How to Be a Leader

An Ancient Guide to Wise Leadership

Plutarch, Jeffrey Beneker, Jeffrey Beneker

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780691197807
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Antike & klassische Philosophie

Timeless advice on how to be a successful leader in any field The ancient biographer and essayist Plutarch thought deeply about the leadership qualities of the eminent Greeks and Romans he profiled in his famous—and massive— Lives, including politicians and generals such as Pericles, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Mark Antony. Luckily for us, Plutarch distilled what he learned about wise leadership in a handful of essays, which are filled with essential lessons for experienced and aspiring leaders in any field today. In How to Be a Leader, Jeffrey Beneker presents the most important of these essays in lively new translations accompanied by an enlightening introduction, informative notes, and the original Greek on facing pages.In "To an Uneducated Leader, " "How to Be a Good Leader, " and "Should an Old Man Engage in Politics?" Plutarch explains the characteristics of successful leaders, from being guided by reason and exercising self-control to being free from envy and the love of power, illustrating his points with memorable examples drawn from legendary Greco-Roman lives. He also explains how to train for leadership, persuade and deal with colleagues, manage one's career, and much more.Writing at the height of the Roman Empire, Plutarch suggested that people should pursue positions of leadership only if they are motivated by "judgment and reason"—not "rashly inspired by the vain pursuit of glory, a sense of rivalry, or a lack of other meaningful activities." His wise counsel remains as relevant as ever.

SHOULD AN OLD MAN
ENGAGE IN POLITICS?

Plutarch conceived of an “old man” as someone over fifty years old who had spent twenty to thirty years in service to the state. He claims that he himself was senior when he wrote the essay, and he addresses it to a certain Euphanes, whom he describes as being of the same age and as having followed a similar political career, though in Athens instead of Chaeronea. The essay is divided into two parts. In the first, which I have entitled “The Value of the Senior Politician,” Plutarch addresses the question of whether an aged leader ought to retire. His answer is unequivocally “no,” and in giving it, he argues for the great benefit to be gained from older people. They bring experience, wisdom, and level heads to policy making, and having already earned their reputations, they lack the ambition, impetuousness, and contentiousness that drive the young. In the second part, entitled “The Role of the Senior Politician,” Plutarch more fully develops the image of the elder as teacher and mentor. The advice that he claims the older generation may impart to the younger is in fact quite similar to the advice that he himself gives to the young Menemachus in How to Be a Good Leader. Plutarch also explains that the skills and experience possessed by senior leaders cannot be acquired in any other way than through constant and life-long political activity. Moreover, dedicated politicians commit all aspects and phases of their lives to serving their cities and the people, working on their behalf even when they are not holding office.

This essay has many correspondences with Cicero’s How to Grow Old, which is framed as a dialogue between Cato the Elder and two younger men, Scipio Aemilianus and Gaius Laelius. Plutarch draws on the experiences of all three of these Roman politicians as he makes his arguments in the present essay. He seems to have felt that Cato in particular was an excellent example for how leaders ought to conduct themselves during the final phase of their careers.

1. I am well aware, O Euphanes, that you admire Pindar and so are often repeating something that he has articulated well and persuasively: “When the contests are being set, a pretext casts one’s courage into utter darkness.”¹ Now with respect to political contests, our hesitations and weaknesses find abundant pretexts, and as a final excuse they bring up our old age, just as though they were making “the sacred move.”² And with this move they seem to blunt and shame our ambition, convincing us that there is some proper finale not only for athletes but also for politicians. This being so, I think that I should explain for you what I regularly conclude for myself about being involved in politics in old age. I do not want us to abandon our long companionship on the journey that we have made together till now, nor to cast aside our political life, which is like an old and familiar friend, and switch to a new, unfamiliar life that will be too short to become familiar and friendly. My hope instead is that we will remain true to the life we chose in the beginning, when we decided that “living” and “living nobly” were one and the same goal. Unless, of course, we intend to prove in the short period of our life which remains that we lived the longer part in vain and ignobly.

THE VALUE OF THE
SENIOR POLITICIAN

Contrary to what someone once said to Dionysius, tyranny does not in fact make for a noble funeral shroud. But Dionysius also combined his long reign as tyrant with injustice, which made his disaster even more complete. And later, when Diogenes saw Dionysius’s son in Corinth, living as a private citizen after also having been a tyrant himself, rightly did the philosopher say to him, “How unworthy of your stature is the fortune you’re experiencing, Dionysius! For you ought not to live here among us, free and without fear, but like your father you ought to live on into old age back home, hidden away in the tyrant’s palace.” However, when people are accustomed to make themselves useful to the state as private citizens no less than when they hold office, the reputation they earn in life through their democratic and law-abiding political activity becomes the reputation they enjoy in death. This is the reputation that makes for a genuinely noble funeral shroud, because it “last of all, sinks down into the earth,” as Simonides says. But there is no such reputation for those whose love of humanity and love of goodness die before they do, or whose zeal for true beauty and goodness fails before their desire for basic bodily needs, just as in the soul the practical and divine elements are more fleeting than the emotional and physical elements.³ Nor is it right to say, or to agree when others say it, that only while earning a profit do we fail to grow tired in our efforts. We should instead improve on the saying of Thucydides, believing not only that “love of honor is ageless,”⁴ but also that community and politics, which even among ants and bees endure to the end, are ageless as well. For no one has ever seen a honey bee that has become a drone due to old age, in the way that some people believe it is best for politicians, once past their prime, to sit at home taking their meals and to remain out of the way, watching their practical expertise become dull through disuse, as an iron tool is blunted by rust. For Cato the Elder used to say that we ought not willingly add to old age, which has many of its own problems, the shame of misbehavior. And of the many forms of misbehavior, idleness and cowardice and moral weakness bring more shame than any other to an old person who is descending from public service to women’s work in the home, or who oversees the reapers and the threshers in the field. We may rightly ask that person, “What has become of Oedipus and his famous riddles?”⁵

In contrast to those who retire early, what about those who commence their political careers in old age rather than early in life, as they say Epimenides slept away his youth and awoke as an old man fifty years later? These people set aside the quiet life that they have lived for so long and throw themselves into competitions and offices, being unaccustomed, unpracticed, and unconversant with the business of politics and the people involved. This scenario could allow some critic to say, as the Pythia did, “You’ve come too late” seeking office and public leadership; you are knocking at the door to the general’s headquarters in the wrong season of life. You are like a party guest who is quite ignorant of social norms and so arrives late at night, or like a foreigner, but not one who changes location or country, but one who exchanges a known way of life for one that is completely unfamiliar. For the saying of Simonides, “The city teaches the man,” is true in the case of those who still have time to be retrained and to learn a new lesson. Even this education is barely accomplished via many political contests and public affairs, if the city, at just the right moment, lays hold of a nature that is able to withstand toil and misery with ease.⁶ This advice will strike a chord with those who are just beginning a political career in old age.

2. On the other hand, however, we also observe that youths and people just starting out are turned away from public affairs by those who are sensible. The laws testify to this through the heralds at the assemblies, since they do not set the likes of Alcibiades and Pytheas upon the speaker’s platform first,⁷ but rather they summon those who are more than fifty years old to speak and give advice. This is because older politicians have plenty of experience and are no strangers to daring deeds, and so they are not tempted to score victories over their political opponents, as younger people are. Now Cato the Elder, when he was on trial at more than eighty years old, said that it was difficult, having lived his life with one generation, to defend himself before another. And everyone agrees that Caesar (that is Augustus, the one who defeated Antony) made his administration quite a bit more kinglike and advantageous to the people near the end of his life. Augustus himself was taming the youth severely by means of habits and laws, and when they raised an uproar he said, “Listen, young men, to an old man, to whom old men used to listen when he was young.” The political leadership of Pericles was most powerful in his old age, when he convinced the Athenians to undertake even the war.⁸ And when the Athenians were eager to do battle against sixty thousand hoplites at an inopportune moment, he stood in their way and prevented them, all but sealing up the people’s weapons and the keys to the city’s gates. But what Xenophon has written about Agesilaus is worth quoting verbatim:⁹ “To what youth was that man’s old age not clearly superior? Who in their prime was as fearsome to his political enemies as Agesilaus was at the very end of his life? Whom were his military enemies gladder to have out of the way than Agesilaus, even though he died quite old? Who but Agesilaus gave courage to the allies, even when he was already near the end of his life? What young man was more missed by his friends than Agesilaus although he died an old man?”

3. Old age did not keep those leaders from performing such great deeds. But as for us who live easily nowadays in political systems that include neither tyranny nor any war or siege, should we exhibit fear when facing peaceful conflicts and rivalries that are for the most part settled justly by means of law and debate? If we do, we are admitting that we are inferior not only to the generals and popular leaders of the past, but even to the poets and teachers and actors. Indeed, Simonides won a choral contest in old age, as this epigram demonstrates with its closing lines: “For his training of the chorus, glory followed Simonides, the eighty-year-old son of Leoprepes.” And Sophocles, they say, in order to acquit himself against the charge of dementia brought by his children, read aloud the first choral song from his Oedipus at Colonus, which begins as follows: “You have arrived, stranger, at the land’s mightiest houses in this country famed for horses, shining Colonus, where the sweet-voiced nightingale comes most often to sing, down in the green glens.”¹⁰ The song was so obviously magnificent that Sophocles, they say, was escorted from the court, as if from a theater, to the applause and cheers of those in attendance. And everyone agrees that Sophocles wrote this brief epigram: “At the age of fifty-five, Sophocles wrote a song for Herodotus.” Death snatched Philemon the comic poet and Alexis, too, as they were performing on stage and receiving crowns. And Eratosthenes and Philochorus report that Polus the tragic actor, at seventy years of age, performed in eight tragedies over four days just before he died.

4. Is it not a shame, then, that the old people who appear on the stage are viewed as more noble than those who appear on the speaker’s platform, and who, after withdrawing from the contests that are truly sacred, set aside their political role and take up instead something inconceivable? For the role of a farmer is humble after playing a king.¹¹ Demosthenes says that the Paralus was treated unworthily because it was a sacred ship, but Meidias nonetheless used it to transport wood and vine props and feed for animals.¹² On the same basis, will not politicians appear to one and all to have put themselves voluntarily “out to pasture,” as they say, if they abandon directorships of games, leadership of the Boeotian cities, and presidencies of Amphictyonic Councils, but then are later observed distributing barley and crushed olives and shearing sheep? To take on menial and common work after practicing politics is like stripping away the dress of a free and modest woman, replacing it with an apron, and then forcing her to work in a tavern. For in this way, the dignity and stature of one’s political virtue is ruined when it is transferred to managing the household and moneymaking.

But if—and this is the only option that remains—one gives the names “relaxation and enjoyment” to “high living and luxury” and then invites politicians to grow old in that environment as they fade quietly away, I do not know which of these two shameful pictures describes that life better. Maybe it is that of the sailors who abandon their ship still under sail and before they even reach port, and then spend the whole rest of their lives indulging in sexual pleasures. Or, as some artists playfully and inaccurately represent Hercules at the court of Omphale—wearing a saffron robe and submitting to the Lydian maidservants, fanning himself and curling his hair—shall we likewise entertain politicians extravagantly after stripping them of their lion skins and making them recline at the table to forever enjoy music and be charmed by the aulos?¹³ And in doing so, shall we be undeterred by Pompey the Great’s admonishment of Lucullus? Now Lucullus, after his military and political career, gave himself up to baths, dinners, sex in the daytime, prolonged tedium, and the construction of buildings such as a young man would undertake, while he criticized Pompey for a love of holding office and a love of honor that he said were inappropriate for his age. Pompey, in response, said that it was in fact more unseasonable for an old man to indulge in luxurious living than to continue serving in government. And further, when a doctor prescribed that Pompey should eat a thrush when he was sick, but the bird was out of season and hard to procure, someone told him that many thrushes were being raised on Lucullus’s estate. He did not send for one, however, but instead he exclaimed, “So, Pompey would not survive if Lucullus were not a hedonist?”

5. Even if our human nature seeks pleasure and joy ...