Parallel Lives

• 1. Introduction

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  Parallel Lives began with a declaration that surprised many readers: "For it is not Histories that I am writing, but Lives." Plutarch, a Greco-Roman philosopher, historian, and Apollonian priest, made that distinction deliberately. He was not cataloguing battles or empires. He was studying what character does to a person. Written in Greek probably at the beginning of the second century, the Parallel Lives is a series of 48 biographies of famous men. The subjects range from the mythic Theseus and Romulus to figures as recent as Mark Antony and Cicero. What made the project unusual was not the scale, but the structure. Plutarch arranged his subjects in pairs, one Greek and one Roman, chosen because their lives seemed to rhyme. The question his method asks is this: what can Alexander the Great teach us about Julius Caesar, and vice versa? The answers he found shaped how readers understood antiquity for centuries to come.

• 2. The Moral Engine

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  Plutarch's Life of Pericles contains a candid admission about the problem of working from old sources. He wrote: "It is so hard to find out the truth of anything by looking at the record of the past. The process of time obscures the truth of former times, and even contemporaneous writers disguise and twist the truth out of malice or flattery." He knew his men had been dead nearly 300 years before his pen touched them. Rather than pretend otherwise, he reframed what biography was for. His aim was ethical rather than historical. He explored how character, good or bad, shapes the destinies of powerful people. Within each biography he presented both positive and negative attributes, describing moral and psychological motivations rather than simply narrating events. He used his subjects as what scholars call "moral actors", figures meant to prompt self-examination in readers. Even his judgements were posed as questions, pushing readers to acknowledge contradicting viewpoints rather than simply accept his conclusions.

• 3. Pairing as Method

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  Eighteen of the surviving 23 pairs close with a formal written comparison between the two lives. That comparison was not decorative. It was the point. Plutarch shaped each individual biography to fit its partner, sometimes stretching the evidence considerably. His account of Eumenes illustrates the pressure the method exerted. As scholars have noted, his Eumenes is a far cry from any picture of Eumenes found in the historical literature he used. It was an artificial creation to provide a counterpart to his Sertorius, and can only be understood against the background of the Sertorius. Historical context was regularly set aside in favor of moral analysis whenever the two were in conflict. The Parallel Lives, therefore, must be understood primarily as literary biographies rather than straight historical records. The pairs chosen range across centuries: Solon of Athens is matched with the Roman Poplicola, Demosthenes with Cicero, and Pyrrhus with Marius. The pairings reflect Plutarch's wish to draw the great Greeks of the distant past closer to what he called the noonday of the living, by placing them beside Romans still recognizable to his readers.

• 4. Survival and Loss

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  Of Plutarch's original 48 biographies, only 23 pairs and four singular lives survive intact. The four singular lives recount the stories of Artaxerxes, Aratus, Galba, and Otho. Traces of other biographies point to an additional twelve single lives that are now missing. Among the lost is the comparison of Epaminondas of Greece with Scipio Africanus of Rome, a pairing that survives only as a named entry in the Lamprias Catalogue, the list of Plutarch's works made by his hypothetical son Lamprias. Also gone is his biography of Hercules. The Lives circulated widely enough throughout Rome after their original production that they survived the Early Middle Ages, which accounts for the substantial portion that did come through. Plutarch's second set of biographical works, the Lives of the Roman Emperors from Augustus to Vitellius, fared far worse: only the Lives of Galba and Otho from that series remain.

• 5. Translation and Reach

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  The first printed edition of the Parallel Lives appeared in Rome around 1470, translated into Latin from the original Greek. Several more translations arrived through the end of the fifteenth century: an Italian version in 1482, then a Spanish one in 1491, and a German translation in 1541. The work's widest reach came through a single French edition. In 1559, Amyot, the Abbot of Bellozane, published a French translation that became an immediate success. Six authorized editions were published by the Parisian house of Vascosan by the end of 1579, and it was also largely pirated. Thomas North's 1579 English translation drew directly from Amyot's French, following it phrase for phrase rather than returning to the Greek original. That decision proved consequential. North's version became a primary source for Shakespeare, who drew on it for Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra. A later English translation appeared in 1683, this time taken from the original Greek and published by Jacob Tonson. It came to be known as Dryden's translation, even though the poet John Dryden served only as editor and had no role in the actual translation work.