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Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans - Definition |
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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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