Parallel Lives (Hellenistic)

What It Is

Ten biographies from the age between Alexander and Rome, translated by Robin Waterfield for Oxford World's Classics in 2016: Alexander, Demosthenes, Phocion, Eumenes, Demetrius, Pyrrhus, Agis and Cleomenes, Aratus, Philopoemen and Flamininus. Together they trace Greek history from the rise of Macedon to the arrival of Roman legions in the eastern Mediterranean.

Plutarch, writing around AD 100, is doing what he always does: character before chronology, the telling remark before the campaign map. But the material is different from the classical Greece most readers know. These are professional kings and mercenary generals operating across a world that runs from the Adriatic to the Hindu Kush, men who could go from throne to exile and back inside a decade.

Nothing else in English gathers these lives in one volume. That is a large part of why this book exists.

Why It Matters

The Hellenistic age is the hinge nobody teaches. It produced the Greek that the New Testament was written in, the libraries and the mathematics, the ruler cults, and the political world Rome would have to deal with. Skip it and the road from Pericles to Caesar has a hole in the middle.

It is also the period that most tested Plutarch's central conviction. In classical Athens, character and city are entangled; in this world, a single man with an army can remake a kingdom in a season and lose it in another. Fortune, tyche, is everywhere in these lives, and Plutarch keeps having to ask what a virtue is worth when luck is that powerful. The question has not aged.

An adjective still in daily use in English comes from one of the men in this volume. So does much of what Europe has believed about Alexander for two thousand years, since Plutarch's Alexander, not any historian's, is the one that reached Shakespeare, Racine and the modern screen.

Before You Read

Twelve to fifteen hours, and easier going than its reputation suggests. Plutarch is companionable and each life stands alone.

Get a rough map of the successor kingdoms into your head first: Macedon, the Seleucid east, Ptolemaic Egypt. Andrew Erskine's introduction supplies it. Without that frame, the constant shifting of alliances is a fog; with it, this becomes one of the most gripping books on the list.

Read Alexander first, then Demetrius, then Pyrrhus. That is the fastest route into the strangeness of the age. Note that Alexander also appears in Oxford's Greek Lives; if you own that volume, you already have him.

Which Translation to Read

• Robin Waterfield (Oxford World's Classics, 2016) — recommended. Waterfield's Plutarch is the best in English: fast, unfussy, and entirely free of the antiquarian fog that hangs over older versions. Andrew Erskine's introduction and notes do the essential work of making a bewildering period navigable. There is no real competitor for this particular set of lives. The cost: the Roman partners are missing, so Plutarch's paired structure is lost, and Alexander duplicates the Greek Lives volume. View on Amazon →
• Ian Scott-Kilvert, The Age of Alexander (Penguin Classics), revised by Timothy Duff, 2011. An overlapping selection with an outstanding revision: Duff supplies a general introduction and a separate introduction to every life, and he is very good on how Plutarch actually builds a biography. The cost: Scott-Kilvert's English is now sixty years old, and the contents overlap with Oxford's without matching them.
• Bernadotte Perrin (Loeb Classical Library, eleven volumes). All forty-eight lives, Greek facing English, the complete Plutarch. For the reader who wants the whole thing on one shelf. The cost: eleven volumes at Loeb prices, and a translation from the 1910s that is serviceable rather than alive.

Take Waterfield. Take Duff's revision of Scott-Kilvert alongside it if you want the best short essays on how these lives are constructed. Perrin only if you mean to read all forty-eight.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the lives in pairs of your own devising. Plutarch's own pairings are with Romans you do not have here, so make your own: Demetrius against Pyrrhus, Agis and Cleomenes against Aratus. The comparisons are where the thinking happens, and Plutarch has trained you to make them.

Keep asking his question rather than the historian's. He is not chiefly interested in whether a man won. He is interested in whether he was any good, and whether the two have anything to do with each other.

The commonest mistake is to treat this as the leftovers, the lives that did not make it into the famous volumes. It is the opposite. These are the least familiar and therefore the most surprising, and a reader coming to Demetrius or Eumenes cold gets something the Alexander industry can no longer give: a genuinely unknown career, told by a master.