Parallel Lives (Annotated)

Plutarch's Parallel Lives is a monumental series of paired biographies in which eminent Greeks and Romans—such as Theseus and Romulus, Alexander and Caesar, Demosthenes and Cicero—are set beside one another for moral and political comparison. Written in elegant, anecdotal Greek prose, the work is less a chronicle of events than an inquiry into character: ambition, virtue, fortune, statesmanship, a...