Plutarch: The Life and Legacy of the Ancient World’s Most Famous Biographer

A well-dressed, middle-aged man stood in the street of a small Greek town, watching workmen measure tiles and haul loads of stone and mortar, and he called out corrections as they went. Passersby found the sight worth a laugh because the individual doing it was a man of international reputation, a philosopher whose lectures had drawn crowds in Rome, and a friend of Roman consuls, yet he was standing in the road to oversee the mundane business of a country building project. When people asked why he was there, he answered, in effect, that he was not doing it for himself but for Chaeronea. The town was his, and no task done on its behalf was beneath him.

The man was Plutarch, and the scene, which he wrote about himself, captures the paradox of his whole life. He wrote the ancient world’s most influential biographies of Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Pericles, Cato, and dozens of other men who had conquered the world and shaken empires, and he wrote them so well that they established the very pattern of what a life story could be. As it turned out, the author of those grand biographies spent almost all of his own life in a small town in the hills of central Greece, a town he loved and refused to leave, busying himself with its temples and its tile-measuring and its minor magistracies. The contrast was not an accident but the key to the man. Plutarch believed that greatness of soul had nothing to do with the size of the stage, and that a person could take the measure of Caesar without ever wishing to be Caesar.

Thankfully, far more is known about Plutarch’s life than most ancient writers. Where so many of them left no trace of themselves, Plutarch is everywhere in his own enormous body of work. He tells readers about his grandfather and brothers, about his teacher and friends, about his wife and children, about the dinners he hosted and the arguments he enjoyed, and the tragedies he suffered.