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Parallel Lives
Sign in to saveAlso known as Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, Plutarch's Lives, Lives, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, Plutarch, Vitae, Vitae Parallelae, Bioi Paralleloi
biographies of famous Greeks and Romans by Plutarch
Key facts
- Author
- Plutarch
- Original title
- Βίοι Παράλληλοι
- Translator
- Thomas North , John & William Langhorne , George Long , Aubrey Stewart, A. H. Clough , Bernadotte Perrin
- Language
- Koine Greek
- Genre
- Biography
- Publication date
- Early 2nd century AD
- Publication place
- Roman Empire
- Media type
- Manuscript
- Library of congress classification span
- DE7 .P5
- Original text
- Βίοι Παράλληλοι at Greek Wikisource
- Translation
- Parallel Lives at Wikisource
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- literary work
- Author
- Plutarch
- Genre
- biography
- Image
- Plutarch Han.jpg
Show 5 more facts
- title
- Vitae parallelae
- Commons category
- Parallel Lives
- language of work or name
- Ancient Greek
- translator
- Thomas North
- publication date
- 2002-09-01
Sources (2)
via Wikidata · CC0
~11 min read
Encyclopedic overview
The Parallel Lives (Ancient Greek: Βίοι Παράλληλοι, Bíoi Parállēloi; Latin: Vītae Parallēlae) is a series of 48 biographies of famous men written in Greek by the Greco-Roman philosopher, historian, and Apollonian priest Plutarch, probably at the beginning of the second century. The lives are arranged in pairs to illuminate the common moral virtues or failings of their subjects.
The surviving Parallel Lives consists of 23 pairs of biographies, each pair consisting of one Greek and one Roman whose lives Plutarch viewed as similar, such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, or Demosthenes and Cicero. There are also four singular Lives, recounting the stories of Artaxerxes, Aratus, Galba, and Otho. Traces of other biographies point to an additional twelve single Lives that are now missing.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Parallel Lives” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.