Plutarch

Mestrius Plutarch (cz. 46-ca. post 127) was a Greek historian, biographer, and essayist.

Parallel Lives

His best-known work is the Parallel Lives, a series of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings. The surviving Lives contain twenty-three pairs of biographies, each pair containing one Greek Life and one Roman Life, as well as four unpaired single Lives. As he explains in the first paragraph of his Life of Alexander, Plutarch was not concerned with writing histories, as such, but in exploring the influence of character — good or bad — on the lives and destinies of famous men. Some of the more interesting Lives — for instance, those of Heracles and Philip II of Macedon — no longer exist, and many of the remaining Lives are truncated, contain obvious lacunae, or have been tampered with by later writers.

Related Topics:
Parallel Lives - Biographies - Moral - Character - Heracles - Philip II of Macedon - Lacuna

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Life of Alexander

His Life of Alexander is one of the five surviving tertiary sources about the Macedonian conqueror/king and it includes anecdotes and descriptions of incidents that appear in no other source. Likewise, his portrait of Numa Pompilius, an early Roman king, also contains unique information about the early Roman calendar.

Related Topics:
Anecdote - Numa Pompilius - Roman calendar

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