The nonverbal text and political context in Plutarch's biography Alexander

Abstract

This paper investigates the indirect forms of psychological insight in Life of Alexander by Plutarch, which includes not only the portrayal of some gestures (the popular gesture of “taking hold of one's hand” is mentioned in the frst place), but also the overall non-verbal behavior of the character. The object under analysis is the biography of Alexander the Great, as it is here that the preamble about the crucial meaning of microgestures for understanding one's personality is found, and although this idea is important for other comparative biographies, it is the text of Alexander that serves, to our mind, as its best illustration. For instance, variations in the main hero's character are highlighted, on the one hand, by his diminishing ability to laugh and on the other hand, on the contrary, by the growing feeling of fear, and this fear is not so much for his life as for his power. At the beginning Alexander still has the necessary distance between himself and his image, that is, between his façade and his essence, which is proved by the emperor's ability to smile, joke and laugh in a variety of different situations and circumstances. When fear rather than laughter becomes predominant in his life, it is this fact and not only the external events, according to Plutarch, that brings his character's end closer. The motif of laughter, semantically rich, which is accentuated differently in the parallel work Life of Caesar as well as in Life of Alexander, emphasizes that the reasons why these rulers lost their lives lie in their fear of losing their power. Since the question of power is a political issue, the nonverbal text thus becomes involved in the political context.