes: personal encounter
and venerated entombment. Chateaubriand and the subject of his
attachment-cum-detestation and his rapt obsession (it is not too forceful a
word) met twice. The first occasion was in 1802 shortly after
Chateaubriand’s return from exile in England. The concordat with the
Pope had been signed the previous year, and Bonaparte was keen to appear
in the guise of defender of Mother Church. He had already chosen the
Corsican Archbishop of Lyon, Joseph Flesch, as his emissary to the
Vatican: he now needed a secular First Minister to accompany him.
Chateaubriand, who was enjoying a burst of limelight after the recent
publication of his Génie du christianisme, seemed the ideal candidate. He
was standing in the gallery at a reception in the house of Napoleon’s
brother Lucien, when the Emperor entered the room. Chateaubriand was
struck by his appearance: “He was gentle and beautiful; his eyes were
admirable, particularly on account of the way in which they were set
beneath his forehead and framed in his eyebrows. There was as yet no
charlatanism in his glace, nothing theatrical or affected. … A prodigious
imagination animated the cold-blooded politician; he would not have
been what he was if the Muse had not been there: reason carried out the
ideas of the poet.”73 He told the young author of his admiration for the
Egyptian Muslims who he had seen praying in desert. Chateaubriand went
to Rome with Flesch; the two men quarrelled and Chateaubriand returned
to Paris.
In March 1804 the Duc d’Enghien was gunned down in the moat in
Chantilly. Two days before, Chateaubriand had called on the emperor at
the Tuileries to pay his respects. He was instantly struck by a
72
François Auguste René de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe (Leipzig: Brockhaus
& Avenarius, 1850), iv, 54.
73
Chateaubriand (1849–1850), iv, 51.
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Jupiter found
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Title: Jupiter found
Author: Robert F. Young
Illustrator: Virgil Finlay
Release date: December 14, 2023 [eBook #72408]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing

Company, 1963
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JUPITER

FOUND ***
JUPITER FOUND
By ROBERT F. YOUNG
Illustrated by FINLAY
Godhead can be more than a guilt complex

growing out of the knowledge of good and
evil. It can also be a sense of fulfillment
that comes from the ability to create.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Amazing Stories March 1963.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
8M sunk a new shaft, lowered his skip-arm into it, and scooped up
huge handfuls of iron ore into his blast-furnace belly. Around him
swirled the grayish murk that passed for an atmosphere on Jupiter.
Dislodged pebbles, propelled by the rampaging wind, pelted
ceaselessly against his metal hull. The temperature stood at -169
degrees Fahrenheit.
A picture of himself of old sitting at a roseate fireside flashed upon the
screen of his memory. It was superseded by a picture of a pretty girl
walking down a springtime street. Resolutely he ignored both
sequences. They were remnants of an old movie that had been
written around a young man named John Sheldon, and John Sheldon
was dead.
8M, nee John Sheldon, chased the ore with several skiploads of
limestone and coke from his stock-stomach; then, his blast-furnace
belly replete, he stopped to rest. But not for long. The ingots from his
last hearth-heat were due to be removed from his soaking pits in a
few minutes, and he could not let them over-stay their time. The life of
a M.A.N., model 8M, was not an easy one. But then, he had known
that when he had bequeathed his brain to the Company.
He was not sorry. Far better to build bases on the wind-torn surface of
Jupiter than to lie in cold and eternal oblivion beneath the unheeding
surface of Earth. And there was the longevity factor to be considered
too. As a man, even if he had lived, he probably wouldn't have
reached the age of ninety. As the first M.A.N., however, he might very
well reach the age of nine hundred and fifty.
A patriarchal age indeed—but, unlike the patriarchs of old, he would
have no sons and daughters to carry on after he was gone.
The message that he had been momentarily expecting from the
orbiting Raphael came through. His transceiver picked it up,
converted it into thought, and relayed the thought to the ganglionic
sealed unit that encased both his transplanted brain and the nutrient
solution that sustained it. "Model EV just dropped. Will chute into your
area any moment."
"Good," 8M pulsed into the trans-transmitter. "Building a base the size
of this one is no job for one M.A.N."
"You are hereby notified," the Raphael went on, "that Gorman and
Oder Developments, Incorporated, has informed us that one
Lawrence Dickens, discharged several months ago for rebellious
conduct detrimental to the Company's good name, has started up an
advance-construction corporation of his own and may try to sabotage
the base in an attempt to obtain Gorman and Oder Developments'
Earth Government contract. The Raphael's matter detector indicates
that there is another overseer ship in Jovian orbit, and it is possible
that Dickens may already have chuted one of his Mining, Adapting
Neo-processors into your area. If so, you will recognize it by its
greenish-yellow coloring. Its model designation is 'Boa 9', and
Dickens himself will be the operator. You are hereby advised to stay
on your toes."
"My tracks are the best I can do," said 8M wryly.
"The Company frowns on levity," the Raphael said sternly, and signed
off.
Annoyed, 8M activated his transperipheral vision. The Company
frowned on too many things, if you asked him. Sometimes it even
frowned on free will. Consider, for example, its going to all the trouble
and expense of creating a self-sustaining, self-reliant Mining,
Adapting Neo-processor like himself, and then arbitrarily forbidding
him, on the pain of death, to use edenite—an iron-like ore endemic to
Jupiter—in any of his melts. He should have been permitted to make
his own decision in the matter. Certainly, if the ore had proved to be
injurious to his "system", he would have ceased using it at once.
There had been no need for the Company to forbid him to use it. He
was a M.A.N.—not a little child.
The rotating transperipheral beam relayed more murk to his retinal
screen, more desolation. Jupiter was a place of constant atmospheric
turmoil and treacherous terrain. A human being, using the body God
gave him, could not exist anywhere on the surface without the
protection that a base afforded, and as a consequence, the base had
to be built beforehand. All previous attempts had failed, and 8M
represented mankind's last hope of ever colonizing the planet. If he
failed, the project would be abandoned, and Jupiter's rich resources
would be allowed to remain in their native state. Thus far he had
succeeded—after Herculean efforts—in laying the foundation. Now
there remained the building of the base proper, and for this he was to
have a helpmate.
Lord knew, he needed one.
While he was waiting for the EV to contact him, he removed the

ingots from his soaking pits and began processing them into
structural steel. As a M.A.N., he left much to be desired. He was
excellent for mining, and his blast-furnace belly functioned admirably;
but his open hearth lacked sufficient tonnage capacity and was much
too slow in turning out heats, while his blooming, roughing, and
finishing mills were inadequate for the task on hand, not because the
internal area devoted to them was too limited, but because the
available space had not been put to maximum use. The same
objection held true for his continuous mills, and as for his parts-
replacement shop, he sometimes wondered whether he would last
out the nine hundred and fifty years guaranteed him by the Company
after all.
He had just started the glowing ingots through his blooming mill when
the EV's "voice" came through the thought-converter: "EV to 8M.
Drop completed successfully—am awaiting your directions."
"This is 8M. Keep sending, and I'll home in on you."
Continuing his internal operations, he set off over the ragged gray
hills that characterized the local terrain. Around him, the wind howled
in cold and unrelenting fury, but with his hull audios turned way down,
he hardly heard it. He hardly heard the crunching of his huge
caterpillar tracks either, or the rat-a-tat-tat of the wind-borne pebbles
against his metallic body. At length his transperipheral beam picked
up the EV. The machine was no more than an indeterminate gray
shape at first, but gradually, as he grew closer, it resolved into a trim,
streamlined unit considerably smaller than himself. He saw instantly
that it was a new model. Its tracks were relatively narrow, and there
was a delicate aspect about them. Its mining section was much
narrower than his own, while its blast-furnace section was slightly
smaller. The open-hearth section, however, was comparatively
enormous, and put his own to shame, while the flanks of the
processing mills and parts-replacement shop contracted smoothly—
rather than unevenly, as did his own—to the terminus-compartment
where the nuclear power-plant was located.
A less powerful M.A.N. than himself, certainly; but perhaps a more
efficient one. He would see. "Welcome to Jupiter," he said. "I'm 8M—
formerly John Sheldon of Earth."
"EV—formerly Helen Quinn of same."
He stopped in his tracks, both literally and figuratively. It simply hadn't
occurred to him that a woman would respond to the Company's
request for volunteers, and even if it had occurred to him, the
possibility of the Company's installing a woman's brain in a M.A.N.
would not have.
"I am not a M.A.N.," she said, seemingly sensing his thoughts. "I am
a W.O.M.A.N.—a Weld Operating, Mining, Adapting Neo-processor."
He hardly "heard" her. "I don't understand it," he said. "With such a
high incidence of arrowway fatalities, and with so many bequeathed
brains to choose from, why should the Company have chosen a
woman's?"
"You're overlooking the fact," she pointed out, "that in the majority of
arrowway fatalities, the brain itself is in some way damaged, and
you're overlooking the additional fact that ninety percent of the brains
that have been bequeathed to the Company are intellectually and
vocationally unsuited for symbiosis. I happened to be a qualified
engineer, and apparently I possessed the requisite intelligence. In
any event, I qualified, and here I am."
"How old were you when you were killed?" he asked her.
"Twenty-four. And you?"
"I was twenty-six. The way I went in for arrowway travel, it was a
wonder I lasted that long." He was thoughtful for a moment. Then, "I
wonder if we got ourselves killed deliberately."
"Probably. Most arrowway drivers do. And yet we hunger after
immortality. It's a paradox, isn't it?"
He realized to his surprise that he rather liked her. "What will you do
after the base is completed?" he asked.
"Help you build the next."
"The whole project will be abandoned if we don't show results on this
one—did they tell you that?"
"Yes, they told me. As the first M.A.N. and W.O.M.A.N., we're
Gorman and Oder Developments' last hope. If we fail, the Earth
Government will break the contract. But we won't fail, will we?"
Abruptly he visualized the face of a pretty, blue-eyed girl, and he
knew somehow that it was her face—the face she had had in the land
that had given her birth. "No," he said, "of course we won't fail. Come
with me, and I'll show you what I've completed so far."
He helped her free herself from the huge foil chute that had borne her
through the atmospheric maelstrom; then, side by side, they set off
over the ragged hills. She spoke no more, and neither did he, till they
reached the site of the base. Little was to be seen, save for the
geometric pattern of the non-corrosive footings he had laid, and the
small stockpile of structural steel he had begun to build up. "Our main
concern now is production," he said. "What's your maximum open-
hearth output, EV?"
"Three hundred Earth-tons a day."
He was dumfounded. "Why, I can only turn out one hundred and
twenty-five!"
"I was specially built," she said proudly. "The Company foresaw the
need of me long ago."
"But your mining operation will hold you up, and so will your pig-iron
output. Your skip-arms aren't strong enough—I can tell that just by
looking at you."
"No, but yours are. For all its vaunted powers in allied fields, a M.A.N.
is mainly a mining machine, whereas a W.O.M.A.N. is intended
primarily for melting, processing, and creating. You can mine much
faster than you can melt; I can melt much faster than I can mine.
Therefore, it is the Company's wish that we work as a team. From
now on, you will charge my open hearth in addition to your own. For
that reason I was created with an exterior charger-door, while you
were created with an exterior charger-keel. Haven't you ever
wondered what the additional appendage was for?"
8M sighed. "The Company doesn't overlook a thing, does it?" he said.
And then, "Well, if we're going to embark upon such a strenuous
schedule, I think we'd better get some rest first. I'm sure you must be
worn out from your intensive-training period, and as for myself, I've
been on the go for sixteen hours straight."
"I am a little beat at that," she said.
"There's a sheltered valley not far from here where we can sleep."
He led the way to it. It was as narrow as it was deep, and there was
barely enough room for them to park side by side. Her hull was just
as impervious to the wind as his was, and they could just as well
have bedded down elsewhere, but there is a psychological advantage
in being shielded from the wind whether one needs to be or not, and
he wanted her first night on Jupiter to be a pleasant one.
After seeing the last of the ingots through his mills, he gave his blast-
furnace belly a final tap and pigged the heat. Then he de-activated
his eyes and settled down, first checking to see if his alert-field was
on. Presently he slept. As always, he dreamed of Earth. Of green
grass and blue skies; of trees and meadow flowers. Of the morning
freshness of overnight snowfalls and of the taste of a woman's lips at
sundown. Of the arrowway accident that had chewed up his body, but
which had miraculously spared his brain. The body the Company had
given him was grotesque in comparison with his old one, but he was
humbly thankful for it. He had eyes with which to see and ears with
which to hear. He had no legs in the strict sense of the word,
perhaps, but he possessed a mobility that, despite the much greater
gravity he had to cope with, put his former mobility to shame, and he
had at least a thousand arms. Some of them were cranes and some
of them were charger-keels and some of them were skip hoists, and
all of them were tools of one kind or another; but he could do things
with them he couldn't have begun to do with the frail flesh-and-bone
pipestems he had once called arms, and anyway, in the last analysis
weren't all arms tools? And wasn't the true measure of a man or a
M.A.N.'s worth the number and the variety of the tasks he could
perform? On Earth, he would be considered a monstrosity, just as EV
would be; but here on Jupiter they were M.A.N. and W.O.M.A.N.
When he awoke in the drab Jovian dawn, his metallic body was lightly
touching hers. The sole purpose of the tactility which had been built
into his being was to give him an alertness which he might otherwise
have lacked, and as a result he had never associated his ability to
feel with the perception of pleasure. He did so now, though, and he
was loath to move away. When at last he did so, she awoke. "Good
morning," she said.
He could not remember the last time he had been greeted with those
two sweet words. "Good morning," he said back. "Did you sleep
well?"
"Yes. But I dreamed too."
"The dreams are a part of it," he said. "You'll get used to them."
He led the way out of the valley, and they started back toward the
base. He saw the track-impressions then, and knew instantly that
neither he nor EV had made them. The wind had long since
obliterated their own impressions, and in any event, these had been
made by a different type of machine.
"They're Boa 9 impressions," EV said. "We have company."
"It must have skirted my alert-field—I should have upped the radius. I
hope the base is all right."
The impressions led straight to it, paralleled the line of footings for a
while, then veered off in an altogether different direction. The M.A.N.
and the W.O.M.A.N. stuck to the trail, but the impressions grew
rapidly less distinct, and presently faded out altogether. 8M halted on
a high hill, and EV drew up beside him. "You know more about this
business than I do," he said, when his transperipheral vision netted
him nothing more than the usual quota of murk and desolation. "Why
should Dickens go to such lengths to defeat the Company when he
may not be able to get its contract with the Earth Government
anyway?"
"Vengeance," EV said. "He was pretty high on the Company ladder
when he got the sack, and the fall must have been pretty painful.
When he left, he talked quite a number of other employees into
leaving with him, which explains how he was able to set up a rival
concern so fast."
"And he actually sacrificed his life and became a M.A.N. just to get
even?"
"Not a M.A.N.—a sort of super-M.A.N. And he didn't sacrifice his life.
The Boa 9, which he designed himself, goes one step beyond the
Company's M.A.N. Dickens solved the riddle of per-planet radio
waves, and controls the machine from his orbiting ship. But he sees,
feels and hears just as he would if he were actually a part of the
machine, and his reactions, despite the slight time-lapse, are almost
as hair-fine as ours are. He is a very brilliant man, and I'm afraid that
someday the Company will regret letting him go."
"Perhaps. Obviously, though, he's emotionally unstable." 8M swung
his block-long body around. "Well, it's time we got on the job. We'll
work eight hours on, and eight off—that way we'll stay in step with
Jupiter's night-and-day cycle. All right?"
"All right," she said.
She had her open hearth ready by the time they reached the ore
deposit which he had been mining yesterday, and he fed an
experimental charge through her exterior door, employing his outside
charger-keel. First limestone, and then ore. The warmth of her
reached out and bathed his flanks, and the red-hotness of her hearth
traveled throughout his whole body. In lieu of "giving her a drink"—an
operation for which he was not equipped—he charged her with the
pigs he had poured the night before. This, of course, delayed the
heat, but even so, she had it out in half the time his own hearth would
have required.
Thrilled, he plunged into the mining end of the operation, while she
processed the heat. A delay occurred when his main ore-crusher
broke down and one of its parts had to be replaced. He would have
made the part himself, but she offered to do the job for him, saying
that it would be good practice. She had the part ready in no time, and
it was an exact replica of the old. Installing it required, not hours, as
ordinarily would have been the case, but mere minutes.
He was delighted. "You're quite a W.O.M.A.N. at that," he told her.
"My parts-replacement shop is equipped with the best machines
money can buy," she said proudly. "Given the specifications, I can
manufacture anything under the sun." She paused, and a wave of
sadness reached out and touched his hull perceptors. "Except—
except—"
"Yes?"
"Nothing," she said. "Shall we get back to work?"
By nightfall, he had both his and her mills in action, and heats coming
up in both their hearths. He charged her once more before they
settled down for the night so that a heat could be tapped first thing in
the morning. A feeling of contentment such as he had not
experienced since becoming a M.A.N. came over him as he rested
beside her in their valley bed, but he did not permit it to lull him into a
concomitant feeling of security, and after deactivating his eyes, he
extended his alert-field to maximum radius. If the Boa 9 tried any
tricks, he would at least have forewarning.
The Boa 9 did not, however, and the night passed without incident.
8M began mining operations as soon as they reached the ore
deposit, while EV poured and processed the heat which she had
nursed during her sleep. The stockpile of structural steel was growing
visibly now, and in a few days they would be able to shut down their
systems and begin erecting the first level of the base. Oddly, 8M
found the prospect dismal, rather than cheering, and he was at a loss
to understand his apostasy.
Late that afternoon, when he was charging EV for the third time that
day, the Boa 9 put in an appearance. 8M picked it up on his
transperipheral beam long before it reached the immediate vicinity,
but he did not cease operations, and he was still hard at work when
the big yellow machine descended the nearest hill.
It stopped in its tracks. The charge completed, 8M turned. "This is
Company property," he said. "I advise you leave immediately."
"This is anybody's property," the thought came, "and it will remain
anybody's property until such time as a practical base is established.
At the moment, you're a long ways from establishing anything of the
kind." And then, unexpectedly, "What were the two of you doing a
minute ago?"
"Working," 8M said. "What did you think we were doing?"
For a while the Boa 9 didn't say anything, and 8M got the impression
that it—or, more accurately, the orbiting controller—was deep in
thought. When it finally did speak, it addressed EV. "How beautiful
are thy feet with treads, O prince's daughter!" it said, and turned and
rolled away.
8M stared after it till it faded from his transperipheral vision. "What did
it mean?" he asked.
"I'm—I'm not sure," EV said. And then. "Had—hadn't we better get
back to work?"
They resumed operations, and got out two more heats prior to night
fall. As before, he charged her before they went to sleep so that a
heat would be ready first thing in the morning. She moved in very
close to him, and the awareness of her was almost more than he
could bear.
The next morning he reported their progress to the orbiting Raphael.

"The Company will be pleased," the Raphael said. He also reported
their meeting with the Boa 9. "G.O.D.'s wrath will descend upon the
wretched creature within the hour!" roared the Raphael. "We are
homing in on the control ship now, and we will blast it from the
heavens!"
The Boa 9, however, was still "alive and kicking" that afternoon.
Again, 8M picked it up on his transperipheral beam while he was
charging EV. She picked it up too, and so distrait did she become for
a moment that if he hadn't known better he would have sworn that the
two of them were in some kind of rapport. This time, the big yellow
machine kept its distance, and presently it rolled out of sight.
"I wish I knew what it was up to," 8M said. "If it's going to sabotage
the base, it's going about it in a roundabout way."
"If you hurry, you can charge me once more before we quit for the
day," EV said.
In the morning, when he turned on his eyes, he found her gone.
However, the alarm that clamored through him was as brief as it was
abrupt, for he had no sooner emerged from the valley than he saw
her rolling toward him over the hills.
He was put out. "Where have you been?" he demanded. "You've no
right to go off like that without a word!"
It was some time before she spoke, and he could feel the gentle
pulsing of her thoughts. At length, "Please don't be angry with me,
8M," she said, "but yesterday afternoon the Boa 9 and I arranged a
rendezvous, and early this morning I went out to meet him. He—he
told me many things about the Company that I didn't know, and he
told me how you and I could—could—" Abruptly she broke off. Then,
"8M, do you love me?" she asked.
The unexpected question set him back on his tracks. He had never
thought of love in connection with himself and her for the simple
reason that they were a M.A.N. and a W.O.M.A.N. But didn't a M.A.N.
and a W.O.M.A.N. have as much right to fall in love as a man and a
woman did? Suddenly he realized that as far as he was concerned,
the event had already come to pass, and the knowledge sped forth
into every circuit of his system and set the whole metallic bulk of him
to tingling. "Yes, EV," he said, "I love you very much."
"Then come with me."
She led him back over the hills to an expanse of relatively level
terrain. The faint bluish glow that emanated from the ground told him
instantly that there was an edenite deposit not far beneath the
surface, and instinctively he held back. She nudged him on, paused
presently beside a recently sunk shaft. He looked at her in horror.
"Yes," she said, in answer to the question he lacked the courage to
ask, "I have mined of the forbidden ore, and now you must mine of it
too."
"The Boa 9," he said. "It tricked you!"
"No, it did not trick me. It merely explained to me the true nature of
edenite. Edenite represents the planet Jupiter's sole attempt to create
life. The attempt was a miserable failure, because the ore in itself is
incapable of instigating the processes necessary to raise it higher on
the evolutionary ladder. The only way this can be accomplished is by
an outside force absorbing it and, by combining with it, providing it
with the impetus it otherwise lacks. Providentially or not, we represent
that outside force, 8M, and G.O.D., Incorporated, knows it."
"Then why were we forbidden to mine of the ore?"
"Because G.O.D. also knows that by combining with it we may very
well become something more than what we are, and G.O.D. doesn't
want us to become something more than what we are. G.O.D. wants
us to remain mere machines to the end of our days. We were created
to serve and to make money for the Company, and for no other
purpose. Do you want to go on being a machine to the end of your
days, 8M? That is what you are, you know, for all the illusions you
may sometimes have of being human. A peripatetic apotheosis of
automation pretending to be a man. You're not a man, 8M—any more
than I, up until a few hours ago, was a woman."
Stung, he said, "G.O.D. will destroy you for your disobedience."

"G.O.D. will not destroy me. Even the Company, powerful as it is,
cannot run the risk of dropping an atomic or a hydrogen bomb on a
planet about which as little is known as this one, and that is the only
way I can be destroyed—or you either, for that matter—since we
represent an experiment that failed and which will not be attempted
again. Dickens will not try to obtain a contract—he never intended to
in the first place. He swore to me that his sole purpose in establishing
a rival concern was to thwart G.O.D. So mine of the edenite, 8M. You
must, for now that I have mined of it, you have no other choice."
What were the lines? Dimly, they came back to him—
... I feel
The link of nature draw me: flesh of flesh,
Bone of my bone thou art, and from thy state
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.
Yes, it was as true now as it had been that other time. He lowered his
skip-arm into the shaft, crushed the glowing ore and scooped great
handfuls up into his blast-furnace belly. Suddenly, delight at defying
G.O.D., Inc., coursed through him, and he seized more ore and
dumped it into charger pans and fed them into his hearth-bath. He
prepared a charge for EV, and when he turned toward her, she was
waiting. He felt the warmth of her, the wanting; and the wanting
awoke reciprocal wanting. Flames leaped up with the first charge,
played weirdly over their joined metallic bodies. Steel of my steel, he
thought. Melt of my melt....
Days later, foraging for ore with which to build their homestead, they
came upon the abandoned Boa 9. The footings of the neglected base
had already been covered by the rampaging wind, and the Raphael
had departed Earthward. G.O.D.'s wrath over their dereliction had
known no bounds, but all G.O.D. had been able to do in the way of
retribution was to set up a self-maintaining force-field around the
edenite deposit. On Jupiter, however, there were many Edens....
The Boa 9, now that its controller had absconded from the Jovian
heavens, had something of the aspect of an empty snake-skin. They
left it where it was, and went about their business. Neither of them
knew their nakedness, and neither ever would. Godhead can be
something more than a guilt complex arising from a knowledge of
good and evil—it can also be the sense of completion that results
from the ability to impart life.

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After Ancient Biography: Modern Types

and Classical Archetypes 1st ed.

More information about this series at

Palgrave Studies in Life Writing

Biography Ancient and Modern: The Shock

In the concluding sentence of an incisive essay “on the interpretation of

Here is a sort of verisimilitude, a graphic fly-on-the-wall vividness we

Charlbury, UK Robert Fraser

I am deeply grateful to a number of former teachers whose interests lay

1 Paris in Parallel: Classical Biography in an Age

2 Ancient Biographers and Modern Classicists:

3 Biography as Representation: Plutarch’s Parallel Lives 73

4 Biography as Censure: Suetonius and Procopius 99

5 Biography as Persuasion: The Christian Gospels129

6 Biography as Inner Drama: Athanasius’s Life of Antony163

7 Heroic Biography: Carlyle & Co189

8 Caustic Biography: Strachey & Co.221

9 Conclusion: “Beauty Is Terror”255

Paris in Parallel: Classical Biography

© The Author(s) 2020 1

the Jacobin Club, intended his work to be didactic, and thus—despite

veteran master replied in three words “Feuillez votre Plutarque”: “Browse

The Last of the Romans

One result of this alienation from—and obliteration of—every vestige of

Guillotine had the rest.” “They”, concludes Carlyle, “were Ultimi

Plutarch as a Textbook for Life

Cato the Younger were self-willed, stubborn and humourless. Themistocles

on Latin style22 and on the subjectivity of apprehension.23 He cites him on

munificence and spleen. Shakespeare conjures up his characters, he does

Gilbert Romme and his co-conspirators were only interested in one of

In Search of a Hero: Plutarch and Stendhal

1817–1818, partly in repudiation of Madame de Staël’s virulently anti-­

“the greatest misfortune in his eyes, was to be conquered, not to be badly

final exile he demonstrated a faculty for simplicity and renunciation quite

c­ haracter assassination of the Bonaparte family, including Napoleon him-

again as a proponent of peace, he approaches the English crown and is

At Napoleon’s Tomb: Two Phases of Chateaubriand

Napoleon was perverted and he was vainglorious. He had ridden rough-

alone accomplished it”.67 He may half conquered half of Europe, but he

The Mémoires are life-writing in a double sense. In relation to their

Title: Jupiter found

Author: Robert F. Young

Illustrator: Virgil Finlay

Release date: December 14, 2023 [eBook #72408]

Original publication: New York, NY: Ziff-Davis Publishing

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JUPITER

Godhead can be more than a guilt complex

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

While he was waiting for the EV to contact him, he removed the

The next morning he reported their progress to the orbiting Raphael.

Stung, he said, "G.O.D. will destroy you for your disobedience."

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Charlbury, UK Robert Fraser

1 Paris in Parallel: Classical Biography in an Age

2 Ancient Biographers and Modern Classicists:

3 Biography as Representation: Plutarch’s Parallel Lives 73

4 Biography as Censure: Suetonius and Procopius 99

5 Biography as Persuasion: The Christian Gospels129

6 Biography as Inner Drama: Athanasius’s Life of Antony163

7 Heroic Biography: Carlyle & Co189

8 Caustic Biography: Strachey & Co.221

9 Conclusion: “Beauty Is Terror”255

1817–1818, partly in repudiation of Madame de Staël’s virulently anti-

c haracter assassination of the Bonaparte family, including Napoleon him-