Works, — The great work of Plutarch is his Parallel Lives (B/oi IlapdWriXoi), which contains the biogra- phy of forty-six distinguished Greeks and Romans, be- sides the lives of Artaxerxes Mnemon, Aratus, Galba, Otho, and Homer, which last is probably not by him. The forty-six lives are arranged in pairs or sets, each of which contains a Greek and a Roman, and the two lives in each pair are followed by a comparison of the characters of the two persons. These lives are : The- seus and Romulus, Lycurgus and Numa, Solon and Va- lerius Publicola.Themistocles and Camillus, Pericles and Fabius Maxinuts. Alcibiades and Coriolanus, Timoleon and .Emilius Paulus, Pelopidas and Marcellus, Aristi- des and Cato Major, Philopoemen and Flaminius, Pyr- rhus and Marius, Lysander and Sulla, Cimon and Lu- cullus, Nicias and Crassus, Eumenes and' Sertorius, Agesilaus and Pompey, Alexander the Great and Ju- lius Caesar, Phocion and Cato Minor, Agis and Cleo- menes and the two Gracchi, Demosthenes and Cicero, Demetrius Poliorcetes and M. Antonius, Dion and M. Brutus. The biographies of Epaminondas, Scipio, Au- gustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius. Xero, Yitellius, He- siod, Pindar, Crates the Cynic, Diophantus, Aristomenes, and the poet Aratus are lost. Plutarch's son, Lamprias, made a list of his father's works, which is partly ] ire- served and printed by Fabricius (Bibliot/ieca Grceca).
In the department of biography. Plutarch is the only writer of antiquity who has established a lasting repu- tation. The plan of his biographies is briefly explained by himself in the introduction to the " Life of Alexan- der the Great," where he makes an apology for the brevity with which he is compelled to treat of the nu- merous events in the lives of Alexander and ( isesar. "For," he says, "I do not write histories, but lives; nor do the most conspicuous acts of necessity exhibit a man's virtue or his vice, but oftentimes some slight circumstance, a word or a jest, shows a man's character better than battles, with the slaughter of tens of thou- sands, and the greatest arrays of armies and sieges of cities. Now, as painters produce a likeness by a rep- resentation of the countenance and the expression of the eyes, without troubling themselves about the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to look rather into the signs of a man's character, and thus give a portrait of his life, leaving others to describe great events and battles." The object then of Plutarch in his biographies was a moral end, and the exhibition of the principal events of a man's life was subordinate to this bis main design; and though he may not always have adhered to the principle which be laid down, it cannot be denied that his view of what biography should be is much more exact than that of most per- sons who have attempted this style of composition. The life of a statesman or of a general, when written with the view of giving a complete history of all the public events in which he was engaged, is not biog- raphy, but history. This extract from Plutarch will also in some measure be an apology for the want of historical order observable in many of the lives. Though altogether deficient in that critical sagacity which dis- cerns truth from falsehood, and disentangles the intri- cacies of confused and conflicting statements, Plutarch has preserved in his Lives a vast number of facts which would otherwise have been unknown to us. He was a great reader, and must have had access to large libra- ries. It is said that he quotes two hundred and fifty- writers, a great part of whose works are now entirely lost. On the sources of Plutarch's Lives the reader may consult an essay by A. H. L. Heeren, Be Fontibus et Auctoritate Vitarum Parallelarum Plutarchi Com- mentationes IV (Gott. 1820, 8vo). Besides the Lives, a considerable number of Plutarch's essays may be styled historical. They may all be read with pleasure, and some of them with instruction, not so much for their historical value as for the detached curious facts that are scattered so profusely through Plutarch's writings, and for the picture which they exhibit of the author's
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Orators, which are at- i . Plutarch, are of little value, and may nol still they bear internal evidence, al leasl nega- nol being of a later age than that of Plutarch, ol Plutarch firel appeared in a Latin version by several hands, al Rome, in 2 vols. foL, about 117". rhis rsion formed the basis <■! various Spanish ami Italian translations. The tir-t Greek edition was print- ed by Philip Giunta | Florence, !517,foL). Among more
litions are those "i Bryan (L I. 1729, 5 vols.
I Latin, which was completed bj Moses .In s.. nl. ait. r Bryan's death ; tl Par. 1809-
1 thai by Schafer (Leips. 1826, i e translations are v< ry numerous. The rman translation i- said to be by Kaltwasser \l i mrg, 1799 1806, l" vols. 8vo). Anothi t Ger- man translation appeared al VTienna in 1812. I he bi si