Plutarch wrote in a dead language and died about eighteen hundred years ago. Since his death all the modern languages have been born, and a literature produced so vast that no man can hope to master it. Under these circustances why should Plutarch's Lives be read today? What have they to give busy men and women in a century which has immense tasks to perform and a host of books of its own making clamoring to be read?

To begin at the beginning: Plutarch's Lives are perennially interesting; even in inferior translations they hold the attention from cover to cover. And the reason of this is not far to seek: they deal with men of the first order, and they deal only with men whose careers and achievements have dramatic action and the story-telling quality; and these stories of real life are told with freshness, vigor and intelligence. The Lives are a portrait gallery of famous men. They are a mine of information, not always minutely accurate but truthful and full of vitality. They are sound to the heart in moral feeling and judgment; and are, therefore, the best possible text-books for the making of strong men. Montaigne, who was a shrewd judge in such matters, says in his "Essay on the Education of Children:" Let him inquire into the manners, revenues, and alliances of princes, things in themselves very pleasant to learn, and very useful to know. In conversing with men, I mean, and principally those who only live in the records of history, he shall by reading these books, converse with those great and heroic souls of former and better ages. . . What profit shall he not reap as to the business of men, by reading the Lives of Plutarch?

Plutarch deals habitually with the "business of men" in the world; the affairs, not of traffic and commerce, but of conduct, manners and action. This is the stuff of which men are made, and the Lives form a great Book of Heroes; they have been well described as "the pasture of great souls." There is another good reason why men and women who speak English should read them; they are one of the great sources upon which Shakespeare drew for some of his noblest plays.

Shakespeare went to these sources for the material for "Anthony and Cleopatra," "Julius Caesar," and "Coriolanus:" and Plutarch's prose suited his purpose so well that it is introduced more than once with very unimportant changes; and Emerson, whose moral insight was wonderfully keen, said of the Lives: "I do not know where to find a book -- to borrow a phrase of Ben Jonson's --'so crammed with life.'"

Plutarch was interested chiefly in men of action, and his work is saturated with character, which is thought organized and expressed in action. He was familiar with history in the large sense, but he cared most for men. "I do not write Histories but Lives," he said; "nor do the most conspicuous acts of necessity exhibit a man's virtue or his vice, but oftentimes some slight circumstance, a word or a jest, shows a man's character better than battles with the slaughter of tens of thousands, and the greatest arrays of armies and sieges of cities. Now, as painters produce a likeness by a representation of the countenance and the expression of the eyes, without troubling themselves about the other parts of the body, so must I be allowed to look rather into the signs of a man's character, and thus give a portrait of his life, leaving others to describe great events and battles."

Sources:
Plutarch's Lives of Illustrious Men
Translated by Dryden and Clough
Introduction by Hamilton W. Mabie
In Four Volumes, Illustrated
John C. Winston Company, Philadelphia

"They died, but not as lavish of their blood,
Or thinking death itself was simply good;
Their wishes neither were to live nor die,
But to do both alike commendably."

Plutarch stuied in Athens, which had become a university city, and in Egypt, whither the world-wide interest in "the wisdom of the Egyptians" sent him. Later he took the road which men of intellectual ambition or aspiration thronged, and found himself in Rome. In the imperial city oratory had always counted for much, and the teaching and practice of the art was an important and influential profession. Plutarch appears to have had only a superficial knowledge of Latin, though he read widely in the literature. He was a diligent student of Roman history, and his studies equipped him for writing the remarkable group of Roman Lives from which many men in later generations have learned almost all they knew about Rome. In those days the Romans went to school to the Greeks; it was the fashion to have Greek tutors for boys in well-to-do families, and cultivated Romans spoke Greek almost as readily as they spoke Latin. Like many of his fellow-countrymen in Rome, Plutarch delivered lectures on philosophical and other subjects; and it is probable that these discourses furnished material for his book on "Morals."

But his heart was in Greece, and North, who made a famous translation of the Lives in Shakespeare's time, says very charmingly:
"Plutarch, though he tarried a long while in Italy and in Rome, yet that took not away the remembrance of the sweet air of Greece, and of the little town where he was born; but being touched from time to time with a sentence of an ancient poet, who saith that,
'In whatsoever country men are bred
(I know not by what sweetness of it led),
They nourish in their minds a glad desire,
Unto their native homes for to retire,'
he resolved to go back to Greece again, there to end the rest of his days in rest and honor among his citizens, of whom he was honorably welcomed home."

The Lives were probably written after his return to Chaeronea, as were the many books which bear his name, many of which have disappeared.

NOTE:
Now, go and read The Lives for yourself! It is the best book ever written of the history and character of famous Greek and Roman men.