Plutarch

Plutarch (c. 46 CE–c. 119 CE) was a Greek philosopher, biographer, and priest at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi whose writings profoundly shaped Western biographical literature and moral philosophy. Born into a wealthy municipal family in Chaeronea, Boeotia, he studied mathematics and philosophy at the Academy in Athens under Ammonius. Plutarch was a prolific author whose expansive surviving corpus is bifurcated into two primary collections: the Moralia, a diverse compilation of essays exploring ethics, politics, and religious customs, and his masterwork, the Parallel Lives. In the Lives, he paired prominent Greek and Roman statesmen and military commanders—such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar—to analyze their moral character, virtues, and psychological flaws rather than merely chronicling chronological history, establishing the character study as a vital literary tradition.