Parallel Lives By Plutarch

Plutarch was a famous philosopher and biographer who was born between the years of 45-50 CE and died sometime after 120 CE . Throughout his life he had written several pieces, which includes the Parallel Lives, which is a collection of biographies. In this series, Plutarch wrote about several people and their lives including Lucius Cornelius Sulla who is better known as Sulla and will be my main focus throughout this paper. Sulla was a consul in 80 BCE and dictator of Rome from 82-81BCE . Plutarch recorded that Sulla was born into a family of nobility and one of his ancestors Rufinus, had been consul . However, Rufinus was found to have broken the law and was removed from the senate which took away Sulla’s chance to live a life of

Sosius Senecio who was a consular , which could mean that people who had an education and were of a higher status were to read his work. Since people who were in the higher levels of government would be reading his piece Plutarch would need to ensure that he wrote in a way that wouldn’t offend who was reading it. He was educated and studied in Athens , which may have helped him with his writing career. An issue that arises from Plutarch’s written piece is that Sulla lived around 138-78 BCE . This means that when Plutarch wrote The Life of Sulla, Sulla had been dead for several decades. This creates problems regarding his piece because the information that Plutarch used from other writers could be incorrect or over exaggerated to make things more interesting. Another issue is that Plutarch’s style of writing was to include himself in the story as though he were present during the events this creates more problems because some of the things that Plutarch wrote sounded very vivid. For example, when people were being slaughtered in Cerameicus Plutarch describes it with great detail as a horrible blood bath . This is an issue because he was not there when the event occurred and could have made up how the events transpired and looked that day. Plutarch also includes specific numbers throughout the text. For example, when Sulla’s army went to battle, Plutarch listed how many men had been lost in battle, he said that Sulla lost 23 men and killed twenty thousand of the enemy . It is skeptical to believe these numbers are correct because how were they able to keep track of how many were slain since the battle had occurred several decades beforehand. These problems mean that the information that we are reading today could be incorrect and can be misconstrued. We could be portraying people who lived centuries before us as someone completely