A rhetorical showpiece staging Fortune and Virtue as rival advocates, each claiming credit for building the Roman Empire.
De Fortuna Romanorum ("On the Fortune of the Romans") is a short declamatory essay from Plutarch's Moralia cast as a courtroom-style contest. Virtue and Fortune, personified as two litigants, dispute which of them deserves the credit for Rome's rise to world power. Plutarch opens by framing the case as an old philosophical question - is a great outcome the product of deliberate excellence or of unearned luck? - then stages a vivid pageant: Virtue advances slowly, escorted by a grim procession of wounded Roman heroes (Mucius Scaevola, Horatius, the Fabii, the Scipios), while Fortune sweeps in swiftly and triumphantly, having abandoned the Persians, Alexander, and the Carthaginians to settle permanently on the Palatine.
The bulk of the surviving text argues Fortune's side of the case, marshaling evidence: Rome's ancient temples to Fortune far outnumber and predate its temples to abstract virtues; kings from Servius Tullius to Sulla to Julius Caesar publicly credited Fortune for their rise; and the story of Rome's founding itself - the she-wolf, the woodpecker, the eclipse at Romulus's conception - reads as a chain of lucky rescues rather than earned achievement. Plutarch retells the legend of the geese of the Capitoline, whose noise (born of hunger-driven wakefulness, not virtue) saved Rome from a nighttime Gallic assault, as an example of fortune working through the most unlikely, unreasoning agents. The essay breaks off mid-argument, discussing Alexander the Great's aborted plans against Italy, before the case for Virtue can be fully answered - the text has not survived complete.
The piece matters less as sustained philosophy than as a specimen of Greek epideictic rhetoric applied to Roman history: Plutarch, a Greek intellectual under Roman rule, turns the technique of paradoxical praise-oration on the empire that governs him, using myth, anecdote, and personification to probe whether Rome's success was providence, luck, or merit - a question with obvious stakes for how a subject people should regard its rulers.
“For Virtue is accused of being fine but unprofitable, and Fortune of being a good that is unreliable.”
— De Fortuna Romanorum · read this chapter →
“so Fortune, abandoning the Persians and the Assyrians, flitted lightly over Macedonia and quickly shook off Alexander, and, carrying kingdoms about through Egypt and Syria, made her way through them”
— De Fortuna Romanorum · read this chapter →
“give your sails over to Fortune and receive the wind, trusting that you carry Caesar and Caesar's Fortune.”
— De Fortuna Romanorum · read this chapter →
“the sight displays the power of Fortune, and her capacity to find resources for everything out of the most unlikely materials, whenever she takes some matter in hand and directs it like a general, putting intelligence into creatures without reason, and courage and boldness into cowardly ones.”
— De Fortuna Romanorum · read this chapter →
“For Valor made Romulus great, but Fortune watched over him until he became great.”
— De Fortuna Romanorum · read this chapter →
It is a short Plutarch essay staging a personified debate between Fortune and Virtue over which deserves credit for building the Roman Empire. Plutarch argues largely for Fortune's side, citing Rome's ancient temples to Fortune, its founding legends, and Roman leaders who publicly credited luck for their success.
No. The surviving text breaks off mid-argument while discussing Alexander the Great's plans against Italy, before Virtue's case is fully answered. The ending has been lost.
Plutarch cites Caesar as a man who explicitly believed Fortune sailed and campaigned with him, quoting Caesar urging a ship's pilot during a storm to trust that he carries 'Caesar and Caesar's Fortune.'
During a Gallic siege of the Capitoline, sacred geese kept near Juno's temple were unusually wakeful because they were being fed poorly; they heard the enemy climbing at night and cackled loudly enough to rouse the Romans, who then repelled the attack. Plutarch uses the episode as proof Fortune can work salvation through unreasoning creatures.
Plutarch was a Greek intellectual living under Roman rule, and the essay uses a familiar Greek rhetorical exercise (a paradox-argument for an unlikely thesis) to examine, from outside, whether Rome's dominance came from genuine merit or mere luck.
Plutarch retells the she-wolf's rescue of the infant Romulus and Remus, along with the eclipse said to mark Romulus's conception, as evidence that Fortune preserved Rome's founders before they had done anything to earn survival, making Fortune rather than Virtue the true first cause of the city.
Moralia: Ad Principem Ineruditum · Moralia: Adversus Colotem · Moralia: Amatoriae Narrationes · Moralia: Amatorius · Moralia: An Recte Dictum Sit Latenter Esse Vivendum · Moralia: An Seni Respublica Gerenda Sit · Moralia: An Virtus Doceri Possit · Moralia: An Vitiositas Ad Infelicitatem Sufficia · Moralia: Animine An Corporis Affectiones Sint Piores · Moralia: Apophthegmata Laconica · Moralia: Aquane An Ignis Sit Utilior · Moralia: Bruta Animalia Ratione Uti