Plutarch’s Protean Tyrant
By Marcaline Boyd
The consensus of scholarly opinion holds that Plutarch condemned tyranny as the worst political regime (Teixeira 1988). One prevalent line of thinking has seen Plutarch’s tyrant as a type — a perverted ruler, destructive to his community (Wardman 1974, 49–57; Aalders 1982, 35).
Following Diogenes: Cynic Leadership in Plutarch and Beyond
By Inger Kuin
Plutarch treats the legendary meeting of Alexander the Great and Diogenes the Cynic in detail no fewer than three times. Given the popularity of this anecdote, starting already with Cicero (Tusc. 5.92), Plutarch’s interest in it is not surprising as such. What I investigate in this paper is how he presents the meeting in different contexts.
Emotional Intelligence and Leadership: Hannibal and Scipio
By Regina Loehr
“Emotional Intelligence” has become part of common parlance and a major and controversial consideration in modern conceptions of leadership. Much like the modern world, where “emotional intelligence” was mostly an unarticulated but still valuable quality until recently, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not seem to name or discuss “emotional intelligence” as its own category in considering a successful leader. In this paper, I examine the value of emotional intelligence in ancient historical accounts of successful leaders.
Theoretical Models of Rulership in Roman and Early Byzantine Panegyrics
By Sviatoslav Dmitriev
Roman and early Byzantine panegyrics are typically approached indiscriminately as reflecting the aspirations of Roman senatorial aristocracy (Straub 1964; Braund 1989). In political terms, they are believed to have followed Pliny’s Speech of Thanks to the emperor Trajan as a specimen of this genre par excellence, outlining the ideal images of “good” and “bad” rulers (Ronning 2007; Pilar García Ruiz 2013; Gibson and Rees 2013; Kelly 2013; Formisano 2015; Rees 2018).
Plutarch’s Politicians and the People: The Politics of Honour in Pericles, Cimon and the Greek Cities of the Roman Empire
By Thierry Oppeneer
This paper examines Plutarch’s ideas on political leadership and euergetism in the lives of Cimon and Pericles against the background of second-century AD city politics. Up till now, scholars have mainly explored the Lives as sources on the periods they describe or as programmes for moral self-improvement (Pelling 1995; Duff 1999; Stadter 1997, 2003-2004; Chrysanthou 2018).