Plutarch: The Delphi Priest Whose Parallel Lives Fed Shakespeare

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Plutarch was born before AD 50 in Chaeronea in Boeotia, into a long-established local family; he names his grandfather Lamprias in his writings. As a young man he studied mathematics and philosophy in Athens under Ammonius, and he was at the games at Delphi when Emperor Nero competed. Around AD 70 he went to Rome and gained citizenship through Lucius Mestrius Florus, an associate of Vespasian, taking the name Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus and entering the equestrian order. Instead of staying in the capital he went home to Chaeronea to serve as a local magistrate and inspect public works. His Parallel Lives paired 23 famous Greeks with Romans, and in the life of Alexander he wrote that he was writing lives, not history. Around AD 95 he became a priest of Apollo at Delphi, helped revive the decaying sanctuary, worked with the Amphictyonic League and organized the Pythian Games for decades. A Middle Platonist, he read the myths as allegories and defended free will and the immortality of the soul. His 78 surviving essays, the Moralia, range from sibling affection and the face in the moon to Isis and Osiris and arguments for vegetarianism. Jacques Amyot's French translation and Sir Thomas North's 1579 English version reached Shakespeare, who drew on them for Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. Montaigne cited him over 400 times, and he is the ancient historian cited most often in the Federalist Papers. He showed Alexander's remorse after killing his friend Cleitus in a drunken rage, locked away, weeping and refusing food. His life of Pyrrhus is a key record of Roman history from 293 to 264 BCE, where other ancient texts are lost. In one satirical dialogue, Gryllus, a man Circe turned into a pig, argues to Odysseus that animals are more virtuous than humans. His surviving letter of consolation to his wife Timoxena followed the death of their two-year-old daughter, also named Timoxena. Ralph Waldo Emerson called the Lives a Bible for heroes, and Boswell used his history-versus-life distinction for his Life of Johnson.