When Hermes Enters: Towards a Typology of the Silences of Plutarch's Narrator and Their Uses in Characterization

This paper explores Plutarch's employment of silence as a means for the characterization of his figures, and especially of his main protagonists in the Lives. The focus in this paper is cases where the narrator is silent and refrains from providing information or from mentioning key elements or features. While undoubtedly this presentation is a manner of abridging material and advancing the plot, the claim here is that it also serves a narratological purpose. In these cases, the narrator mimics the characters depicted and thus sheds light on their personality in two ways: (1) The absence of certain details from the portrayal underscores the narrow vision of the characters themselves, who are partially blind to their surroundings and are also not aware of their own vices. A special case would be scenes in which an actual silence of the characters is emphasized by the narrator's own omission. (2) The narrator's selection of material, resulting in the disappearance of certain features and figures from the account, highlights the moral choices made by the characters themselves. The examples given in this paper display Plutarch's techniques of indicating that some silence is involved: (a) by playing with the readers' expectations stemming from their acquaintance with external accounts (intertextual silence); (b) by gradually revealing in the narration that some details were previously skipped over (narrational silence); (c) through a comparison with other Lives or the synkrisis (intratextual silence); (d) by explicitly acknowledging an omission on the narrator's part (Herodotean silence)'the latter case would address the De malignitate Herodoti as well.