Roman Empire (Greek under Rome)

Plutarch

Priest of Delphi

Lifespan · c. 46 – c. 120 CE

A brief orientation

Plutarch was born in Chaeronea, in Boeotia, around the middle of the first century CE. He studied at the Platonic Academy in Athens, travelled in Egypt and in Italy, gained Roman citizenship and the Roman name Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, and spent most of his life back in Chaeronea, where he served for many years as one of the two priests at the oracle of Apollo at Delphi.

His writing falls into two great groups: the Parallel Lives, a sequence of paired biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen, soldiers and lawgivers; and the Moralia, a substantial collection of essays and dialogues on ethics, religion, politics, education, friendship and much else.

What the Lives are doing

The Lives are not chronicles. Plutarch says explicitly that he is writing biographies, not histories — that what interests him is the character a person's life reveals, often more clearly in a small incident than in a great battle. The pairings (Alexander with Caesar, Theseus with Romulus, Demosthenes with Cicero, and so on) are designed for comparison: many of the pairs end with a brief comparative essay (synkrisis) drawing the two figures against each other.

Why he matters for Virtue & Power

Plutarch is the classical author who, more than any other, treats the shape of a life as the right unit for moral and political reflection. The European tradition has read him in exactly that spirit: Montaigne, Shakespeare (through Sir Thomas North's 1579 English translation), Rousseau and Emerson are all serious readers of Plutarch, and the modern revival of virtue ethics has returned to him often as a source for the case-by-case texture that abstract ethical theory tends to lose.

The Leadership and Ambition entries on this site draw on him directly. The editions we read from are listed on the Sources page.

Related reading

book
Plutarch's Lives
Plutarch's Parallel Lives — paired Greek and Roman biographies, organised for comparison and for the study of character through what people did. The principal source through which later Europe learned to read the late Roman Republic.
theme
Leadership
The classical and historical inquiry into rule, command and stewardship — and into what kind of person is fit to hold authority.
theme
Ambition
The classical inquiry into philotimia — the love of honour and distinction — and into when it makes a public life and when it deforms it.
theme
Virtue
The classical inquiry into excellence of character — what it is, how it is acquired, and how it shapes a life.
theme
Historical memory
The Roman conviction that a polity's character is shaped by the way it remembers itself — that history is a moral practice, not an antiquarian one, and that the *exempla* of the founders' generation are the substance out of which civic virtue is formed.
theme
Historical method
The ancient — chiefly Greek and Roman — inquiry into how history should be written, what kinds of evidence are admissible, what explanation the historian owes the reader, and what the proper relation is between the writer's experience and the events being described.
philosopher
Plato
Athenian philosopher, founder of the Academy, and author of the dialogues that organise the philosophical tradition around the question of the well-ordered soul and the well-ordered city.
philosopher
Tacitus
The senatorial historian whose *Annales* and *Historiae* produced the sharpest extant ancient analysis of what unbounded imperial power did to political character — and the conscience that the European republican tradition kept turning back to.
philosopher
Suetonius
The imperial secretary turned biographer whose *Lives of the Twelve Caesars* personalised the principate as a sequence of human characters — and gave the European tradition its standing portrait of what unchecked power does to the man who holds it.
essay
Plutarch on character
An interpretive reading of Plutarch's stated method in the Lives — biography rather than history, character as the right unit for moral and political reflection — and of why the genre has stayed influential for so long.
essay
Republic memory under empire
An interpretive reading of the imperial-era historiography on the Republic — what the high-empire writers were doing when they kept the older constitutional vocabulary in circulation, and what the European tradition received from the practice.
essay
Power without virtue
A reading of the classical case against power separated from the disciplines of character — Thrasymachus, the tyrant, the libido dominandi, and what they all argue against.
essay
Why Roman history became moral instruction
An interpretive reading of the Roman historiographical tradition as a form of civic education — the *exempla*, the *mos maiorum*, and the European tradition that received the practice and continued it.