Plutarch 46 AD – 119 AD

Plutarch of Chaeronea was a Greek Middle Platonist philosopher, biographer, and priest at Delphi. His Parallel Lives paired famous Greeks with famous Romans to illuminate the moral character of each, and his Moralia collects essays on ethics, religion, education, politics, and natural philosophy. Plutarch drew on Plato, the Old Academy, and the religious traditions of Greece and Egypt, and he transmitted much that we know of earlier philosophy through his copious quotation. His writings shaped European moral and political education from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century.

Plutarch (c. 46–after 119) was a Greek philosopher, biographer, and Platonist priest at Delphi whose Parallel Lives and Moralia have shaped European education and philosophical culture for two millennia. Born in Chaeronea in Boeotia, where he served on the local council and remained throughout his life, he was educated at Athens and traveled widely, holding Roman citizenship and serving briefly as procurator of Achaea.

The Parallel Lives — fifty surviving biographies arranged in pairs, one Greek and one Roman — present the moral and philosophical lessons of statesmen, generals, and lawgivers from Theseus and Romulus through Cato the Younger and Mark Antony. Plutarch's biographical method is explicitly philosophical: the Lives are written for the moral formation of the reader, with telling anecdotes preferred to comprehensive historical narrative because the soul of a man is more visible in a small action than in his large public works. The Lives shaped Renaissance political thought, Shakespeare's Roman plays, and the broader European tradition of moral biography.

The Moralia is a collection of around eighty treatises and dialogues on philosophical, religious, ethical, and miscellaneous topics. Plutarch's Platonism is moderate and ethical rather than systematic; his polemical writings against the Stoics and Epicureans defend a Platonic alternative grounded in the cultivated character of the philosophical person. He continued writing into his seventies and died in Chaeronea after 119.