Plutarch and the Historical Tradition

Plutarch was indisputably one of the most prominent of the philosophers and biographers of the ancient world. The papers of this book analyse from diverse perspectives Plutarch’s use and reshaping of the historical tradition, under two broad and interdependent categories: biographical techniques and appropriation of sources. A wide spectrum of Lives from different historical periods of Greece and Rome is examined in depth: Pericles, Alcibiades, Nicias, Lysander, Eumenes, Pyrrhus, Publicola, Sertorius, and Antony. The book offers studies of elements such as the parallelism which makes a pair of lives into a literary unit, the themes which unify the lives and the way Plutarch exploits echoes of Greek tragedy or of Egyptian religion to interpret a life. The manner in which Plutarch rewrote historical material, selecting, combining, simplifying, enlarging, or drastically abridging is also considered. It emerges that Plutarch not infrequently rewrote his sources, whether single authors (Thucydides, Sallust) or complex traditions, to create a unified character, and to relate his hero’s life to that of the parallel hero in the pair. The construction of a Plutarchian life required careful selection and radical and creative reworking of the historical tradition.