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James Boswell quoted Plutarch on writing lives, rather than biographies, in the introduction to his own Life of Samuel Johnson. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the transcendentalists were greatly influenced by the Moralia and in his glowing introduction to the five-volume, 19th-century edition, he called the Lives "a bible for heroes". [49]
Plutarch read widely, and often combined several sources for his Lives, although he mostly followed one source at a time for a particular event or topic. [10] Plutarch cites seven authors in the Life of Caesar: Asinius Pollio was a writer of the first century BC. A soldier who served under Caesar then Octavian, he turned to literature at the ...
Engraving facing the title page of an 18th-century edition of Plutarch's Lives. The Parallel Lives (Ancient Greek: Βίοι Παράλληλοι, Bíoi Parállēloi; Latin: Vītae Parallēlae) is a series of 48 biographies of famous men written in Greek by the Greco-Roman philosopher, historian, and Apollonian priest Plutarch, probably at the beginning of the second century.
The Moralia include On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander the Great, an important adjunct to Plutarch's Life of the great general; On the Worship of Isis and Osiris, a crucial source of information on Egyptian religious rites; [2] and On the Malice of Herodotus (which may, like the orations on Alexander's accomplishments, have been a rhetorical exercise), [3] in which Plutarch criticizes ...
Plutarch's main principle was that the study of Aristotle must precede that of Plato, and like the Middle Platonists believed in the continuity between the two authors. With this object he wrote a commentary on Aristotle's On the Soul (De Anima) which was the most important contribution to Aristotelian literature since the time of Alexander of Aphrodisias; and a commentary on the Timaeus of Plato.
Plutarch goes further back to describe an older Greek writing system, similar as he attested to the Egyptian writing. In his "Discourse Concerning Socrates's Daemon", [ 11 ] he describes how Agesilaus king of Sparta, uncovers Alcmene 's tomb at Haliartus and discovers a brazen plate on which a very ancient script was written, much older than ...
According to the Greek biographer Plutarch (writing roughly 700 years after the Spartan king), Polydorus and his co-king Theopompus changed the constitution of Sparta so that the Kings and the Gerousia (28 chosen men above the age of 60) could veto decisions made by the Spartan Apella (the male citizen body).
Plutarch was writing some 400 years after the events in question, and is therefore a secondary source, but he often names his sources, which allows some degree of verification of his statements. [5] Plutarch was also primarily interested in moral lessons from history, rather than actually detailing history in depth, [ 6 ] and thus his ...