Essays on Plutarch's Lives

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; the chronological order of composition and the cross-references from one Life to another; on the possibility that several biographies were edited simultaneously; the methods Plutarch adopted to summarize his own reading and research; the choice of subjects and of sources; Plutarch's compositional techniques; and the criteria for selecting the Greek and Roman pairs. An introduction discusses the traditions of historiography which influenced Plutarch, and the background to Graeco-Roman biography, analysing Plutarch's sources and assessing how he used them. At the cusp between literature, philosophy, and history, Plutarch's biographies and these studies of them are of unique interest to scholars interested in all aspects of the ancient world.