Plutarch

Based on Wikipedia: Plutarch

Imagine you're a Roman senator in the second century, and you want to understand what makes a great leader. You could study military strategy or political theory. Or you could read about Alexander the Great weeping because he had no more worlds to conquer, then compare him to Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon. That's exactly what Plutarch gave the ancient world—and why his books have shaped how we think about history, morality, and human character for nearly two thousand years.

Plutarch wasn't just a writer. He was a priest at one of the most sacred sites in the ancient world, a local politician, a philosopher, and a man who moved comfortably between Greek intellectual culture and Roman imperial power. His life spanned one of history's most fascinating periods, from the reign of Nero to that of Hadrian, and his writings became the lens through which later generations—including Shakespeare, the American Founding Fathers, and modern classicists—would understand the ancient world.

A Small Town with a Long Shadow

Plutarch was born around 46 AD in Chaeronea, a small town in the Greek region of Boeotia. If that name sounds familiar, it should. Chaeronea was where Philip II of Macedon crushed Greek independence in 338 BC, and where Sulla massacred an army of Pontic soldiers in 86 BC. History happened in Chaeronea, even if it wasn't always kind to the place.

His family was old money by local standards—prominent enough to matter in a provincial town, well-connected enough to send their son to Athens for education. His father Autobulus and grandfather Lamprias appear frequently in Plutarch's writings, as do his brothers Timon and Lamprias. The affection with which he wrote about Timon suggests a genuinely close family, something that mattered to Plutarch throughout his life.

At around twenty years old, Plutarch traveled to Athens to study mathematics and philosophy under a teacher named Ammonius. This was during the reign of Nero, the emperor famous for supposedly fiddling while Rome burned. Plutarch actually attended the games at Delphi where Nero competed—the emperor fancied himself an artist and athlete, and nobody was brave enough to tell him otherwise. It's possible Plutarch met important Romans at these games, including the general Vespasian, who would soon become emperor himself.

Between Two Worlds

Here's where Plutarch's story gets interesting. He was thoroughly Greek—educated in Greek philosophy, devoted to Greek religion, proud of Greek cultural heritage. But he also became a Roman citizen, taking the full Roman name Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus.

His sponsor for citizenship was Lucius Mestrius Florus, a Roman associated with the new emperor Vespasian. This wasn't mere social climbing. Becoming a Roman citizen in the first century opened doors. It meant legal protections, business opportunities, and access to the corridors of power. Plutarch visited Rome around 70 AD with Florus and cultivated friendships with some of the most powerful men in the empire.

But he never moved there permanently. Unlike many ambitious provincials who abandoned their homes for the capital, Plutarch returned to Chaeronea. He served as a local magistrate, held the office of archon—essentially a mayor—probably multiple times, and represented his hometown on diplomatic missions abroad. He managed the Amphictyonic League, an ancient Greek religious organization, for at least five terms, during which he was responsible for organizing the Pythian Games at Delphi.

This choice—to remain rooted in a small Greek town while engaging with the Roman world—shaped everything he wrote.

The Priest of Apollo

Around 95 AD, Plutarch received one of the most prestigious religious appointments in the Greek world. He became one of two priests at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi.

Delphi had once been the center of the Greek religious universe. People traveled from across the Mediterranean to consult the Oracle, the priestess called the Pythia who delivered prophecies supposedly inspired by Apollo himself. Kings and generals had sought her advice before waging wars. Cities had sent delegations to ask about colonization, laws, and divine favor.

By Plutarch's time, the site had declined considerably. The glory days were centuries past. But Delphi was experiencing something of a revival, financed by wealthy Greek patrons and possibly by imperial support. Plutarch took his priestly duties seriously, writing several essays about the oracle and its meaning. A portrait bust was dedicated to him at Delphi in recognition of his efforts to revive the sacred shrines.

He probably also participated in the Eleusinian Mysteries, the secret religious rites near Athens that promised initiates a better afterlife. We don't know exactly what happened during these ceremonies—participants were sworn to secrecy on pain of death—but they were considered the pinnacle of Greek religious experience.

Family Man

Plutarch married a woman named Timoxena, and together they had at least four sons and one daughter. Two of their children died young, including their daughter, also named Timoxena, who died at age two.

A letter survives from Plutarch to his wife after their daughter's death. He writes to console her, urging her not to grieve too much, drawing on philosophy and religious belief to offer comfort. It's an intimate document, revealing a man who practiced what he preached about virtue and emotional balance, but who also clearly felt his losses deeply. The letter mentions the earlier death of a son named Chaeron.

His surviving sons, Autoboulos and Plutarch, appear in their father's writings. He dedicated his treatise on Plato's Timaeus to them. A third son, Soklaros, probably survived to adulthood as well—an inscription from the time of Trajan mentions a Lucius Mestrius Soclarus in Boeotia, sharing Plutarch's Roman family name.

The family continued for centuries. Plutarch's descendants included philosophers and authors, and the family was still producing notable figures in the fourth century AD. The novelist Apuleius, author of The Golden Ass, even made his fictional protagonist a descendant of Plutarch—a literary compliment to a man whose reputation only grew after his death.

The Parallel Lives

Plutarch's masterpiece was the Parallel Lives, a series of biographies pairing famous Greeks with famous Romans. The concept was simple but brilliant: write about a great Greek, then write about a comparable Roman, then conclude with an essay comparing the two.

But here's what made Plutarch revolutionary: he wasn't writing history. Not really. In the opening of his Life of Alexander, he explicitly states that he cares less about recording every important event than about illuminating character. Sometimes he skips over world-changing battles to spend paragraphs on a telling anecdote or a revealing quirk of personality.

He compared his craft to portrait painting. Just as a painter focuses on the face—especially the eyes—to capture a person's essence, Plutarch focused on the small details that revealed who someone truly was. A joke they told. How they treated their servants. What they did when they thought no one was watching.

Twenty-three pairs survive, plus four single biographies. Many more have been lost. The pairs include some of history's most fascinating figures: Alexander the Great paired with Julius Caesar, Demosthenes with Cicero, Theseus with Romulus. Each biography is readable on its own, but the comparisons add another layer, forcing readers to think about what virtue and vice look like across different cultures and circumstances.

Alexander Through Plutarch's Eyes

Take his Life of Alexander, one of only five ancient sources about the Macedonian conqueror that survive to this day. Plutarch draws on accounts that no longer exist, including detailed descriptions from Alexander's favorite sculptor, Lysippos. He gives us probably the most complete physical description of Alexander that survives from antiquity.

But Plutarch is more interested in the man's soul than his body. He traces Alexander's extraordinary drive and ambition back to his youth, asking how much of his later conquests were foreshadowed in the boy. He emphasizes Alexander's self-control and contempt for luxury—qualities the Greeks admired—writing that "He desired not pleasure or wealth, but only excellence and glory."

Yet as the biography progresses, the tone shifts. Plutarch becomes less admiring. The deeds become "less savoury." The murder of Cleitus the Black—a cavalry commander and old friend whom Alexander killed in a drunken rage—marks a turning point. Alexander immediately regretted it, but the damage was done, both to Cleitus and to Plutarch's portrait of his subject.

This is sophisticated biography. Plutarch isn't writing hagiography or hit pieces. He's trying to understand a human being in full, with all his contradictions.

Caesar and the Art of Inspiring Men

The Life of Caesar, paired with Alexander, remains one of our primary sources for the Roman dictator's career. Along with Suetonius's The Twelve Caesars and Caesar's own military commentaries, it forms the foundation of what we know about one of history's most consequential figures.

Plutarch emphasizes Caesar's audacity from the beginning. When the dictator Sulla demanded that the young Caesar divorce his wife Cornelia—daughter of Sulla's enemy Cinna—Caesar refused. In an era when Sulla was executing his opponents by the thousands, this took remarkable nerve. Sulla reportedly said that in Caesar he saw "many Mariuses," referring to his great enemy, the populist general Gaius Marius.

The biography traces Caesar's military genius, his ability to inspire soldiers, and his political maneuvering. Plutarch sometimes quotes directly from Caesar's own writings and mentions moments when Caesar was dictating his famous commentaries. The Life ends with a detailed account of the assassination, including the famous phantom that appeared to Brutus the night before—a detail that Shakespeare would later immortalize.

Filling Historical Gaps

Some of Plutarch's Lives are invaluable simply because other sources haven't survived. His Life of Pyrrhus—the Greek king who gave us the phrase "Pyrrhic victory"—is our main source for Roman history between 293 and 264 BC. The works of the earlier historians Dionysius and Livy that covered this period are lost. Without Plutarch, we would know far less about a crucial era when Rome was transforming from a regional Italian power into a Mediterranean empire.

The Moralia: Everything Else

Plutarch wrote constantly. Beyond the Lives, he produced an enormous body of essays, dialogues, and speeches collected under the title Moralia—roughly translated as "Ethical Matters" or "Customs and Mores."

The range is staggering. There are seventy-eight surviving works, covering topics from the sublime to the ridiculous.

"On the Face Which Appears in the Orb of the Moon" is a dialogue exploring why we see what looks like a face on the lunar surface. Galileo later drew on this work. "On Fraternal Affection" discusses how siblings should treat each other. "On the Worship of Isis and Osiris" provides crucial information about Egyptian religion that would otherwise be lost. "On Peace of Mind" offers practical philosophical advice for maintaining equanimity.

And then there's "Odysseus and Gryllus," a humorous dialogue between Homer's Odysseus and one of the pigs that the witch Circe created from his sailors. The pig argues that being an animal is actually better than being human. It's funny, but it's also serious philosophy in disguise, questioning human assumptions about rationality and happiness.

Some works attributed to Plutarch in ancient manuscripts were actually written by someone else, a figure scholars call "Pseudo-Plutarch," who lived in the third or fourth century. These include treatises on the Attic orators, fate, and music. They're still historically valuable, even if Plutarch didn't write them.

A Philosopher's Philosophy

Plutarch was a Platonist, but not a rigid one. He drew on multiple philosophical schools—borrowing from the Peripatetics (followers of Aristotle) and occasionally even from the Stoics, despite criticizing their core principles. The only school he rejected entirely was Epicureanism, with its materialist physics and its claim that the gods didn't intervene in human affairs.

His religious sensibility ran deep. As a priest at Delphi, he couldn't accept that the universe was just atoms bouncing randomly in void. He believed in a God more pure and elevated than the popular Greek deities, closer to Plato's conception of divine perfection.

To explain why the world contains evil if it was created by a good God, Plutarch adopted what philosophers call a dualist position. He proposed a second principle—an evil world-soul bound up with matter from the beginning. In creation, this principle was filled with divine reason and arranged by it, becoming the soul of the world. But it continued to operate as the source of evil. This kept God's hands clean while explaining why bad things happen.

Daemons—spiritual beings between gods and humans—served as God's agents in the world, explaining how divine influence operated without requiring God to get directly involved in earthly messiness. Plutarch strongly defended free will and the immortality of the soul. These weren't just academic positions for him; they were matters of lived belief.

The Lost Library

We have a lot of Plutarch's writing. We've also lost a lot.

An ancient catalogue called the "Catalogue of Lamprias"—traditionally attributed to Plutarch's son, though scholars doubt this—lists 227 works. Only 78 survive. The Romans loved the Lives enough that copies multiplied over centuries, preserving most of them. But traces remain of twelve more biographies that are now lost, including lives of Hercules, Philip II of Macedon, Epaminondas, both Scipios (Africanus and Aemilianus), and important emperors like Augustus, Claudius, and Nero.

The lost Moralia includes works on skepticism and the differences between various philosophical schools—writings that would help us understand ancient debates that now appear only in fragments and references.

Death and Legacy

We don't know exactly when Plutarch died. Estimates range from around 120 to around 125 AD. He was probably in his seventies or eighties, having outlived most of his contemporaries.

The emperor Hadrian reportedly appointed him nominal procurator of Achaea late in life—an honorary position that entitled him to wear consular vestments and ornaments. It was a fitting recognition for a man who had spent his life bridging Greek and Roman worlds.

His influence is almost impossible to overstate. The Lives shaped how the Renaissance understood antiquity. Shakespeare based Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus directly on Thomas North's 1579 English translation of Plutarch. Montaigne adored him. The American founders—Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams—read him for models of republican virtue.

Today, when people debate whether classics departments perpetuate problematic views of antiquity, Plutarch is often at the center. His vision of Greece and Rome—heroic, moral, exemplary—has influenced how Western culture thinks about the ancient world for two millennia. That's exactly why understanding him matters.

He was a small-town Greek who became a Roman citizen while remaining devoted to his hometown. He was a priest who wrote philosophy and a philosopher who took religion seriously. He was a biographer who cared more about character than events, and an essayist who could move from lunar astronomy to talking pigs without losing his readers.

Most of all, he was someone who believed that studying great lives could make you a better person. Whether that's true or not, millions of readers over two thousand years have been willing to find out.