Plutarch’s Parallel Lives

Plutarch (born between 45 and 50, died after 119) spent most of his life in his small home town of Chaeronea. He had studied philosophy in Athens and visited Rome; he became a Roman citizen, probably under the name Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, and from about 95 was one of the two priests of Apollo at Delphi. Most of his works were written after the fall of Domitian in 96: the Parallel Lives are traditionally dated to 96–120 and were probably composed in the first years of the 2nd century. They are addressed to his Roman friend, the consular Quintus Sosius Senecio.

Each pair sets a Greek beside a Roman whose career seemed to resemble his — Theseus and Romulus, Alexander and Caesar, Demosthenes and Cicero. Twenty-three pairs survive, as well as a few unpaired Lives; others, among them the first pair, Epaminondas and Scipio Africanus, are lost. “It is not histories that I am writing, but lives,” Plutarch warned in the Life of Alexander: his subject was character rather than events. Even so, the Lives preserve much that is known from nowhere else — the Life of Pyrrhus is the main account of Roman history for the years 293–264 BC.

First printed in a Latin translation in Rome around 1470, the Lives became a European classic through Jacques Amyot’s French version (1559) and Thomas North’s English translation of it (1579), the source of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. Montaigne praised the book, and Emerson wrote that Plutarch’s “delight in magnanimity and self-sacrifice” had made his books, like Homer’s Iliad, “a bible for heroes”.