Plutarch’s Parallel Lives – The Comparisons

The collected ‘Comparisons’ from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives:

In his ‘Comparisons’, Plutarch contrasted the greatest men of Ancient Greece with the greatest men of Ancient Rome, pitting figures like Alcibiades, Pericles and Alexander the Great against homologous ones, the likes of Romulus, Cato and Caesar.

Plutarch’s Lives has served as a source of inspiration to various thinkers and statesmen over the centuries: men like Montaigne, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and, perhaps most notably, William Shakespeare, who used Plutarch as “the quarry from which [he] built his Roman plays.”

Napoleon too greatly admired Plutarch’s Lives, reading it first as a child, and later carrying copies in his personal library while on campaign in his eponymous wars.

This book contains the collected ‘Comparisons’ of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, part of the Loeb Classical Library edition, translated by Bernadotte Perrin (1847-1920), acclaimed American classicist and the Lampson Professor of Greek Literature and History at Yale University. Perrin was also authored three books on Plutarch’s Lives, as well as several books on Greek poetry, history and drama.