The project of the parallel lives: Plutarch’s conception of biography

The Parallel Lives are Plutarch’s best known and most successful work, the project of his mature years and the fruit of his most consummate ideas and reflexions. Needless to say there is, as always, a considerable gap between the author’s initial and most sincere intentions and the eventual outcome, influenced as it is by the contingencies of the available material and by the twists and turns in the process of writing, nor should one overstate the conformity of a long series each of whose members is a work of art in itself - in fact, in the case of the Parallel Lives, a piece of art involving pendants. But it is Plutarch’s conception of biography that is at the center of the present discussion. The chapter also considers an aspect of the Parallel Lives that only rarely gets its due, their relation to their author.