What it is
The Life of Alexander is Plutarch's biography of Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE), paired in the Parallel Lives with the Life of Caesar. The platform reads it as one of the most important single texts in the corpus, because its preface is the clearest statement Plutarch ever made of his whole method — and because it became, for the later European world, one of the principal portraits of the most studied conqueror in history.
The manifesto preface
The Life opens with Plutarch's famous declaration of purpose: he is writing lives, not histories, and the most glorious deeds do not always reveal a man's virtue or vice — often "a slight thing like a phrase or a jest" shows character more than battles in which thousands die. He asks the reader's indulgence for passing lightly over the great campaigns to dwell on the signs of the soul. The platform reads this preface as the charter of moral biography: it announces that the book's true subject is Alexander's character — his ambition, his generosity, his self-command and its failures — and that the conquests are material for that study, not its point.
What it argues about Alexander
Plutarch's Alexander is a figure of immense natural gifts held in tension: the pupil of Aristotle and lover of Homer; the general of boundless pothos (longing) and courage; the king whose early self-command — his famous restraint toward the captured Persian royal women — Plutarch sets against the later deterioration, the drinking, the killing of Cleitus, the adoption of Persian state. The platform reads the Life under character and power and great men and history: it is Plutarch's study of how a nature of the highest promise is tested, and partly undone, by absolute power and unbroken success.
Influence and citation
The Life of Alexander shaped the European image of Alexander as decisively as any text, and its anecdotes — the taming of Bucephalus, the cutting of the Gordian knot, the visit to Diogenes — became the common property of the Western imagination. The platform reads it with the standard discipline: Plutarch wrote four centuries after Alexander, drawing on earlier sources now lost, and is a witness to the Alexander tradition and to Plutarch's moral reading of it rather than a contemporary record. The fuller interpretation is in Alexander through Plutarch.