What it is
The Parallel Lives — Bíoi Parállēloi — is the work for which Plutarch is best known: a sequence of biographies of distinguished Greeks and Romans paired by some affinity of life or character. The collection originally ran to twenty-four pairs; twenty-three pairs survive, alongside four single Lives. Most of the pairs end with a short comparative essay (synkrisis) drawing the two figures against each other.
The pairings are characteristic: Theseus with Romulus, Lycurgus with Numa, Alexander with Caesar, Demosthenes with Cicero, Pericles with Fabius Maximus, Alcibiades with Coriolanus, Aristides with Cato the Elder, Phocion with Cato the Younger, Pyrrhus with Marius, and on through the corpus.
How Plutarch reads a life
Plutarch is explicit in the opening of the Life of Alexander that he is writing biography (bíos) and not history (historía). The distinction matters: a small saying, an apparently trivial incident, a private gesture may, he says, illuminate a character more than a great battle does. The Lives are organised around that conviction. They are not chronicles; they are studies in moral and political character, written from a particular Middle-Platonist vantage that takes character to be the right unit for that kind of study.
The Roman Lives
For the platform's editorial purposes, the Roman Lives are where Plutarch does his most consequential work. Without them, what we know of the late Republic as the succession of human characters that brought it down would be considerably thinner.
The principal Roman Lives are the political and military careers that shaped the last two centuries of the Republic: Marius and Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Crassus, Cicero, Cato the Younger, Brutus and Antony, read against their Greek partners. Several survive without surviving partners (the lost Life of Scipio Africanus is the saddest loss). The late-Republican Lives — Pompey, Caesar, Crassus, Cicero, Cato, Brutus — are best read as a quasi-narrative sequence; their characters interlock, and the same incidents recur from different vantages.
Plutarch's reading is not partisan. His Cato is recognisably the Stoic inflexible figure who could not survive the Republic; his Caesar is recognisably the commander whose discipline and intelligence were inseparable from the ambition that ended it; his Cicero is at once brave, vain, and ultimately tragic. The Roman Lives do not argue for or against the Republic. They show what kind of human beings the Republic produced — and what kind of human beings, in turn, the Republic could not contain.
Why the European tradition has not stopped reading them
Plutarch's influence is hard to overstate. Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation (made from Amyot's French) is the source from which Shakespeare drew the Roman plays — Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus — and many of their most famous passages are translations of North's translations of Plutarch's Greek. Montaigne reaches for him on nearly every page of the Essais. Rousseau's Confessions opens with the report that the young Rousseau read the Lives "every meal." Emerson reads them; the American founders read them; the European school curriculum read them for four centuries.
What survives in that influence is not a set of doctrines but a specific practice: the comparative reading of human lives as the most useful form of political and moral education. The Lives belong to the cluster of texts the European tradition kept turning back to because it could not finish with them.
Citing the Lives
Standard citation is by the name of the Life followed by chapter and section (e.g. Caes. 17.1; Cat. Min. 24.3). The standard Greek edition is the Bibliotheca Teubneriana (Ziegler); see our Sources page.