Much of ancient history can only be written thanks to evidence supplied by Plutarch. The historical methods and qualities of this vital source were for long subjected to little systematic analysis. However, over the last two decades a set of studies has appeared in the field the work of Christopher Pelling. Dispersed until now in a wide range of international journals and symposia, these studies are here published as a single volume. The seventeen papers have been edited afresh by the author, with up-to-date annotations and bibliography.
Chapter 1. Plutarch’s method of work in the Roman Lives
Chapter 2. Plutarch and Catiline
Chapter 3. The Apophthegmata Regum et Imperatorum and Plutarch’s Roman Lives
Chapter 4. Plutarch’s adaptation of his source-material
Chapter 5. Plutarch and Thucydides I
Chapter 6. Truth and fiction in Plutarch’s Lives
Chapter 7. ‘Making myth look like history’: Plutarch’s Theseus–Romulus
Chapter 8. Dionysiac diagnostics: some hints of Dionysus in Plutarch’s Lives
Chapter 9. Plutarch and Roman politics
Chapter 10. The moralism of Plutarch’s Lives
Chapter 11. Plutarch’s Caesar: a Caesar for the Caesars?
Chapter 12. ‘You for me and me for you’: narrator and narratee in Plutarch’s Lives
Chapter 13. Aspects of Plutarch’s characterization
Chapter 14. Childhood and personality in Greek biography
Chapter 15. Rhetoric, paideia, and psychology in Plutarch’s Lives
Chapter 16. Synkrisis in Plutarch’s Lives
Chapter 17. Is death the end? Closure in Plutarch’s Lives
Chapter 18. The shaping of Coriolanus: Dionysius, Plutarch and Shakespeare