The Parallel Lives were dedicated to Q. Sosius Senecio, an acquaintance of Pliny, and a great man-four times consul-of Trajan's reign. The plan was open-ended. Each book
contained the lives of a Greek and a Roman whose careers had something in common: wisdom as lawgivers, courage, perseverance, eloquence, a period of exile, or a great
fortune. Formal comparisons usually followed. The result was a presentation of classical history that, more than any other, created the Renaissance image of antiquity.
Plutarch's purposes were confessedly moral. He sought to expound the virtues and vices of his great men and show how they responded to the challenges of fortune. He was
not concerned with them as historical forces, only as men of certain qualities who were placed under the stress of great events and decisions.
Whether it is Theseus or Pericles, Coriolanus or Caesar, the problem is seen in the same light, and (sources allowing) the biography follows more or less the same pattern:
origin and childhood, introduction into public life, the career and its points of crisis, the death and posthumous reputation. It has often been pointed out that this partly
echoes a well-attested rhetorical scheme for 'encomium'-origin, nature, character, actions and virtues, accomplishments, comparison with others-and this is of course true.
But the distance between Plutarch's attitudes and that of a rhetorical encomiast can hardly be exaggerated. 'Rhetors', said Cicero, 'are allowed to tell lies in history, so as to
be in a position to say something clever.' This is what Plutarch never does. His respect for evidence should not be questioned, though his interpretation of it, and his view of
what biographical evidence is, may excite surprise. We should not expect in him any recognition of the difference between a primary and a secondary source; and we must
be willing to accept 'probability'-meaning accord with what one expects of a certain kind of person in certain kinds of circumstances-as a criterion for judging between
alternative accounts of the facts. What makes the Lives live, however, is not their moral preoccupations, nor yet their evident concern to demonstrate the political as well as
the intellectual greatness of classical Greece; it is above all Plutarch's narrative gift, his willingness to listen to his sources and his skill in choosing the telling detail. No one
forgets the death of Cato at Utica, or the love of Antony and Cleopatra; and it is from Plutarch that these episodes came into the consciousness of the modern world.