Lives by Plutarch - 4 - Cimon
Cimon
Quote
"I too, Metrobius the scribe, used to pray the following prayer: To live out all the days of my life in the company of Cimon, that godlike man, a paragon of unselfishness, in every way the best and foremost of all the Greeks."
Notes
Cimon's father dies in prison where he's put until he can pay a fine of 50 talents. This leaves Cimon and his sister on their own to take care of themselves (no mention of where his mother is), and it forces him to take responsibility for himself early.
He grows and shows strong leadership early, too. When the Persians are invading and Athens is trying to evacuate the city (mentioned in the Life of Themistocles), Cimon is the first to step up and walk onboard the ship, which helps boost morale and get other people on board.
His reputation keeps growing and he's seen as a more stable and honourable character than Themistocles. He's easy on the eyes, too, says Plutarch.
He has lots of military victories against the Persians and he becomes pretty wealthy from them. But he's very generous with his wealth. He allows people to come onto his property to pick fruit and vegetables, and he hosts a free meal, open to everyone, every day.
However, this generosity brings some criticisms against him, too. People are suspicious that he's "pandering to the rabble" and being too much of a populist. But Cimon is careful to remain balanced and to "keep the power of the people within it's proper limits", as well as avoiding bribery and corruption.
Cimon is actually playing an important, stabilizing role in the government, keeping revolt and revolution at bay. But during one voyage when he's away the people overthrow the government and take over. He comes back and tries to bring back an aristocratic government but the people attack him for it. People say he had an incestuous relationship with his sister, and they accuse him of being too close with the Spartans, who are Athens' main rival. Admittedly, he is friendly with the Spartans and he shares their preference for aristocracy and thrift.
An earthquake strikes Sparta and they're looking for help from other Greeks. Cimon wants to help them but this only adds to his troubles with the Athenians and they banish him.
But Athens suffers some losses after losing Cimon and they eventually ask him to come back. Plutarch writes: "And this just goes to show how in those days quarrels were conducted with civility, feelings were moderate, and people had no difficulty in restraining them if the public good was at stake; even ambition, which is the most dominant and powerful human emotion, used to be subordinate to national emergencies." Not sure if he's making some comment about his own period here.
Cimon leads the Athenians in a new expedition against Persia because "the Athenians were incapable of keeping still." There are some bad omens that seem to be prophesying his death, but he's determined to go anyway. He's spurred on by the rumour that Themistocles, who had joined with the Persians at this point, would come out and fight. But Themistocles poisons himself instead of going to face the Athenians again, as recorded in the Life of Themistocles.
Cimon does end up dying during this expedition. And without him, the Greeks devolve into more war and fighting with each other.
Extras
Plutarch includes some of his methods and beliefs about biographical writing in this life. He writes:
"When painters are faced with a slight blemish of some kind on the beautiful and pleasing figures they portray, we do not expect them either to omit it altogether (which would stop their portraits from being true likenesses) or to stress it (which would make them ugly to look at). By the same token, since it is difficult — or, more probably, impossible — to represent a man's life as entirely free from shortcomings and blemishes, we should supply the truth, confident in its versimilitude, when dealing with the good aspects of our subject's life. However, the flaws and defects which, prompted by emotion or by political necessity, taint his actions we should regard as lapses from virtue rather than as manifestations of vice. We should not, then, be particularly eager to overemphasize these flaws in our account, but should write instead as if we felt ashamed of the fact that human nature fails to produce any character which is absolutely good or unequivocally virtuous."
Plutarch looks at the lives of these men he writes about with generosity and humanity, not moral superiority and judgment or unrealistic hero worship. It's wrong to think that anyone's life can be completely virtuous (though it's interesting that this section comes in the life of Cimon who seemed to have barely any flaws at all), but it's also unfair to jump on people's flaws and cast judgment without having a full understanding of who they were, and of what human nature is.
It's common to use history merely as a means of justifying something in the present, usually some ideological or political position. This necessarily involves picking out the details that suit your purpose and ignoring or suppressing the rest, and transforming three-dimensional human lives into one-dimensional caricatures.
Maybe the bulwark against that is a more sober understanding of human nature, which doesn't easily conform itself to any ideology. It's messy and complicated by our vices and our shortcomings, but looking at it this way can also be a source of inspiration for what's possible. We can see and feel the resonances in ourselves in these portraits preserved by Plutarch from thousands of years ago.
The fact that they have lasted so long is a testament to the value of pursuing the truth in human nature and history and seeing it for what it is, not twisting it to suit a self-interested belief system that is here one day and gone tomorrow.