Plutarch and the Historical Tradition

Plutarch was indisputably one of the most prominent of the philosophers and biographers of the ancient world. The papers in this book analyze, from different perspectives, Plutarch's use and reshaping of the historical tradition, under two broad and independent categories: biographical technique and appropriation of sources. A wide spectrum of lives from different historical periods of Greece and Rome is examined in depth: Pericles, Alcibiades, Nicias, Lysander, Eumenes, Pyrrhus, Publicola, Sertorius, and Antony. Stadter has brought together many eminent Plutarchan scholars in a volume which offers diverse examinations of Plutarch's art.Plutarch and the Historical Traditionoffers studies of stylistic elements such as the parallelism which makes a pair of lives into a literary unit; or the themes which unify the lives, as Plutarch exploits echoes of Greek tragedy, or of Egyptian religion, to interpret a life. The manner in which Plutarch rewrote historical tradition,selecting, combining, simplifying, enlarging, or drastically abridging, is also considered. It emerges that Plutarch frequently rewrote his sources, whether single authors (Thucydides, Sallust) or complex traditions, to create a unified character, and to relate his hero's life to that of the parallel hero in the pair. The construction of a Plutarchan life, these essays demonstrate, required collective discrimination and radical and creative reconstruction of the historical tradition. Plutarch and the Historical Traditionwill be valuable to all interested in ancient history and biography. Full documentation, a bibliography, and an index, make it especially useful for students and scholars.