In the Library
Parallel Lives
Plutarch, 100 CE
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 13 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by John Dryden (ed. A.H. Clough)
- Chapters
- Chapters 10
- Length
- Length 179k words
£1.99
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sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations
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Marcus Aurelius
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Letters to Lucilius
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Seneca turns Plutarch's question of how a great man should live into daily practice, letters written by a statesman who knew Nero's court from the inside.
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About the book
Theseus founds Athens; Romulus founds Rome. Plutarch sets them side by side, then pairs Alexander with Caesar, Demosthenes with Cicero, and forty more Greeks and Romans across roughly fifty surviving Lives. A priest at Delphi who wrote in Greek under the Roman emperors around the turn of the second century, Plutarch was less interested in battles than in the small action that revealed the man: a glance, a jest, a hesitation at a doorway. Shakespeare lifted whole speeches from North's translation; Montaigne quoted him on every other page; the founding fathers read him as a manual for republican virtue. Character, the Lives insist, is not what a man does on his greatest day but what he does on every other one.