Into whatever shape he may have systematized his views, and however popular his treatment of them, Plutarch ranked with the philosophers. If he was opposed to Stoicism and Epicureanism, he was, like other philosophers, no less opposed to sophistic. To him the representatives of that art were apt to seem shallow and showy.[6]
He held, with the Socratics in general, that the basis of right action is knowledge, and he had no belief in empiricism. Not that he rejected either established moral views or established religion. He was no sceptic, still less an atheist. As Friedländer has well argued, there was no ancient cult of atheism. Plutarch, indeed, is remarkably receptive in the matter of deities. The Egyptian worship of Isis and Osiris, which had made great progress throughout the Roman Empire, appeared to him equally tenable with the worship practised by his own ancestors. In the polytheism in which he acquiesced, such divinities were only other forms of those known in Hellas, and he found no difficulty in reconciling and combining the two sets of notions and cults. He was deeply tinged with Orientalism, though his culture and his natural good taste made him despise corybantic demonstrations and what Friedländer has called ‘dirty mortifications’. He held the Eranian belief in daemonic agencies, which acted upon mankind from the one side as the gods did from the other. If he appears to rise to the conception of ‘God’ in the singular, the word is rather to be taken as denoting the sum of divine wisdom and beneficent dispensation. Like all the best minds of his own and many a previous generation, he found moral difficulties in accepting the characters ascribed to the deities in the best literature of earlier Greece, and therefore, while approving of the established education in poetry, he necessarily felt some qualms as to the possible effects. Poetry served in the schools ‘as introduction to philosophy, history, geography, and astronomy’, and it had much to do with the formation of religious and ethical notions. Homer, Pindar, Sophocles, and Menander were ‘learned and wise’, and boys were brought to regard them as inspired. Hence Plutarch’s treatise on _Poets as Moral Teachers of the Young_. The point of view in that essay is not, indeed, entirely rational. It was not so easy for Plutarch as it is for us to realize that moral and religious ideas in Greek literature had passed through an evolution corresponding to the development of intellect and society. Instead of frankly recognizing the limitations of Homer or the inconsistencies of the dramatists in this respect, he puts a highly ingenious constraint upon the connexion between any dubious sentiment and its context. It is only when he fails in such a _tour de force_ that he consents to censure the poet. In this procedure he was by no means the first. The battle of the ‘takers of objection’ (προβληματικοί) and the ‘solvers of difficulties’ (λυτικοί) was centuries old. That Plutarch should range himself as far as possible with the solvers is a circumstance which would naturally follow both from his love of literature and from his constitutionally reverential temperament.