Plutarch Parallel Lives Analysis

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Plutarch’s writings were of a wide variety including Philosophy, rhetoric, antiquarianism, and biography. A series of biographies called Parallel Lives written towards the end of Plutarch’s life compared Roman and Greek people to find similarities in the two cultures, although many of his biographies were written considering the personalities of the people rather than strict historical events. The ancient Greeks thought that Plutarch’s work were concrete histories and took them as truth when looking at the past and at other cultures (i.e. Romans considering Greeks and vice- versa). Plutarch was born into an aristocratic Greek family and lived in the late 1st / early 2nd century. He traveled through much of the Greek and Roman empires and studied/ wrote about things that he didn’t understand or had questions, such as Spartan sayings. …show more content…

The biographies were possibly meant to reconcile the two groups by showing the similarities between each other and thus improve relations. He also seemed to used the texts to look further into aspects of cultures that he didn’t fully understand or was confused by. Plutarch lived centuries after the Sparta that he writes about, and probably used other historian’s works in forming his writings as well as most likely over exaggerating certain aspects of the Spartan culture. Many of his other writings centered around events that occurred long before he wrote about them. His Parallel Lives were also written without personal encounters with many of his subjects. Some historians claim that many of Plutarch’s works also include his personal experiences and ideologies in his works, some of which are presented as the experiences and ideology of those he was writing about. Plutarch may have been using some of his biographies to strengthen Roman- Greek relationships by creating comparisons of great heroes in the two

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