Plutarch

Plutarch (ad 46?-120), Greek biographer and essayist, born in Chaeronea in Boeotia. He was educated in Athens and is believed to have traveled to Egypt and Italy and to have lectured in Rome on moral philosophy. He frequently visited Athens and was a priest in the temple at Delphi. He spent the later years of his life at Chaeronea, where he held municipal office. Many of the treatises he wrote are probably based on his lecture notes. To his students, Plutarch was regarded as a genial guide, philosopher, and spiritual director.

His extant works, written in a modified Attic, a so-called common dialect, fall into two principal classes: the didactic essays and dialogues, grouped under the title of Moralia; and the biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, generally known as Plutarch's Lives. The more than 80 essays are charmingly written and enlivened by anecdotes and quotations. The essays treat matters of ethics and religion. Some are philosophical works supporting the teachings of Plato in opposition to the doctrines of the Stoics and the Epicureans, and nine books of Symposiaca, or Table Talks, by wise men on various subjects.

Best known are Plutarch's Parallel Lives, a series of 4 single biographies and 23 pairs of biographies. Many of the pairs, such as those on the legendary lawgivers Lycurgus and Numa Pompilius, the generals Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and the orators Demosthenes and Marcus Tullius Cicero, are followed with a brief comparison. Composed with great learning and research, the Lives are not only historical works of great value, but they are also, and purposely, character studies with a moral. The first translation of the Lives into English was by Sir Thomas North in 1579; this is the translation Shakespeare followed closely in the composition of his plays based on Roman history, such as Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra.