Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Parallel Lives was written by Plutarch, a Greco-Roman philosopher, historian, and Apollonian priest. It was probably written at the beginning of the second century and consists of 48 biographies of famous men, written in Greek.
The surviving Parallel Lives consists of 23 pairs of biographies plus four singular lives, covering Artaxerxes, Aratus, Galba, and Otho. Traces of an additional twelve single lives exist but those texts have been lost.
Plutarch arranged the lives in pairs to illuminate common moral virtues or failings in his subjects. His interest was primarily ethical rather than historical; he compared Greek and Roman figures whose lives he viewed as similar in order to encourage readers toward self-examination and moral reflection.
Thomas North's 1579 English translation of the Parallel Lives served as a direct source for Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra. North's translation was itself based phrase for phrase on the 1559 French translation by Amyot, the Abbot of Bellozane.
The Dryden translation is an English edition of the Parallel Lives published in 1683 by Jacob Tonson, translated from the original Greek. Despite the name, the poet John Dryden served only as the project's editor and had no role in the actual translation.
Plutarch himself acknowledged the limits of his sources, writing that the process of time obscures the truth of former times and that contemporaneous writers distort truth through malice or flattery. Scholars treat the Parallel Lives primarily as literary biographies rather than historical records, since Plutarch prioritized moral analysis over historical accuracy.