Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans is a series of biographies of famous men, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings. The surviving Parallel Lives, as they are also known, contain 23 pairs of biographies, each pair containing one Greek Life and one Roman Life; as well as 4 unpaired single Lives. It is a work of considerable importance, not only as a source of information about the individuals biographized, but also about the times in which they lived.

As he explains in the first paragraph of his Life of Alexander, Plutarch was not concerned with writing histories, as such, but in exploring the influence of character - good or bad - on the lives and destinies of famous men. Some of the more interesting Lives - for instance, those of Heracles and Philip II of Macedon - no longer exist, and many of the remaining Lives are truncated, contain obvious lacunae and/or have been tampered with by later writers.

His Life of Alexander is one of the five surviving tertiary sources about Alexander the Great and it includes anecdotes and descriptions of incidents that appear in no other source. Likewise, his portrait of Numa Pompilius, an early Roman king, also contains unique information about the early Roman calendar.

Biographies

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	Parallel Lives - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (773 words) Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans is a series of biographies of famous men, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings. The surviving Parallel Lives, as they are more properly and commonly known, contain twenty-three pairs of biographies, each pair consisting of one Greek and one Roman, as well as four unpaired, single lives. The first pair of Lives—the Epaminondas-Scipio Africanus—no longer exists, and many of the remaining lives are truncated, contain obvious lacunae and/or have been tampered with by later writers. The Internet Classics Archive | Aristides by Plutarch (5824 words) For Epaminondas, who all the world knows was educated, and lived his whole life in much poverty, and also Plato, the philosopher, exhibited magnificent shows, the one an entertainment of flute-players, the other of dithyrambic singers; Dion, the Syracusan, supplying the expenses of the latter, and Pelopidas those of Epaminondas. After this the Greeks determined in council to remove their camp some distance, to possess themselves of a place convenient for watering; because the springs near them were polluted and destroyed by the barbarian cavalry. The consequence was that the sea captains and generals of the Greeks, in particular, the Chians, Samians, and Lesbians, came to Aristides and requested him to be their general, and to receive the confederates into his command, who had long desired to relinquish the Spartans and come over to the Athenians.
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