Roman Lives

‘I treat the narrative of the Lives as a kind of mirror…The experience is like nothing so much as spending time in their company and living with them: I receive and welcome each of them in turn as my guest.’

In the eight lives of this collection Plutarch introduces the reader to the major figures and periods of classical Rome. He portrays virtues to be emulated and vices to be avoided, but his purpose is also implicitly to educate and warn those in his own day who wielded power. In pr…