Plutarch (c.46–c.120 CE,) later Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, was a Greek historian, biographer, essayist, and moralist. One of the most influential writers ever, his works strongly influenced the evolution of the essay, the biography, and historical writing in Europe from the 16th to the 19th century.
Born in Chaeroneia in the Greek region of Boeotia, Plutarch spent most of his later life there. He studied philosophy in Athens and voyaged to Italy and Egypt, making a circle of distinguished friends. He possibly visited Rome, where he gave public lectures in philosophy.
Among Plutarch’s 227 works, the most important is the Bioi parallēloi (‘Parallel Lives,’) in which he recounts the noble deeds and characters of Greek and Roman soldiers, legislators, orators, and diplomats. Plutarch was very much concerned with men’s moral conduct and individual moral guidance in an age when men were losing their faith in religion and philosophy.
Plutarch also wrote the Moralia, or Ethica, a series of more than 83 treatises on diverse subjects such as vegetarianism, superstition, philosophy (Epicurean, Stoic, and Academic,) dietetics, divine justice, prophecy, demonology, conjugal relations, family life, mysticism, and numerous helpful precepts.
Plutarch occupies a unique place in literature as the foremost encyclopedist of antiquity. Sir Thomas North’s translation into English of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives was a primary source used by William Shakespeare for several of his Roman plays.
Ironically, Plutarch, who was the biographer of many others, had no biographer except for a scant remark in Suidas, a 10th-century Byzantine encyclopedia of the ancient Mediterranean world. Prominent modern biographies include Donald Russell’s Plutarch (1973,) C P Jones’s Plutarch and Rome (1971,) and Reginald Barrow’s Plutarch and His Times (1967.)
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Solon being asked, namely, what city was best to live in. That city, he replied, in which those who are not wronged, no less than those who are wronged, exert themselves to punish the wrongdoers.
—Plutarch
I am writing biography, not history, and the truth is that the most brilliant exploits often tell us nothing of the virtues or vices of the men who performed them, while on the other hand a chance remark or a joke may reveal far more of a man’s character than the mere feat of winning battles in which thousands fall, or of marshalling great armies, or laying siege to cities.
—Plutarch
Let us carefully observe those good qualities wherein our enemies excel us; and endeavor to excel them, by avoiding what is faulty, and imitating what is excellent in them.
—Plutarch
Good birth is a fine thing, but the merit is our ancestors.
—Plutarch
Topics: Birth
Let us carefully observe those good qualities wherein our enemies excel us; and endeavor to excel them, by avoiding what is faulty, and imitating what is excellent in them.
—Plutarch
Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly.
—Plutarch
Topics: Listening, Conversation
Nothing is harder to direct than a man in prosperity; nothing more easily managed than one in adversity.
—Plutarch
Topics: Prosperity, Success & Failure, Adversity
The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting — no more — and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth.
—Plutarch
Topics: Thought, Intelligence, Education
To find fault, is easy; to do better may be difficult.
—Plutarch
Topics: Difficulty
Prosperity is not just scale; adversity is the only balance to weigh friends.
—Plutarch
Topics: Adversity, Friendship
Time is the wisest of all counselors.
—Plutarch
Topics: Time, Time Management
No man ever wetted clay and then left it, as if there would be bricks by chance and fortune.
—Plutarch
Topics: Fate, Luck
Every condition of life, if attended with virtue, is undisturbed and delightful; but when vice is intermixed, it renders even things that appear sumptuous and magnificent, distasteful and uneasy to the possessor.
—Plutarch
Topics: Virtue
He made the city Athens, great as it was when he took it, the greatest and richest of all cities, and grew to be superior in power to kings and tyrants. Some of these actually appointed him guardian of their sons, but he did not make his estate a single drachma greater than it was when his father left it to him.
—Plutarch
I wish you all very good lives.
—Plutarch
Talkative people who wish to be loved are hated; when they desire to please, they bore; when they think they are admired, they are laughed at; they injure their friends, benefit their enemies, and ruin themselves.
—Plutarch
To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.
—Plutarch
Topics: Failure, Adversity, Difficulties, Failures, Mistakes
Time is the soul of this world.
—Plutarch
Topics: Time Management
The present offers itself to our touch for only an instant of time and then eludes the senses.
—Plutarch
Topics: The Present
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