Plutarch was an ancient Greek biographer, who, among others, wrote about Alexander the Great. His works had a powerful influence on the evolution of the essay and historical writing in Europe from the 16th to the 19th century.
Plutarch was a Platonist philosopher. In fact, his significance as a philosopher lies in his attempt to do justice to Plato’s work as a whole and to create a coherent and credible philosophical system of it.
Plutarch’s genius, however, and the reason he is known to us today is due to his abilities as a biographer and historian. He is perhaps best known to us as the author of Parallel Lives, a series of 48 biographies of famous men.
The biographies of these men are arranged in pairs to highlight common moral virtues or failings. Parallel Lives is composed of 23 pairs of biographies with each pair consisting of a Greek and Roman of similar destiny—for instance, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar or Demosthenes and Cicero.
Plutarch was a prolific writer, having penned around 227 works. In addition to Parallel Lives, he authored a collection of moral essays. These were a series of more than sixty studies, mostly in dialogue format, devoted to ethical, religious, physical, political, and literary topics.
Plutarch was the biographer of several famous men from antiquity, including Alexander the Great, Pericles, Solon, Lycurgus, and Alcibiades.
The life of Plutarch
Plutarch was born in Chaeronea, a city of Boeotia in Central Greece around 45 to 47 AD. This date is inferred from Plutarch’s own testimony, according to which he began studying at Athens with a Platonist philosopher named Ammonius.
Plutarch must have stayed in Athens not only during his studies with Ammonius but considerably longer so as to become an Athenian citizen. According to his testimony, he also visited Rome and Alexandria. However, he spent most of his life in his native city and in nearby Delphi.
Historians have posited two reasons as to why he spent so much time around his hometown. The first is Plutarch’s strong ties with his family. His family was apparently wealthy enough to support his studies and travels. Secondly, he was sincerely interested in the religious activity of Delphi. Indeed he even served in various positions in Delphi, including that of the priest of Apollo.
In addition to his duties as a priest, Plutarch was also a magistrate at Chaeronea, and he represented his hometown on several missions to foreign countries during his early adult years. For multiple years, he held the office of archon (ruler) in his native municipality.
Plutarch was the manager of the Amphictyonic League for at least five terms from 107 to 127 AD. During this time, he was responsible for organizing the Pythian Games. He refers to this position in one of his moral essays, “Whether an Old Man Should Engage in Public Affairs.”
According to historian George Syncellus, in Plutarch’s later life, Emperor Hadrian appointed him nominal procurator of Achaea. This entitled him to wear the vestments and ornaments of a consul.
The works
Plutarch explains in the first paragraph of his Life of Alexander, his biography of the great man, that he was not concerned with writing histories but rather exploring the influence of character, good or bad, on the lives and destinies of famous men.
He strived to prove that the more distant past of Greece as well as more contemporary Roman times were characterized by men of action and achievement. His interest was largely ethical, although a lot of his work has significant historical value.
Plutarch’s first biographical works pertain to the lives of Roman emperors spanning Augustus to Vitellius. Of these, only the biographies of Galba and Otho have survived. Manuscripts on Tiberius and Nero are extant only as fragments, as provided by Damascius. These early biographies of emperors were likely published under the Flavian dynasty or during the reign of Nerva (96-98 AD). There is evidence that the two biographies still in existence, those of Galba and Otho, should be considered separate manuscripts.
The Galba and Otho biographies took a slightly different shape to the other biographies in that the subjects are not portrayed for their own sake. Rather, they serve as an illustration of an abstract principle, namely whether or not they adhere to Plutarch’s morally founded ideal of governing as a Princeps.
Building on the perspective of Platonic political philosophy, in Galba and Otho, Plutarch expounds on the constitutional principles of the Principate in the time of the civil war after Nero’s death. While questioning the behavior of the autocrats, he also provides an impression of their tragic ends, ruthlessly competing for the throne and finally destroying each other.
“The Caesars’ house in Rome, the Palatium, received in a shorter space of time no less than four emperors,” Plutarch wrote, “passing, as it were, across the stage, and one making room for another to enter.”
As previously mentioned, Plutarch’s best known work is Parallel Lives, the chief manuscripts of which date back to the 10th and 11th centuries. The first printed edition appeared in Rome in 1470. The volumes have influenced art and literature worldwide. Thomas North’s 1579 English translation was greatly influential on Shakespeare’s work. The most generally accepted edition of Parallel Lives, however, is that of Carl Sintenis in the Bibliotheca Teubneriana.
For the most part, Plutarch doesn’t touch upon the major events in his time but instead devotes much space to anecdote and seemingly trivial matters, reasoning that this often said more about his subjects than even their most monumental accomplishments.
He wanted to provide well-rounded portraits, likening his craft to that of a painter, and he went to extraordinary lengths to draw parallels between physical appearance and moral character.
Some of the biographies, such as those of Heracles, Philip II of Macedon, Epaminondas, Scipio Africanus, Scipio Aemilianus, and possibly Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus no longer exist. Many of the remaining ones are truncated, contain obvious gaps, or have been tampered with by later writers. Extant biographies include those of Solon, Themistocles, Pericles, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Cicero, Mark Antony, and Marcus Junius Brutus among many others.
Another of Plutarch’s more famous works is that of the life of Alexander, which he wrote as a parallel to the life of Julius Caesar. It is one of just five extant tertiary sources on the Macedonian conqueror.
In this manuscript, Plutarch uses anecdotes and descriptions of events not found in other sources. The historian devotes a huge amount of space to describing Alexander’s drive and passion, striving to determine how much of it was presaged in his youth.
Plutarch also relies heavily on the work of Lysippos, Alexander’s favorite sculptor, to give what is likely the fullest and most accurate description of the conqueror’s physical appearance. In elucidating his character, Plutarch saw fit to emphasize Alexander’s unique degree of self-control and disregard for luxury: “He desired not pleasure or wealth, but only excellence and glory.”
As the work progresses, Plutarch exhibits less admiration for the Macedonian, and the events he recounts become less savory. The murder of Cleitus the Black, which Alexander instantly regretted, is commonly cited to this end.
Plutarch’s moral essays are an eclectic collection of seventy-eight essays and transcribed speeches. Among these is “Concerning the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon.” This is a dialogue on the possible causes for such a perception of the moon and was a source for Galileo’s own work.
Other works include “On Fraternal Affection,” a discourse on honor and affection of siblings towards each other, and “On the Worship of Isis and Osiris,” a significant source of information on ancient Egyptian religion.
Plutarch’s influence on later literature
Jean Jacques Rousseau quotes from Plutarch in the 1762 Emile, Or Treatise on Education. This takes a look at the education of the whole person for citizenship. Rousseau introduces a passage from Plutarch in support of his position against eating meat: “‘You ask me,’ said Plutarch, ‘why Pythagoras abstained from eating the flesh of beasts…'”
Ralph Waldo Emerson and the transcendentalists were greatly influenced by Plutarch’s moral essays. In his glowing introduction to the five-volume, 19th-century edition, Emerson referred to Parallel Lives as “a bible for heroes.”
He also opined that it was impossible to “read Plutarch without a tingling of the blood; and I accept the saying of the Chinese Mencius: ‘A sage is the instructor of a hundred ages. When the manners of Loo are heard of, the stupid become intelligent, and the wavering, determined.'”
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