Biografia ca linșaj – cazul politicianului Cleon în Viețile paralele ale lui Plutarh
Biography as lynching - the case of the politician Cleon in Plutarch's Parallel Lives

Summary/Abstract: Few personalities in Antiquity had a biography in the true sense of the word. For many others we can create a biography from literary testimonies, subjective of course, always to be judged critically and in context, trying each time to infer the reasons why a personality is presented in one way or another and how they actually were. A textbook case of a politician whom the sources portray in a much harsher light than he probably was, is Cleon, the politician who succeeded Pericles as ruler of Athens in the early part of the Peloponnesian War. Despite his reputation for objectivity, Thucydides presents him in negative tones, contrasting him with the more moderate Pericles. Around the same time, Aristophanes practically lynches him in his earliest surviving comedies, the Acharnians, and especially in the Knights. Plutarch, in the Lives of Pericles and Nikias, takes up the information given by the classical authors, to which are added numerous other sources now lost. The paper aims to show how we can try to distinguish between slanderous and true testimonies, taking the case of Cleon as an example, and how we can draw a biography perhaps closer to the truth than the one offered by the surviving literary sources from Antiquity. But we start, ὕστερον πρότερον, from the Lives of Plutarch and try to verify the information by going back in time to the classical authors.

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