Plutarch

Who Was Plutarch?

Plutarch was a Greek historian, biographer, and essayist of the Roman imperial period whose Parallel Lives — paired biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen and generals — became one of the most widely read works of antiquity and one of the most influential books in Western literary history. Born in Chaeronea, Boeotia, around AD 46, he was educated in Athens, served as a priest at Delphi for the last thirty years of his life, and wrote with a breadth of learning and a generosity of spirit that made him beloved by every subsequent age that encountered him.

His Moralia — a collection of essays on subjects ranging from the education of children to the nature of the soul to the proper behavior at table — established him as the ancient world’s most humane moral essayist. Shakespeare drew on the Lives for his Roman plays. Montaigne acknowledged him as a primary influence. The Elizabethans read him as a guide to virtue. The Founders read him as a guide to republicanism.

Plutarch is significant for TLA because his moral biography — his conviction that the lives of great men and women are the most effective instruction in virtue — is the ancient precedent for TLA’s method: the close attention to specific human lives as the primary evidence for what human beings are capable of and what they require.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Parallel Lives — c. AD 75–115 — 48 biographies surviving
• Moralia — c. AD 60–120 — 78 essays surviving
• On the E at Delphi — c. AD 67–107
• On the Obsolescence of Oracles — c. AD 75–100