Five-minute digest
Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
Summary
Plutarch’s Parallel Lives set the life of a famous Greek beside that of a famous Roman, so that each could be measured by the other. Twenty-three pairs survive, most closed by a short Comparison in which Plutarch weighs the two men, together with four single Lives: Aratus, Artaxerxes, Galba, and Otho. The pair of Epaminondas and Scipio is lost. The founders come first, Theseus with Romulus and Lycurgus with Numa; then the lawgivers and statesmen of early Athens and the Roman Republic, Solon and Poplicola, Themistocles and Camillus, Pericles and Fabius, Aristides and Cato the Elder; then the generals and kings of the Hellenistic age and the late Republic, from Alcibiades and Coriolanus to Alexander and Caesar, Demosthenes and Cicero, Demetrius and Antony, and Dion and Brutus. Plutarch is clear that he is not writing history. At the opening of the Life of Alexander he explains that great battles often reveal less of a man than a jest or a short saying, and that he will gather such signs of character as a painter studies the face and eyes. The Lives are therefore full of anecdotes: Themistocles telling the Spartan commander to strike but hear him, Cato the Elder preferring to be asked why he had no statue, Caesar telling his friends in an Alpine village that he would rather be first there than second in Rome, Demosthenes training his voice with pebbles in his mouth. The purpose is moral. Plutarch writes so that readers may imitate the virtues of good men and avoid the vices of others; in the pair of Demetrius and Antony he includes two men chiefly as warnings. He praises justice in Aristides and Phocion, temperance in Cato and Agesilaus, piety in Numa and Camillus, magnanimity in Pericles and Timoleon, and he traces how ambition, anger, and love of pleasure undid men of great gifts such as Alcibiades, Marius, Sulla, and Antony. He judges generously but firmly, and lets the facts of a life carry the lesson. The Lives were among the most widely read books of the Renaissance and the early modern world. Amyot’s French version and Sir Thomas North’s English translation from it gave Shakespeare the plots and much of the language of Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. Montaigne counted Plutarch among his two favorite authors, the American founders read him as a school of republican virtue, and the Dryden translation, revised by Clough, became the standard English version of the nineteenth century, the one given here.
Top Lessons
Character shows in small things
Plutarch looks for character in sayings and jests as well as battles. A student learns to read a person by habits and small choices, which reveal what great occasions can hide.
Comparison as a way to judge
By setting two lives side by side, Plutarch makes the reader weigh virtues against each other: Aristides’ justice against Cato’s industry, Demosthenes’ eloquence against Cicero’s. Comparison sharpens judgment without flattery.
Great gifts need governed passions
Alcibiades, Marius, Sulla, Coriolanus, and Antony had rare gifts, yet ambition, anger, or pleasure undid them. Plutarch shows again and again that ability without temperance ruins both the man and the city.
Public service and private integrity
Aristides died poor, Phocion refused Alexander’s gifts, Cato the Younger kept the treasury honest. Plutarch presents integrity in small public duties as the foundation of trust.
Verified Quotes
“the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever”
“Strike if you will, but hear”
“The city is well fortified which hath a wall of men instead of brick”
“I would," said he, "much rather be asked, why I have not one, than why I have one”
“Also, Carthage, methinks, ought utterly to be destroyed”
“For my part, I had rather be the first man among these fellows, than the second man in Rome”
“The die is cast”
“I came, saw, and conquered”
“more worshiped the rising than the setting sun”
“his inarticulate and stammering pronunciation he overcame and rendered more distinct by speaking with pebbles in his mouth”
“The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars”
“But Cleopatra was busied in making a collection of all varieties of poisonous drugs, and, in order to see which of them were the least painful in the operation, she had them tried upon prisoners condemned to die”
Medical Lens
The Lives record illness and death as part of character: Pericles in the Athenian plague, Alexander’s fatal fever, Cato the Elder’s household medicine and distrust of Greek physicians, and the poisonings and suicides that end several Roman Lives. They are sources for ancient attitudes to sickness and remedies, read with care since Plutarch wrote centuries after many of the events.
- Life of Pericles
Pericles, sick in the plague years, shows a friend an amulet the women had hung on him, as a sign of how far illness had worn him down.
- Life of Marcus Cato
Cato keeps a book of household remedies for his family and expresses his suspicion of Greek physicians.
- Life of Alexander, last chapters
The account of Alexander’s final illness from the royal diaries, day by day, with Plutarch’s doubts about the rumors of poison.
- Life of Antony
Cleopatra tests poisons on condemned prisoners and studies the bite of venomous creatures before her death.
- Life of Cato the Younger, end
Cato’s death at Utica, including his tearing open the wound the physician had dressed.