Plutarch

Quick Facts

• Name: Plutarch
• Lived: c. 46 CE-after 119 CE
• Home base: Chaeronea in Boeotia, with strong ties to Athens, Rome, and Delphi
• Role: Greek Platonist philosopher, priest of Apollo at Delphi, essayist, and biographer
• Main works: Parallel Lives and Moralia
• Main concern: how character is formed, tested, corrupted, and improved
• Main labels: Middle Platonism, Greek moral philosophy, moral biography

The Big Question

How do people become noble or vicious, and how can stories, philosophy, and religion train us to judge character well?

In One Minute

Plutarch is best known for Parallel Lives, paired biographies of famous Greek and Roman figures. He did not write them as neutral chronicles. He used them as moral exercises. A military victory, a dinner-table remark, a marriage, a fit of anger, or a small act of self-control could show what kind of person someone was becoming.

His philosophy belongs to Middle Platonism, the period of Platonism between the older Academy and Neoplatonism. He read Plato as a guide to the soul, the ordered universe, divine providence, and ethical education. In the Moralia, he turns those ideas into essays and dialogues on anger, friendship, poetry, religion, political advice, and the progress of virtue.

What They Taught

Plutarch taught that philosophy should make people better judges of life. It should not stop at clever arguments. It should help a person notice ambition, generosity, courage, vanity, cowardice, and self-deception in real actions.

His central topic is character. Character is the settled shape of a person's habits, desires, emotions, and choices. Plutarch thinks character is not fixed at birth. Nature gives a person tendencies, but education, friends, laws, stories, and repeated choices shape those tendencies into a way of life.

This is why biography matters for him. In Parallel Lives, he pairs Greeks and Romans so readers can compare lives under pressure. Alexander and Caesar show greatness mixed with ambition. Demosthenes and Cicero show speech, public service, fear, courage, and political collapse. The point is not to copy every famous person. The point is to learn moral perception: the ability to see what a deed reveals about the soul behind it.

Plutarch's ethics is Platonist. He thinks the soul has a rational part and a non-rational part. The rational part can understand reasons and aims. The non-rational part includes emotions and bodily desires. Virtue is not the killing of emotion. Virtue is emotion educated by reason. Courage, for example, is not the absence of fear. It is fear guided by judgment toward a worthy action.

This puts him at odds with some Stoic claims. Stoicism often describes the ideal person as free from irrational passions. Plutarch thinks this makes human psychology too thin. Anger, fear, love of honor, grief, and desire can be dangerous, but they can also be trained. A good life needs disciplined emotion, not a blank inner life.

Plutarch also thinks ethics rests on a larger order. Following Plato's Timaeus, he sees the universe as shaped by divine reason. The world is not just random matter. It contains order, purpose, and intelligence, even though disorder and evil remain real. Human beings mirror this cosmic struggle on a smaller scale: reason tries to bring order to emotion, appetite, and public life.

Religion is not an extra topic for Plutarch. He served as a priest at Delphi, and his essays often discuss oracles, divine signs, demons, providence, and myths. Providence means divine care or guidance over the world. A demon, in this older Greek sense, is a spiritual being between gods and humans, not automatically an evil creature. Plutarch uses religious stories as allegories, meaning symbolic stories that point beyond their surface plot. In On Isis and Osiris, for example, Egyptian myth becomes a way to think about reason, disorder, divine life, and the search for truth.

Key Ideas With Examples

• Moral biography: Plutarch writes lives to reveal character. A small habit can matter as much as a battle because it shows how a person handles power, praise, fear, and desire.
• Character formation: character is built over time. A young leader trained by good teachers, honest friends, and demanding laws has a better chance of becoming just than one surrounded by flatterers.
• Virtue: virtue is a stable excellence of character, such as courage, moderation, justice, or practical wisdom. It is stable because the person can act well even when tempted or afraid.
• Reason guiding emotion: Plutarch does not want people to have no feelings. He wants reason to educate feeling. Anger can become destructive revenge, but under judgment it can become a controlled response to injustice.
• Middle Platonism: this is the Platonist tradition before Plotinus. Plutarch reads Plato as teaching a real order above the visible world: divine mind, Forms, soul, and a cosmos shaped by reason.
• Providence: providence is the idea that divine reason cares for the world. Plutarch knows wicked people sometimes prosper, so he writes about delayed divine punishment rather than pretending justice is always obvious.
• Moral comparison: the paired Lives teach by contrast. Comparing two ambitious leaders can show the difference between courage and recklessness, public service and self-glory.

Major Works

• Parallel Lives: Plutarch's most famous work. It pairs Greek and Roman statesmen, generals, lawgivers, and speakers, then often adds a comparison. The Lives are rich historical sources, but their main aim is ethical: to show how public action reveals character.
• Moralia: a large collection of essays and dialogues on ethics, religion, education, politics, literature, and natural philosophy. The title suggests "moral writings," but the range is broader than ethics alone.
• On Moral Virtue: Plutarch's account of virtue as reason shaping the emotions. It also criticizes Stoic psychology for treating the soul too much like reason alone.
• On Control of Anger: a practical essay on noticing anger early, delaying reaction, and training oneself away from humiliation, revenge, and impulsive speech.
• On Tranquility of Mind: an essay on steadiness. Plutarch does not advise withdrawal from life, but a disciplined way of meeting loss, criticism, and changing fortune.
• How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend: a study of moral friendship. A flatterer tells you what protects your ego. A real friend helps you see what needs correction.
• On How the Young Man Should Listen to Poets: a guide to reading literature without being morally damaged by it. Poetry can educate, but only if the reader learns to separate what is noble from what is seductive or false.
• On Isis and Osiris: a religious and philosophical reading of Egyptian myth. Plutarch treats the myth as an allegory of order, disorder, divine reason, and the search for truth.
• On the Delays of Divine Vengeance: a theodicy, meaning an attempt to explain how divine justice can be real even when punishment seems late. Plutarch's answer is cautious: human beings see only part of the moral order.
• On the Generation of the Soul in the Timaeus and Platonic Questions: technical works where Plutarch interprets Plato, especially the relation between soul, reason, disorder, and cosmic order.

Why It Matters

Plutarch made philosophy readable as moral attention. He shows ethics at work in lives rather than only in definitions. That is why his biographies became so powerful for later readers: they let people study ambition, courage, cruelty, generosity, and political failure in concrete scenes.

He also preserves a huge amount of Greek and Roman memory. Many later readers met figures such as Caesar, Brutus, Cato, Pericles, Alcibiades, and Cicero through Plutarch. His portraits shaped Renaissance humanism, political education, Shakespeare's Roman plays, and Montaigne's habit of using ancient examples for self-study.

For philosophy, Plutarch matters because he shows Middle Platonism before it becomes the more systematic Neoplatonism of Plotinus. His Platonism is moral, religious, literary, and civic at once.

Proponents, Critics, and Opponents

Plutarch inherits his basic framework from Plato: the soul needs order, the visible world depends on a higher intelligible order, and philosophy should turn the person toward virtue. He also borrows from Aristotle, especially the idea that virtue trains emotion into a mean between extremes.

His main philosophical opponents are Stoicism and Epicureanism. Against Stoics, he argues that emotions should be trained rather than erased. Against Epicureans, he rejects the ideal of living unnoticed and criticizes their denial of providence and the soul's immortality.

Later Platonists used and criticized him. Some accepted his religious and moral themes, while others rejected parts of his reading of Plato's Timaeus. Historians also read him carefully because he moralizes his material and sometimes relies on sources we cannot check. That does not make him useless. It means he is best read as a moral biographer, not as a modern archival historian.

Plutarch influenced Renaissance humanists, early modern essayists, and political writers. Montaigne especially inherits his method: ancient lives become mirrors for examining oneself.

Related Pages

• Plato
• Platonism
• Roman Republicanism
• Cicero
• Stoicism
• Epicureanism
• Aristotle
• Plotinus
• Neoplatonism
• Michel de Montaigne