Plutarch closes his paired biography of the Athenian lawgiver Solon and the Roman consul Poplicola by weighing them point for point, arguing that Poplicola in practice fulfilled the very definition of happiness Solon had only proposed in words.
This short essay is the formal synkrisis, or comparison, that Plutarch appends to the paired Lives of Solon and Poplicola (Publius Valerius Publicola), one of the Parallel Lives matching a famous Greek with a famous Roman. Rather than narrating new events, it reasons back over material already told in the two preceding biographies, testing each man's career against Solon's own recorded sayings, including his famous conversation with Croesus about who is the happiest of men and his verses on wealth, death, and the desire to be missed by friends.
Plutarch argues that Solon's standard for a blessed life, exemplified by the obscure Athenian Tellus, fits Poplicola even better than it fits Tellus himself: Poplicola died honored, mourned by the whole city, victorious, and free of the taint of ill-gotten wealth. From there the comparison moves through statesmanship, showing how Poplicola consciously modeled Rome's new republican offices on Solon's Athenian reforms, and through political courage, contrasting Solon's failure to stop the rise of the tyrant Peisistratus with Poplicola's success in permanently expelling the Tarquin kings. It also weighs their military records and their handling of territorial disputes, using the Megarian war and the loss of the Roman camp to Porsenna as test cases, before concluding that circumstance, not character, explains why one man's constitution collapsed and the other's endured.
The piece matters historically as a specimen of Plutarch's comparative method itself: a Greek writer under Roman rule using biography to argue that Greek and Roman greatness were commensurable, testing wisdom literature (Solon's sayings) against a life actually lived. It also functions as primary evidence for how a first- or second-century CE audience understood the founding of the Roman Republic as parallel to, and in some ways surpassing, Athens's own founding reforms.
“For consider the pronouncement Solon made to Croesus about happiness, how it fits Poplicola better than it fits Tellus.”
— Comparison Of Poplicola With Solon
“'let not death come to me unwept, but may I, in dying, cause my friends grief and lamentation'—for Poplicola, in dying, brought tears and longing and dejection over himself not only upon friends and kinsmen but upon the whole city, upon many tens of thousands”
— Comparison Of Poplicola With Solon
“so that if Solon was wisest of all men, Poplicola was happiest of all.”
— Comparison Of Poplicola With Solon
“if anyone should attempt to make himself tyrant, the one imposes the penalty of law upon him once he is caught, while the other grants that he may be killed even before trial.”
— Comparison Of Poplicola With Solon
“For Solon himself lived to see his own constitution overthrown, whereas Poplicola's arrangement kept the city stable and well-governed all the way up until the civil wars”
— Comparison Of Poplicola With Solon
A synkrisis is the short formal comparison Plutarch attaches to most pairs of Lives, weighing the Greek and Roman subject against each other point by point rather than telling new stories. Here it closes the Solon-Poplicola pair by testing Solon's own sayings about happiness, wealth, and death against how each man's life actually turned out.
Poplicola, formally Publius Valerius Publicola, was one of the founding consuls of the Roman Republic after the expulsion of the kings. Plutarch pairs him with Solon because both men reshaped their city's government toward the people, Solon through Athenian legal reform and Poplicola through the young Roman republic's offices and laws.
Yes, directly. He writes that if Solon was the wisest of all men, Poplicola was the happiest of all, arguing that the goods Solon prayed for as greatest, honor, sufficient wealth honestly kept, and a mourned death, Poplicola actually achieved and held onto until the end.
He credits Solon's influence for the right of appeal to the people (paralleling appeal to Athenian jurors), an enlarged council rather than an entirely new one, and treasurers set over public funds so that no single ruler controlled both power and money.
Both men are shown resisting tyranny, but differently: Solon refused an offered tyranny over Athens and later could not stop Peisistratus from seizing one anyway, while Poplicola, holding power that was effectively tyrannical, deliberately made it more democratic and helped permanently drive out the Tarquin kings.
He treats it as calculated statesmanship rather than defeat, comparing it to Solon's recovery of Salamis. By conceding land and trusting Porsenna as arbiter, Poplicola preserved the city as a whole and ended the war while keeping the enemy's own war equipment, a trade Plutarch presents as gaining more by yielding less.
He argues that while Solon was more brilliant at the start, acting alone to accomplish the greatest reforms, Poplicola was more fortunate at the end because his constitutional arrangements kept Rome stable for generations, whereas Solon lived to see his own laws overturned after he left them undefended.
It is part of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, specifically the concluding comparison for the paired biographies of Solon and Poplicola; it assumes readers already know the narrative details recounted in those two preceding Lives.
Aemilius Paulus · Agesilaus · Agis · Alcibiades · Alexander · Antony · Aratus · Aristides · Artaxerxes · Caesar · Caius Gracchus · Caius Marius