Plutarch

Plutarch was born 46 AD at Chaeronea in Boeotia, a small Greek town about twenty miles from Delphi, and he stayed there for most of his life instead of settling in Athens or Rome. He studied mathematics and philosophy at Athens under the Platonist Ammonius, and he held local office at Chaeronea and traveled to Rome and Italy on his town's public business. In the opening of his Life of Demosthenes he explains why he did not move: "As for me, I live in a small city, and I prefer to remain there so that it may not become smaller still." In the same passage he says that his public duties and his philosophy students left him no leisure to learn Latin while he was in Italy, and that he began studying Roman literature only late in life. Through his Roman friend Lucius Mestrius Florus he received citizenship and the name Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus.

For the last decades of his life Plutarch served as one of the two priests of Apollo at Delphi, responsible for the sacrifices at the oracle. Three of his dialogues, on the letter E at Delphi, on the decline of the oracles, and on why the Pythia no longer prophesies in verse, are set at the sanctuary and take its rituals and its decayed condition as their subject. A surviving inscription at Delphi records a statue set up in his honor jointly by the Amphictyonic council and the people of Chaeronea.

His two large works are the Parallel Lives and the Moralia. The Lives set a Greek public figure beside a Roman one and close most pairs with a formal comparison; twenty-three pairs survive, along with four single Lives. The Moralia gathers roughly seventy-eight essays and dialogues on ethics, education, marriage, superstition, the oracles, animal intelligence, and the faces visible on the moon. Thomas North's English version of the Lives, published in 1579 from Jacques Amyot's French translation, supplied Shakespeare with the plots of Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra.