Read this if you…
- want the only Ancient historian that's not horrifically boring (but still quite boring)
- want biographies of the greatest Romans + Greeks, compared and contrasted by an Ancient himself
- want to read one of Shakespeare's biggest influences
Skip this if you…
- don't care about famous greeks/romans
- find histories written in ancient times to be boring (honestly, i do, even though this is the best one)
Why It Matters
Plutarch paired famous Greeks with famous Romans to dig into what makes a leader great or terrible, and his biographies shaped how the West understood heroism and character for centuries. Shakespeare lifted Plutarch directly for Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus. The American Founders read him as a practical guide to republican virtue.
The 
Take
Totally fascinating to have an ancients account of the greatest Roman’s and Greeks of all time, but overall boring and long
Where to go next
- History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. Plutarch's Lives built on it. - For the Athenian war years, Plutarch is reading Thucydides over your shoulder — he names him, quotes him, and bows to him on Nicias ("I shall not vainly rival Thucydides") - The *History* is the bedrock fact; the *Lives* is the portrait built on top — read Thucydides first and you'll see exactly where Plutarch turns chronicle into biography - Pericles and Nicias come to Plutarch fully formed from the *History*; he adds the man, not the events
- The Histories by Herodotus. Plutarch's Lives built on it. - The Persian-War *Lives* — Themistocles, Aristides — are built on Herodotus, who Plutarch used as his primary source even while reworking and omitting his details - It's not quiet borrowing: Plutarch resented him enough to write *On the Malice of Herodotus*, a whole essay attacking the *Histories* - Read Herodotus first and you'll see exactly what Plutarch was leaning on — and exactly what set his teeth on edge
- The Iliad by Homer. Plutarch's Lives built on it. - The authority Plutarch quotes more than any other — the *Iliad* is his touchstone for what virtue and character look like - Homer surfaces again and again across the *Lives*, cited as casually as a friend recalls a shared book - Read the *Iliad* first and you hear what Plutarch is hearing when he holds his generals and statesmen up to Achilles
- Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare. Plutarch's Lives shaped it. - Plutarch's *Life of Antony* is the spine of *Antony and Cleopatra* — Shakespeare's principal source, by scholarly consensus - Enobarbus's famous 'barge she sat in' speech is lifted almost word-for-word from Sir Thomas North's 1579 translation — the purple sails, the silver oars, the lovesick wind are all already there in the prose - Shakespeare's gift was knowing when not to improve on Plutarch, and simply set him to verse
- Coriolanus by William Shakespeare. Plutarch's Lives shaped it. - Plutarch's *Life of Caius Marcius Coriolanus* is the single source Shakespeare dramatized for *Coriolanus* - The speech where Coriolanus turns up at his enemy Aufidius's hearth is a near-verbatim lift of North's 1579 prose - Plutarch supplied not just the events but the very words of the play's pivotal scene
- Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. Plutarch's Lives shaped it. - The *Lives* of Caesar, Brutus, and Antony are the single main source of *Julius Caesar* — Shakespeare's action tracks Plutarch's events directly - He read them in Sir Thomas North's 1579 English and followed the biographies scene by scene - This is the clearest case of Shakespeare turning Plutarch's history straight into theatre
- The Complete Essays by Michel de Montaigne. Plutarch's Lives shaped it. - The book that made Montaigne — he credited Amyot's 1559 French *Lives* with lifting him "out of the mire of ignorance" - Plutarch's way of reading a life — character revealed in the telling anecdote, the offhand remark — is the model Montaigne turns inward on himself - The close of the *Essays*' Apology for Raymond Sebond is a direct rewriting of a passage from Amyot's Plutarch
- Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare. Plutarch's Lives shaped it. - The misanthrope in the margins — Plutarch's *Lives* of Antony and Alcibiades carry the Timon digression Shakespeare mined for a whole play - Timon's bitterness, his foils Alcibiades and Apemantus, the fig-tree gibe, the two tomb epitaphs — all drawn from North's 1579 English Plutarch - A few paragraphs of biographical aside became *Timon of Athens*
- Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Plutarch's Lives shaped it. - The book that made the man — Rousseau, in his own *Confessions*, names childhood reading of Plutarch's *Lives* as the thing that "formed that independent and republican spirit, that proud untamable character" - He puts it plainly: "I became the man whose life I read" - Plutarch's parade of Greek and Roman statesmen didn't just inform Rousseau — by his own account it manufactured the self who would write the *Confessions*
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin. Plutarch's Lives shaped it. - Franklin names the *Lives* by name — it sat in his father's library, and he says he "read abundantly" in it as a boy and still thought "that time spent to great advantage" - Plutarch's whole method — the life as a usable example, character read through deeds — became Franklin's template for writing his own - See where America's first great self-made man learned how a life gets turned into a lesson
- The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli. Plutarch's Lives shaped it. - Machiavelli quarried the *Lives* for *The Prince*'s hard examples — Plutarch is the source behind several of its most iconoclastic claims, from conquering fortune to being feared rather than loved - Even the famous lion-and-fox image of cunning rule traces back here: Plutarch records it first as Lysander's maxim - The Renaissance read its ancients through Plutarch — *The Prince* is what one ruthless reader did with them
- A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. Plutarch's Lives shaped it. - Theseus and Hippolyta, who frame the whole comedy, walked into Shakespeare's play straight out of Plutarch's *Life of Theseus* - Shakespeare read it in Thomas North's 1579 English translation — North's wording is echoed in the play, including the conqueror-and-captured-queen backstory named in the opening lines - *Plutarch's Lives* was Shakespeare's standing source for the classical world; here it supplies the Athenian court the lovers wander out from
- Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Plutarch's Lives shaped it. - *Plutarch's Lives* doesn't just influence *Frankenstein* — it appears inside it, one of three books the creature finds and reads in the woods - Plutarch gives him 'high thoughts': from the rulers of ancient Greece and Rome he learns of public virtue, and his moral sense begins to form - Of the creature's three teachers — Plutarch, Goethe, Milton — Plutarch is the one that turns him toward virtue rather than grievance
- Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais. Plutarch's Lives shaped it. - Rabelais was a lifelong Plutarch reader, and it shows — *Gargantua and Pantagruel* is salted with biographical exempla lifted straight from the *Lives* - Rabelais names Plutarch by name and quotes him constantly, drawing on both the *Lives* and the *Moralia* to give his giants their classical scaffolding - One of the source pools, alongside Montaigne and Shakespeare, that the Renaissance kept dipping into
- Self-Reliance and Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Plutarch's Lives shaped it. - Emerson called Plutarch his "bible for heroes" — the *Lives* modeled his own great-men project and gave him his yardstick for human greatness - In *Self-Reliance* he invokes "Plutarch's age" as the benchmark a self-reliant man should measure himself against - "We cannot read Plutarch," Emerson wrote, "without a tingling of the blood"
Depicted in Art
Coriolanus draws his sword beneath Rome's massive walls as Volumnia, Virgilia, their children, and Roman matrons reach toward him pleading.
Nicolas Poussin, 1653
Cleopatra drops a pearl earring into a goblet of vinegar at a lavish banquet table, watched by Antony and attendants in Venetian dress.
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1744
Caesar, robed in white, recoils as a tight ring of conspirators in red and ochre togas close in with raised daggers; one senator at center grips Caesar's cloak.
Vincenzo Camuccini, 1805
The aftermath: Caesar's body lies bloodied beside a toppled gilt throne in the empty foreground while the conspirators rush up the senate steps, daggers brandished overhead.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1867
Lictors carry the corpses of Brutus's sons into his home; he sits in shadow while the women collapse in grief at the right.
Jacques-Louis David, 1789
Hersilia in white throws herself between Romulus and Tatius as the Sabine women raise their babies to halt the battle.
Jacques-Louis David, 1799
Scipio sits enthroned and gestures the captive princess back to her young fiancé Allucius as her parents kneel with treasure.
Nicolas Poussin, 1640
Romulus signals from the dais as armored Romans seize Sabine women in a churning crowd before a classical portico.
Peter Paul Rubens, 1638
Recommended Editions
Robin Waterfield
Oxford University Press · 2008
Waterfield picks a strong selection (Alexander, Caesar, Alcibiades, Cicero, others) and his prose reads novelistically. The best on-ramp into Plutarch without committing to the full thousand-page set.
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Deep Dive
What It's About
This summary gives away plot details.
Notable Quotes
“I came, I saw, I conquered.”
“The die is cast.”