#000570
Plutarch's Lives (Modern Library)
Plutarch; translated by John Dryden, revised by Arthur Hugh Clough
Plutarch's Parallel Lives pairs eminent Greeks with Romans—Alexander with Caesar, Demosthenes with Cicero—to draw out character through anecdote and moral comparison. This Modern Library volume prints the John Dryden translation as revised by Arthur Hugh Clough, the rendering that shaped English readers' Plutarch for generations. Written around the turn of the second century AD, the Lives are less biography in the modern sense than studies of virtue and vice, prizing the revealing gesture over the order of battle. Shakespeare mined them for his Roman plays; the American founders read them as a handbook of republican character. Warm, gossipy, and morally engaged, they remain among the most readable of all ancient books, and a fine one-volume way to keep them at hand.
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The author
Plutarch (c. 46–after 119 AD) was a Greek from Chaeronea in Boeotia, a priest at Delphi, a Roman citizen, and a prolific essayist whose Moralia runs to dozens of treatises. He wrote the Lives late in life, as a mature moralist rather than a chronicler.
The book
The Parallel Lives set a Greek statesman or general beside a Roman counterpart, each pair often followed by a short comparison. Plutarch is frank that he is writing lives, not histories: a jest or a quirk of temper tells him more about a man than the body count of a siege. That method makes the book endlessly quotable and occasionally unreliable as fact.
How it has aged
Historians treat Plutarch cautiously—he wrote centuries after many of his subjects and shaped anecdotes toward a moral—but as literature and as a source for otherwise lost authors he is indispensable. The Dryden–Clough text reads with Augustan vigor, if less literally than modern versions.
For more context
Pair with Shakespeare's Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, both deeply indebted to North's earlier English Plutarch, and with modern translations by Ian Scott-Kilvert for comparison.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Plutarch; translated by John Dryden, revised by Arthur Hugh Clough
- Publisher
- Modern Library
- Place of publication
- New York
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Biography & Memoir
- Location
- Colorado
Places