Essays on Plutarch's Lives

Plutarch's parallel Greek and Roman Lives have long been famous as a unique example of the genre of biography in the ancient world. This volume is a collection of studies on Plutarch's life and work, by an international set of scholars.

This volume brings together the work of a wide range of international scholars on the most important themes in Plutarch''s Greek and Roman Lives. It includes contributions on Plutarch''s life and cultural milieu; his methodology; on the chronological order of composition and the cross-references from one Life to another; on the possibility that several biographies were edited simultaneously; on the methods Plutarch adopted to summarise his own reading and research; on the choice of subjects and of sources; on his compositional techniques; and on the criteria for selecting the Greek and Roman pairs. An introduction discusses the traditions of historiography which influenced Plutarch, and the background to Greco-Roman biography, analysing Plutarch''s sources and assessing how he used them. At the cusp between literature, philosophy, and history, Plutarch''s biographies are of unique interest to scholars interested in all aspects of the ancient world.