Parallel Lives

Plutarch pairs prominent Greeks with their Roman counterparts, including Alexander the Great with Julius Caesar, Theseus with Romulus, and Pericles with Fabius Maximus. Each pair is followed by a comparative moral assessment, and the work originally contained 23 paired biographies plus 4 single, unpaired lives.

Plutarch composed the "Parallel Lives" in the late 1st and early 2nd centuries CE, during the reigns of the Roman emperors Trajan and Hadrian. He was a Greek-speaking citizen of the Roman Empire who lived in the small Boeotian town of Chaeronea and also served as a priest at Delphi.

Plutarch's biographies were Shakespeare's primary source for three Roman plays: "Julius Caesar," "Antony and Cleopatra," and "Coriolanus." Shakespeare relied on Sir Thomas North's 1579 English translation of Plutarch, which itself was translated from a French version by Jacques Amyot.

Of the approximately 50 biographies originally written, the majority survive, though a few pairs and individual lives have been lost over the centuries. The surviving texts include 22 paired lives and 4 single biographies, making it one of the most substantially preserved works of classical biography.