Overview
Plutarch (c. 46–c. 119 CE) was a Greek biographer and Middle Platonist from Chaeronea who became a Roman citizen and Delphic priest. Parallel Lives pairs Greek and Roman figures for moral comparison; Moralia gathers essays on ethics, religion, and education. He wrote in Greek under the early Empire. Handbook dates are approximate across the late first and early second centuries. His portraits shaped later European images of antiquity.
Main ideas
Character is revealed in small actions as much as public deeds; biography is moral philosophy in examples. Virtue lies in a mean trainable by habit and philosophy—Platonist ethics with Aristotelian color. Divine providence and daimonic intermediaries structure a religious cosmology. Superstition and atheism are twin errors about the gods. Education forms the soul through poetry carefully filtered. Comparative lives teach statesmanship through likeness and contrast.
Major works
- Parallel Lives
- Moralia
- On the Delay of Divine Justice
- How to Read Poetry
Legacy
Renaissance humanists and Shakespeare drew heavily on Plutarch’s Lives. Moral essay traditions echo the Moralia. Classicists still use him as a window onto imperial Greek culture.