Plutarch

Plutarch was born around 40 to 46 CE in Chaeronea, a small town in Boeotia in central Greece, best known as the site of Philip II of Macedon's victory over the Greek city states in 338 BCE ^[1]. His family was old, prosperous, and locally prominent. In his own writings he mentions his great grandfather Nicarchus, who remembered the hardships that Antony's forces imposed on the town before the battle of Actium, his grandfather Lamprias, a talkative and genial figure at family dinners, and his father Autobulus, who bred horses and took part in the philosophical conversations Plutarch later recorded ^[2].

As a young man he traveled to Athens, where he studied under the Platonist philosopher Ammonius, probably in the 60s CE. Mathematics and philosophy formed the core of his training, and the Platonism he absorbed there stayed with him for life, coloring nearly everything he wrote ^[1]. He was in Athens, or at least in Greece, when the emperor Nero made his famous tour of the province in 66 to 67 CE, an event Plutarch later recalled ^[2].

Anyone asking who was Plutarch should start with this double identity: a provincial Greek gentleman deeply loyal to his small hometown, and a Roman era intellectual with connections reaching to the imperial court. He held Roman citizenship, taking the family name Mestrius from his friend Lucius Mestrius Florus, a Roman consular who accompanied him on travels in Italy ^[3].

Plutarch's public career began early. While still a young man he served on an embassy to the Roman proconsul of Achaea, an episode he mentions in his advice to aspiring politicians ^[2]. He traveled widely by the standards of a Greek man of letters: to Alexandria in Egypt, across the Aegean to Asia Minor, and at least twice to Italy and Rome, where he lectured on philosophy in Greek and made influential friends ^[1].

Among those friends were senior Roman figures, including Mestrius Florus and Quintus Sosius Senecio, a twice consul under Trajan to whom Plutarch dedicated the Parallel Lives and parts of his table talk ^[3]. A later tradition preserved in the Suda, a Byzantine encyclopedia, claims that Trajan granted him consular ornaments, and Eusebius adds that in old age Hadrian appointed him procurator of Achaea. Scholars treat these reports with caution, but they reflect a genuine reputation for standing with the emperors ^[1].

Despite these opportunities, Plutarch chose to remain in Chaeronea. He explained the decision himself: the town was small, and he stayed so that it would not become smaller. He served it in humble posts, at one point overseeing building works and, by his own wry account, watching tiles and stones being measured ^[2]. Around the 90s CE he also became one of the two permanent priests of Apollo at Delphi, some twenty miles from his home, a role he held for the rest of his life. He helped revive the sanctuary's fortunes, and the Delphians and Chaeroneans jointly dedicated a portrait bust of him there, its inscribed base still surviving ^[4].

The work that secured Plutarch's fame is the Parallel Lives, a series of paired biographies matching an eminent Greek with a comparable Roman: Alexander the Great with Julius Caesar, Demosthenes with Cicero, Theseus with Romulus, Lycurgus with Numa. Twenty three pairs survive, most followed by a short formal comparison, along with four unpaired lives ^[1]. He composed them mainly in the first two decades of the second century CE, dedicating the series to Sosius Senecio ^[3].

Plutarch was explicit that he wrote biography, not history. In the opening of the Life of Alexander he told readers that a small anecdote, a jest, or a passing remark often reveals character better than battles with thousands of dead ^[5]. That principle shaped the whole project. His subject was moral character: how virtue and vice show themselves in great men, and what readers might imitate or avoid. Modern historians mine the Lives for evidence while remaining alert to this moralizing frame and to Plutarch's occasional chronological looseness ^[1].

Among Plutarch achievements, none has mattered more to later literature. Sir Thomas North's 1579 English translation, made from Jacques Amyot's French, gave Shakespeare the raw material for Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, sometimes almost line for line ^[6]. Ralph Waldo Emerson called the Lives a bible for heroes, and readers from Montaigne to the founders of the American republic treated Plutarch as a school of statesmanship ^[1].

Alongside the Lives stands the Moralia, a sprawling collection of more than 70 surviving essays, dialogues, and lectures on ethics, religion, politics, education, and natural questions ^[1]. The range is remarkable: advice to married couples, consolation to his wife on the death of their daughter, essays on how to tell a flatterer from a friend, on the delays of divine justice, on whether animals possess reason, and on the face that appears in the orb of the moon ^[2].

Several pieces draw directly on his Delphic priesthood, including dialogues on the decline of oracles and on why the priestess at Delphi no longer prophesied in verse ^[4]. The Table Talk, nine books of learned dinner conversation, preserves the social and intellectual world of his circle, with his grandfather, father, brothers, teacher Ammonius, and Roman friends all appearing as speakers ^[2].

An ancient list known as the Lamprias catalogue names over 200 works attributed to Plutarch, meaning that well under half of his output survives ^[1]. Even so, the surviving corpus runs to many volumes and made him one of the most copied Greek prose authors of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. A handful of transmitted pieces, such as the Lives of the Ten Orators, are now judged spurious, the work of later imitators gathered under his famous name ^[3].

Plutarch married Timoxena, a woman of Chaeronea, and the marriage appears in his writings as an affectionate partnership. The couple had at least five children: four sons and a daughter, also named Timoxena, who died at the age of two while Plutarch was away from home ^[2]. The letter of consolation he wrote to his wife on that occasion survives in the Moralia and remains one of the most personal documents from antiquity, praising her restraint in grief and recalling the child's sweetness of temper ^[2].

His household in Chaeronea functioned as an informal school. Friends, relatives, and pupils gathered for the discussions that fill the Table Talk, and young men came to study philosophy with him. He counted among his circle Favorinus of Arelate, a celebrated orator of the next generation ^[3].

Plutarch's religious life centered on Delphi. As priest of Apollo he organized rites, entertained visitors to the sanctuary, and defended traditional Greek religion in an age when its oracles had lost much of their old prestige. His piety was philosophical rather than credulous: he interpreted myth and cult through a Platonist lens, arguing for a providential god while rejecting superstition, which he analyzed in a separate essay as a fear worse than atheism ^[4].

Plutarch spent his final decades where he began, dividing his time between Chaeronea and Delphi. The reigns of Trajan (98 to 117 CE) and the opening years of Hadrian saw his most productive period, and the bulk of the Parallel Lives belongs to these years ^[1]. Delphi flourished again in the same period, benefiting from imperial favor that Plutarch's connections may have helped secure, and new buildings and dedications marked the sanctuary's recovery ^[4].

The date of his death is not recorded. He was still alive after 119 CE, since a late source reports his appointment as procurator of Achaea under Hadrian, and most scholars place his death around 120 CE or shortly after, when he was roughly eighty ^[1]. He died, as he had lived, a citizen of Chaeronea.

His fellow townsmen and the community at Delphi honored his memory. The inscribed statue base at Delphi, set up jointly by both towns, carries a Greek epigram naming him, physical confirmation of the esteem he enjoyed in his lifetime ^[4].

Plutarch's afterlife is nearly unmatched among ancient authors. Byzantine scholars copied and anthologized him. In Renaissance Europe, Jacques Amyot's French translations of the Lives (1559) and Moralia (1572) became literary landmarks, and North's English version carried him into the bloodstream of Elizabethan drama ^[6]. Montaigne kept Amyot's Plutarch constantly at hand and quoted him hundreds of times in the Essays ^[1].

For centuries the Lives served as a manual of civic virtue. Rousseau read them obsessively as a boy, and figures of the American and French revolutions invoked Plutarch's heroes as models of republican conduct ^[1]. In the nineteenth century Emerson championed the Moralia, while historians began the more skeptical work of separating Plutarch's moral portraiture from documentary fact. Modern scholarship values him both as a source for lost historians he read and quoted, and as a subtle literary artist in his own right, a view advanced in detailed studies by scholars such as Christopher Pelling and Donald Russell ^[5].

Any list of Plutarch facts points to the same conclusion: a man who never left provincial Greece for long ended up teaching Rome, and then Europe, how to think about greatness. His method, judging public figures by private character, still shapes biography today, which is why a Plutarch biography is in part a history of the genre itself ^[1].