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The MouseionPlutarch

Plutarch

145 works in the library, 142 with an English translation.

Greek philosopher and historian, born at Chaeronea. From Wikidata; Wikipedia.

Lived
1st–2nd c. AD
Kinds of writing
Biography (65), Philosophy (48), Philosophic Dialogue (11), Rhetoric (6), History (2), Polyhistory (2), Physics (2), Biology (2), Medicine, Narrative, Astronomy/Astrology
Dialect
Attic/Koine
Analysed
1,116,170 words

The 145 works

First the work Plutarch is best known for; then the works here with a translation and the most familiar vocabulary: the fewest rare words to look up. That is vocabulary only; grammar, dialect and ideas may still be demanding.

The road of the text

Follow the text from Plutarch's own day to the book in your hands. The gaps are the long silences between one mark and the next.

Before you read. Little numbers like 1 are footnotes. Tap one and it jumps to the source at the bottom of the page, so you can check us. Debated among scholars The evidence allows more than one reading, and specialists disagree. Ancient tradition / legend This is what ancient writers told; it may not be what happened. No label? Then the sources simply state it as fact.

  • The author
  • Copies
  • Print and editions
  • Readers
  1. c. AD 46The authorBorn at Chaeronea in Boeotia, between AD 45 and 471,3
  2. about 20 years laterAD 66The authorStudies philosophy at Athens with Ammonius, while Nero is in Greece (66/67)1,3,4
  3. about 4 years laterc. AD 70The authorVisits Rome with Lucius Mestrius Florus1
  4. about 30 years laterc. AD 95The authorBecomes one of the two priests of Apollo at Delphi1,6
  5. about 5 years laterc. AD 100The authorThe Parallel Lives, probably written at the beginning of the second century8
  6. about 19 years laterAD 119The authorStill alive; made procurator of Achaea by Hadrian1,3
  7. about 1,180 years later1296CopiesA single scribe finishes Parisinus gr. 1671 on 11 July: the Lives and the Moralia, revised by Maximus Planudes20
  8. 6 years later1302CopiesPlanudes adds a list of 69 Plutarch titles to his manuscript of the Greek Anthology21
  9. about 170 years laterc. 1470Print and editionsThe Lives are first printed, in a Latin translation, at Rome8
  10. about 40 years later1509Print and editionsAldus Manutius prints the Greek Moralia at Venice; Erasmus is one of its proofreaders13,22
  11. 8 years later1517Print and editionsThe Greek Lives are first printed, by Philippus Junta at Florence16,22
  12. 2 years later1519Print and editionsThe Aldine Lives, from better manuscripts at Venice16
  13. 40 years later1559Print and editionsJacques Amyot's French translation of the Lives1,16
  14. 13 years later1572Print and editionsAmyot's French Moralia; the Stephanus edition sets the Moralia in fourteen books1,13
  15. 7 years later1579Print and editionsThomas North's English Lives, from Amyot's French: Shakespeare's source1,16
  16. 24 years later1603Print and editionsPhilemon Holland's English Moralia, the first complete one from the Greek1
  17. 80 years later1683Print and editionsThe Lives in a translation overseen by John Dryden1
  18. about 130 years later1813ReadersShelley writes that he has translated the speeches On the Eating of Flesh14
  19. about 100 years later1914Print and editionsThe first Teubner volume of Lindskog and Ziegler's Lives, and Perrin's first Loeb volume9,23
  20. about 100 years later2016Print and editionsThe first papyrus of the Life of Alexander is published, in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri19

Life and work

Checked against sources · 2 October 2026

Plutarch spent most of his life in Chaeronea, a small town in Boeotia about 30 km east of Delphi.1 He knew what that cost a writer of history, who ought, he says, to live in a famous, populous city full of books. «ἡμεῖς δὲ μικρὰν οἰκοῦντες πόλιν, καὶ ἵνα μὴ μικροτέρα γένηται φιλοχωροῦντες»: “I live in a small city, and I prefer to dwell there that it may not become smaller still”.2

As a young man he studied philosophy at Athens with a Platonist called Ammonius, while Nero was in Greece, in 66/67.1,3 He remembered it long afterwards: in his essay The E at Delphi he recalls what, “when Nero was here some years ago, I had heard Ammonius and others discussing”.4

Debated among scholars His birth date is worked out from that remark. If he was not more than twenty when he studied with Ammonius, he was born between AD 45 and 47.3

He became an Athenian citizen, and travelled widely, to Rome and to Alexandria.3 About AD 70 he visited Rome with Lucius Mestrius Florus, an associate of the new emperor Vespasian; it was Florus who sponsored him as a Roman citizen.1 In Rome and Italy, he says, he was too busy with “my public duties and the number of my pupils in philosophy” to practise Latin: “It was therefore late and when I was well on in years that I began to study Roman literature”.2

Debated among scholars As a Roman citizen he was possibly called Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus.1

His father was Autobulus, his brothers Timon and Lamprias. He married Timoxena, and they had at least four sons and a daughter, two of whom died in childhood.1 A letter survives in which he comforts his wife after their little girl died: “This daughter was born after four sons, when you were longing to bear a daughter; which made me call her by your own name.” She lived two years, and he asks his wife to count “the two years of her life” among their blessings.5

Priest at Delphi

About AD 95 he became one of the two priests of Apollo's temple at Delphi.1 In an essay urging an old man to stay in public life, he holds himself up as the example: “I have been serving the Pythian Apollo for many Pythiads”.6 He wrote several works about Delphi and its rites:3 The E at Delphi, The Oracle at Delphi No Longer Given in Verse and The Obsolescence of Oracles. The E at Delphi opens with him sending a friend “some of our Pythian discourses”, and has him sitting near the temple with his sons and some visitors, puzzling over the letter E dedicated there.4

Ancient tradition / legend One of the Delphic dialogues, The Obsolescence of Oracles, holds a strange story, told by one of the speakers. On a ship off the island of Paxi a voice called to the Egyptian pilot Thamus, and told him to announce «Πὰν ὁ μέγας τέθνηκε», “Great Pan is dead”; when he did, a great cry of lament went up, and the emperor Tiberius had the story looked into.7

He was still alive in 119, the year in which, by a notice from Eusebius' Chronicle preserved by the Byzantine chronicler George Syncellus, Hadrian made him procurator of Achaea;3 Wikipedia calls the post nominal.1

The Parallel Lives

The Lives pair a famous Greek with a famous Roman. Twenty-three pairs survive, and four single Lives: Artaxerxes, Aratus, Galba and Otho.1 They were probably written at the beginning of the second century.8 He addresses the Theseus to Sosius Senecio,9 a Roman senator who was consul in 99 and again in 107.10 He knows the ground grows soft the further back he goes, and says so with a picture: just as mapmakers write on the edges of their maps that the rest is desert and wild beasts, so of the oldest times he might say “What lies beyond is full of marvels and unreality”.9

What he wanted was character, not campaigns. The Alexander opens: «οὔτε γὰρ ἱστορίας γράφομεν, ἀλλὰ βίους», “For it is not Histories that I am writing, but Lives”, and “a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles where thousands fall”.11 He says he began the work for others, and kept on for his own sake, «ὥσπερ ἐν ἐσόπτρῳ τῇ ἱστορίᾳ», “using history as a mirror” for his own life.12

Not everything survives. His earliest biographies were Lives of the Roman emperors from Augustus to Vitellius, and of these only Galba and Otho are left. Lives of Heracles, Philip II of Macedon, Epaminondas and the two Scipios are lost.1 Epaminondas had been paired with a Scipio, and both halves are gone.8

The Moralia

Everything else he wrote is gathered under the title Moralia: seventy-eight essays and speeches.1,13 The range is wide: Isis and Osiris, Advice to Bride and Groom, Concerning Talkativeness, Whether Land or Sea Animals Are Cleverer, the face in the moon and the Table Talk. The name Moralia was first given to a set of eleven ethical works in a fourteenth-century manuscript.3 An ancient list of his writings, the Lamprias catalogue, supposedly drawn up by a son called Lamprias, names 227 works.1,3

Two speeches against eating meat, from his youth, show what their modern editors call “a foible of Plutarch’s early manhood”, the Pythagorean or Orphic refusal of animal food.14 And he could be fierce. In On the Malice of Herodotus he takes on the historian for his treatment of the Boeotians and Corinthians, saying “I think myself obliged to defend our ancestors and the truth”.15

His readers

In 1559 Jacques Amyot published a French translation of the Lives, and in 1572 of the Moralia. Sir Thomas North put Amyot's French into English in 1579,1 and Shakespeare used North for his Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra.16 You can watch it happen. Plutarch's Cleopatra sails up the river Cydnus “in a barge with gilded poop, its sails spread purple”;17 in North she has a barge “the poop whereof was of gold, the sales of purple” (sales: sails, in North's spelling), and the barge speech in Shakespeare's play closely follows North.18

Philemon Holland made the first complete English Moralia from the Greek in 1603; in 1683 John Dryden oversaw a translation of the Lives. Montaigne's Essays refer to Plutarch more than four hundred times, and Emerson called the Lives “a bible for heroes”.1 Shelley found the speeches on meat-eating inspiring, and in 1813 wrote that he had translated them; the translation is lost.14

How the words reached us

Manuscripts & transmission

Passed from hand to hand

Papyri. A volume of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri published in 2016 contains a small fragment of Plutarch: the first copy of the Life of Alexander known on papyrus.19

The Lives. Bernadotte Perrin, introducing the Loeb Lives in 1914, named the oldest manuscripts. The Codex Sangermanensis (Sg), of the tenth century, is the oldest, but holds only fifteen Lives. The Codex Seitenstettensis (S), from the monastery of Seitenstetten in Austria, is of the eleventh century and holds sixteen; only since 1870 has it been known as the best manuscript of all. Three Paris manuscripts, numbered 1671 (A), 1672 (C) and 1674 (D), he called “of supreme importance”.16

Planudes. The Byzantine scholar Maximus Planudes had a hand in the Plutarch we read. Parisinus gr. 1671 was written by a single scribe, apparently a professional,, who finished on 11 July 1296, and was “revised and corrected by Planudes” (our translation); it holds the Lives, arranged in three volumes, and the Moralia.20 In 1302 Planudes wrote into his manuscript of the Greek Anthology a list of the titles of sixty-nine works of Plutarch.21

Debated among scholars Only one manuscript, Parisinus gr. 1672, contains all seventy-eight works of the Moralia. G. R. Manton (1949) dated it soon after 1302 and took it to have been made at Planudes' prompting;21 Philippe Hoffmann (1983) says that the great book, long thought to come from Planudes' workshop, is at least half a century later than his death.20

Print. The Lives first appeared in Latin, at Rome, about 1470.8 The Greek Moralia came first, from Aldus Manutius at Venice in March 1509, edited by Demetrius Ducas, with Erasmus and Girolamo Aleandro as its proofreaders.13,22 The Greek Lives followed in 1517 from Philippus Junta at Florence, from Florentine manuscripts that Perrin judged “of relatively inferior value”; the Aldine Lives of 1519 used better ones from Venice.16,22 Since the Stephanus edition of 1572 the Moralia have been arranged in fourteen books.13

The modern text. Modern work on the Lives begins, in Yitzhak Dana's account, with Konrat Ziegler's study of their manuscripts in 1907. Ziegler and Claes Lindskog then compared all the Greek manuscripts available to them, and the first volume of their Teubner edition came out in 1914.23

Textual variants

Where the copies disagree

The order of the Lives. The order in which the Lives are printed is not Plutarch's own: “the order of the Lives in our collection is not the original one”, as Perrin put it.16 Plutarch numbers some of the books himself. Demosthenes and Cicero is “this fifth book of my Parallel Lives”,2 Pericles and Fabius “this tenth book”,24 and Dion and Brutus “the twelfth book of my Parallel Lives”.25 In the reader's list, Pericles and Fabius is the fifth pair, and Demosthenes and Cicero comes near the end. He also says he wrote Lycurgus and Numa before Theseus and Romulus, which now come first.9

Two traditions. According to Dana's review of the Teubner text, only for the first volume of the Lives are there two lines of manuscripts, “a better textual tradition versus an inferior one”.23 The Alexander papyrus of 2016 is said to be of “some text-critical interest” for the wording of that Life.19

Damaged works. Some of the Moralia reach us broken. On the Face which Appears in the Orb of the Moon is, its Loeb editor writes, “certainly mutilated at the beginning, although one cannot tell whether much or little has been lost”, and he adds that he holds this “despite statements to the contrary”.26 The speeches On the Eating of Flesh are worse: the text we have comes from someone who made extracts from them and, the editors think, added “stupid interpolations” and a passage from another work.14

Works that are not his. The Moralia as printed include works Plutarch did not write. Of the first, The Education of Children, its Loeb translator writes: “It is generally believed that the essay which stands first in the collected works of Plutarch cannot have been written by him.”27 The Lives of the Ten Orators, On the Opinions of the Philosophers, On Fate and On Music are counted among the works of an unknown “Pseudo-Plutarch”.13 So are Whether Fire or Water is More Useful and the Greek and Roman Parallel Stories, and the Consolation to Apollonius is often counted with them.28 All of these are in the reader under Plutarch's name: The Lives of the Ten Orators, On Fate, A Letter of Condolence to Apollonius, Whether Water or Fire Is More Useful and Greek and Roman Parallel Stories.

And works the old list misses. The Lamprias catalogue is not a safe guide either way. The speeches on meat-eating are “one of the eighteen works of the received Corpus of Plutarch that do not appear in the Lamprias Catalogue”, and so, their editors point out, is the Table Talk: “the Symposiacs themselves are not to be found there”.14

Books to read it in

  • B. Perrin, Plutarch's Lives, 11 vols (Loeb Classical Library, 1914–26).9 The Greek text and English translation of the Lives in the reader are Perseus's copies of Perrin's.
  • Plutarch's Moralia, in sixteen volumes (Loeb Classical Library), translated by F. C. Babbitt, W. C. Helmbold, H. N. Fowler, H. Cherniss and others.4,6,26,29 Many of the reader's English Moralia, and some of its Greek, come from these volumes.
  • F. H. Sandbach, Plutarch's Moralia, vol. XV: Fragments (Loeb Classical Library, 1969).29 The fragments of the lost works.
  • G. N. Bernardakis, Plutarchi Chaeronensis Moralia (Teubner, Leipzig, from 1888).4 Much of the reader's Greek Moralia; the volumes used are dated 1888 to 1895.
  • W. W. Goodwin (ed.), Plutarch's Morals, 5 vols (Boston, Little, Brown, 1870; the reader's copies are dated 1874).5 Translations by many hands, edited by Goodwin; the reader's second English Moralia.
  • Cl. Lindskog and K. Ziegler, Plutarchi Vitae Parallelae (Teubner, from 1914); vol. I, fasc. 1, fifth edition by H. Gärtner (K. G. Saur, 2000).23 The critical text built on Ziegler's study of the manuscripts.
  • R. Flacelière and É. Chambry, Plutarque, Vies (Budé, Les Belles Lettres); for example tome XII, Démosthène–Cicéron (Paris, 1976).30 Greek text with a French translation.
  • R. Waterfield (trans.), with introduction and notes by P. A. Stadter, Plutarch: Greek Lives (Oxford World's Classics, 1998).31 A modern English translation.

Where this comes from

Sources (31)
  1. Wikipedia, Plutarch (Chaeronea, family, Ammonius, Florus and the Roman name, the priesthood at Delphi, Hadrian, the Lives and Moralia, lost Lives, Amyot, North, Holland, Dryden, Montaigne, Emerson)
  2. Plutarch, Demosthenes 2.1–3.1, in the reader (the small city; Latin learned late; the fifth book)
  3. George Karamanolis, “Plutarch”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (birth 45–47, Ammonius under Nero, travels, the Lamprias catalogue, the name Moralia, Hadrian in 119)
  4. Plutarch, The E at Delphi 1, in the reader (Ammonius and Nero; the Pythian discourses). The Greek is Bernardakis's Teubner text (vol. 3, 1891) and the English Babbitt's Loeb, as the files' headers say
  5. Plutarch, Consolation to His Wife 2–8, in the reader; the English is from Goodwin's Plutarch's Morals (Boston, 1874), as the file's header says
  6. Plutarch, Whether an Old Man Should Engage in Public Affairs 17, in the reader
  7. Plutarch, The Obsolescence of Oracles 17, in the reader (Great Pan is dead)
  8. Wikipedia, Parallel Lives (date of writing; Epaminondas and Scipio lost; the Latin edition of about 1470)
  9. Plutarch, Theseus 1.1–1.2, in the reader (Sosius Senecio; the edges of the map; Lycurgus and Numa written first). The Greek and English are Perrin's Loeb (vol. 1, 1914), as the files' headers say
  10. Wikipedia, Quintus Sosius Senecio (senator; consul in 99 and 107; Plutarch's dedications)
  11. Plutarch, Alexander 1.1–1.3, in the reader
  12. Plutarch, Timoleon, preface (0.1–0.2), in the reader
  13. Wikipedia, Moralia (78 essays; the Aldine edition of March 1509 and its proofreaders; the Stephanus edition of 1572; works by Pseudo-Plutarch)
  14. Plutarch, On the Eating of Flesh 1, in the reader, with the introduction of its Loeb translators, H. Cherniss and W. C. Helmbold (1957)
  15. Plutarch, On the Malice of Herodotus 1, in the reader
  16. Bernadotte Perrin, Translator's Introduction to the Loeb Plutarch's Lives, vol. 1 (1914), on LacusCurtius (manuscripts, first editions, Amyot, North and Shakespeare)
  17. Plutarch, Antony 26.1–26.3, in the reader (Cleopatra's barge)
  18. Mark Womack, “The Barge Speech from Antony and Cleopatra” (North's text beside Shakespeare's)
  19. Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2017.06.39, review by Michael Zellmann-Rohrer of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, vol. LXXXII (2016)
  20. Philippe Hoffmann, “Deux témoins apparentés des Vies de Plutarque: les Parisini gr. 1671 (A) et 1674 (D)”, Scriptorium 37 (1983), 259–264 (Persée)
  21. G. R. Manton, “The Manuscript Tradition of Plutarch Moralia 70–71”, The Classical Quarterly 43 (1949)
  22. Wikipedia, List of editiones principes in Greek (Moralia: Venice, Aldus, 1509, ed. Demetrius Ducas; Lives: Florence, Junta, 1517)
  23. Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2001.05.08, Yitzhak Dana on Plutarchus, Vitae Parallelae, vol. I, fasc. 1, fifth edition by Hans Gärtner (2000)
  24. Plutarch, Pericles 2.4, in the reader (the tenth book)
  25. Plutarch, Dion 2.7, in the reader (the twelfth book)
  26. Plutarch, On the Face which Appears in the Orb of the Moon 1, in the reader, with H. Cherniss's Loeb introduction (1957)
  27. Plutarch (attributed), The Education of Children 1, in the reader, with F. C. Babbitt's Loeb introduction
  28. Wikipedia, Pseudo-Plutarch (the works wrongly attributed to Plutarch)
  29. WorldCat, Plutarch's Moralia: in sixteen volumes, vol. XV, Fragments, ed. and trans. F. H. Sandbach (Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1969)
  30. Revue des Études Anciennes 85 (1983), J. Puiggali's review of Plutarque, Vies, tome XII, Démosthène–Cicéron, ed. and trans. R. Flacelière and E. Chambry (Les Belles Lettres, 1976) (Persée)
  31. Robin Waterfield, Plutarch: Greek Lives (Oxford World's Classics, 1998; introduction and notes by Philip Stadter)

We checked every statement above against these sources on 2 October 2026. Where they disagree, we say so. What we could not confirm, we left out.

In The Painted Stoa

Entries that quote or point to Plutarch's Greek.

OstracismOnce a year the citizens of Athens could decide to hold a strange election.The Plague of AthensIn the summer of 430 BC, with the Spartan army burning the fields of Attica and the whole population crowded inside the city walls, a disease broke out in the port of Piraeus.The helots and the krypteiaSparta's citizens could spend their lives training for war because someone else grew their food.Delphi and the oracleOn a ledge of Mount Parnassus, for a thousand years and more, a woman sat on a tripod in the innermost room of Apollo's temple and spoke for the god.
All 13 entries
PericlesFor about thirty years in the middle of the fifth century BC, the most powerful man in Athens held only an office the Assembly filled by vote every year: general.Growing up SpartanEverywhere else in Greece a father decided how to bring up his son.The Olympic GamesEvery four years for more than a thousand years, Greeks from all over the Mediterranean travelled to the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia to watch naked men run, wrestle, box and race chariots.Asclepius and the healing sleepA sick Greek who could afford the journey might go to a sanctuary of Asclepius, the god of healing, wash, make an offering, and lie down for the night in a special hall, hoping the god would come in a dream and cure him.Knossos and the labyrinthHomer knew Knossos as "a great city" where Minos was king, and later Greeks told of the labyrinth that Daedalus built there for the Minotaur.The Parthenon MarblesThe sculptures carved for the Parthenon in the fifth century BC now live in two museums.Drugs and poisonsThe Greeks had one word for a medicine, a poison and a magic spell: pharmakon.Love, sex and marriageA Greek marriage was a deal between two households, made so that a man would have legitimate children to inherit his house.Women's livesAlmost everything we read about Greek women was written by men.

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