The portrait the method produces
The platform reads the Life of Alexander as the clearest demonstration of what Plutarch's method produces. Because he announced, in the famous preface, that he writes lives and not histories — that a jest may show character better than a battle — the Alexander we get is not the Alexander of the campaign narratives but the Alexander of the soul: the boy who tamed Bucephalus, the pupil who slept with Homer under his pillow, the king whose chivalry toward the captured Persian women and whose later murder of his friend Cleitus are weighed as evidence of one developing character.
The nature of the highest promise
Plutarch's Alexander begins as a nature of almost unlimited promise — courage, generosity, intellect, self-command, all at their height. The platform reads the Life's deepest interest in what happens to that nature under the pressure of absolute power and unbroken victory. The early Alexander masters himself; the later Alexander, flattered, drunk on success and on actual wine, kills Cleitus in a rage, adopts the trappings of Persian despotism, demands worship. The platform reads this under character and power: Plutarch shows power not corrupting a bad man but testing a great one, and finding even the greatest self-command unequal to the strain of having no external check left.
Ambition without a limit
The platform reads Plutarch's Alexander as a study of ambition without a limit. His pothos — the longing that drove him ever further east, past any rational strategic need, toward the edge of the world — is the same drive that made him magnificent and the drive that no conquest could satisfy. There was, for Alexander, no point at which enough was enough; and the platform reads Plutarch as showing, without moralising, that a great nature with no internal limit and no external check is a kind of tragedy waiting on time.
Why the reading still works
The platform reads Plutarch's Alexander as more durable than the historians' precisely because it asks the question that outlasts the facts: what does supreme power do to a supreme man? Set against Caesar in the most famous of the pairings, Alexander becomes a case in the permanent study of genius and its government — and the companion reading of Caesar shows the same method turned on the man whose ambition fell not on a foreign world but on his own republic.