On Plutarch's Roman Concept

As a great Roman historian who had the blood relationship and deep feelings with Greek, Plutarch, the Roman citizen, was deeply influenced by the glorious history and civilization of Greek, which led him to judge the Roman society with Greek standard, and took morality and education as the foundation of a country. As a result, Plutarch gave criticism and dissatisfaction to the lack of morality and virtue, and imperfection of education appeared in the Roman society, which reflected his Greek glory and deep patriotic feelings from blood relationship, civilization and politics life in his limited living environment. At the same time, Plutarch realized that history could not go backward and Greek had been a far away history, he was thankful to the peace living environment that the Roman brought to the Greeks, and had been praising the Roman's achievement of political, army and excellent social usage, suggesting the Greeks in government of the Roman pursing for equal status and cooperation with the Romans in every field, which distinctly revealed Plutarch's contradictory Roman Perception. Base on this, the author translated large quantity of books written by Plutarch and studied a lot of classic literatures, then analyzed and investigated the connotation, characteristics and origin of Plutarch's contradictory Roman Perception, together with the inspiration about history study which can be revealed from this research.This thesis includes two parts, which are introduction and the text.Part one is introduction. The author firstly discussed the importance of this research from literature and reality significance, then reorganized related materials and current situation about study of Plutarch all over the world, in order to give an abundant historical material foundation to further investigate Plutarch's Roman Perception.Part two is the text, which includes three chapters.Chapter one, it was started from the history that Roman conquered Greek, which provided the complicated historical background for the research of Plutarch's Roman Perception. Then the Roman Perception was defined from conception, and the Greeks under government of Roman were illustrated. Through analyzing Plutarch's books and related literatures, the connotation of Plutarch s Roman Perception was summarized, which including the praising of Greek glorious tradition and virtue civilization, eulogizing of Greek achievement, criticism and dissatisfaction about morality lacking of Roman on the contrary, while he had been praising the Roman's achivement of political,army and excellent social usage, suggesting the Greeks in government of the Roman pursing for equal status and cooperation with the Romans in every field. A necessary historical background was given for investigation of the characteristics and origin of Plutarch's Roman Perception.Chapter two, the cherish and praising of Greek, criticism and dissatisfaction of Roman current situation in Plutarch's living environment were discussed from the range of blood relationship, civilization and politics. Besides, Plutarch's acceptance of Roman was also concluded from the truth that he admitted history could not go backward and the equal status of Greek-Roman, also he had done a lot in Roman's peace environments, social custom and politics cooperation. So, the characteristic of Plutarch's Roman Perception is concluded to be contradiction, taking historical research methodology as the main start point, the origin of Plutarch's Contradictory Roman Perception was analyzed from the complicated historical background according to the historical materialism point of view that social existence determines social consciousness. The cultural origin of Plutarch's Roman Perception was discussed by investigating the brilliant civilization and history tradition from the anthropology point of view. The promotion of Plutarch's Roman Perception was investigated from his moral history perception for morality and his political history perception for equal cooperation and republic. Origin of the Roman Perception was also discussed from Plutarch's the god can decide everything, this perception which was analyzed in compare with Polibus's historical inevitability of Roman conquest by the method of history comparison. The origin of Plutarch's Contradictory Roman Perception was also investigated from the policy which Roman's emperor had made for the Greek. In this chapter, the origin of Plutarch's Contradictory Roman Perception was mainly discussed from these five aspects described above.Chapter three, after discussing of Plutarch's Contradictory Roman Perception in the previous three chapters, it mainly focuses on the inspirations of Plutarch's Roman Perception from two aspects. Firstly, the author believes that research methods of psychology and anthropology should be brought into history study to enrich the connotation and pursue for the truth. Then, the author thinks that a historian should develop the right sense of worth, regard problems with historical insight, and take the history events seriously to give better services to history study, in case of sinking into the wrong perception of foreordination.