Biographies: Parallel Lives

Overview
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, composed in the early 2nd century CE, is a sequence of paired biographies of eminent Greeks and Romans designed to illuminate moral character through comparison. A priest of Apollo at Delphi and a civic leader from Chaeronea, Plutarch addresses many of the Lives to the Roman senator Sosius Senecio, shaping them as instructive portraits rather than exhaustive chronicles. He considers deeds chiefly as windows into ethos, habits, choices, and passions, so that virtue and vice stand out more clearly than the march of events. Across roughly twenty-three pairs, plus a few single Lives and fragmentary texts, he stages a cross-cultural dialogue about leadership, civic responsibility, and the fragility of fortune.

Structure and Method
Each unit consists of a Greek Life and a Roman Life followed by a synkrisis, a pointed comparison that weighs similarities, contrasts, and lessons. Plutarch draws on a wide array of sources, histories, official records, memoirs, gossip, and local traditions, openly acknowledging uncertainty when accounts diverge. He favors vivid anecdotes, domestic details, and revealing sayings, trusting that small actions, jokes, tears, or financial habits can disclose more about a person than battlefield statistics. The Lives are not synchronized year by year; episodes are selected and arranged to sharpen ethical contours, often circling back to a defining trait that guides a subject’s rise and downfall.

Themes and Portraits
The collection explores how character meets circumstance. Plutarch contrasts steady civic virtue with brilliant instability, urging readers to consider how moderation, education, friendship, and self-control sustain public life. He probes the tension between personal ambition and the common good, presenting leaders who master themselves as better equipped to master fortune. Moral failure often stems from a single unchecked passion, anger, avarice, vanity, that, under pressure, derails policy and corrodes alliances. The Lives also examine the uses and abuses of power in republican and monarchical settings, reflecting on lawgiving, military prudence, rhetoric, and the delicate art of clemency.

Notable Pairings
Theseus and Romulus open the sequence, mythic founders whose civic violence and contested success set the tone for later reflections on legitimacy. Lawgivers Lycurgus and Numa show how institutions shape virtue over generations. Solon is paired with Publicola to contrast Athenian reform with early Roman republicanism. Themistocles and Camillus present saviors whose brilliance strains civic trust; Pericles and Fabius Maximus defend caution and strategic patience. Alcibiades and Coriolanus dramatize talent without restraint, while Demosthenes and Cicero trace the perils and necessity of political speech. Alexander and Caesar embody world-conquering ambition, the first with imperial charisma, the second with calculated clemency that unsettles the republic. Elsewhere, Nicias and Crassus exhibit disastrous overreach; Demetrius and Antony parade theatrical excess; Dion and Brutus turn philosophy toward tyrannicide; Phocion with Cato the Younger tests stoic rigor against political reality; Eumenes and Sertorius honor loyal, resourceful commanders on the wrong side of fortune; Agesilaus and Pompey compare able generals handicapped by misjudgment; Agis with Cleomenes and the Gracchi twins juxtapose reforming zeal in Sparta and Rome; Philopoemen and Flamininus weigh local patriotism against Roman patronage; Aristides and Cato the Elder champion austere integrity; Lysander and Sulla expose ruthless opportunism; Pyrrhus and Marius show brilliance undone by restless ambition.

Legacy
Parallel Lives became a moral handbook for statesmen and a quarry for writers. Translated and recopied across late antiquity, it returned to prominence in the Renaissance; Montaigne made it a companion for self-examination, and Shakespeare, using North’s English Plutarch, shaped Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra from its pages. Modern historians value Plutarch’s preservation of sources now lost and his insight into ancient values, even as they debate his selectivity and rhetoric. The Lives endure because they ask perennial questions about power and conscience, insisting that character, revealed in choices large and small, determines the fate of cities as surely as armies and laws.