Parallel Lives (Roman)

What It Is

Eight lives from the Roman Republic, running from Cato the Elder to Mark Antony, translated by Robin Waterfield for Oxford World's Classics. They are the Roman halves of Plutarch's paired biographies, and between them they cover the century that decided what Rome would become.

The author is not Roman. Plutarch was a Greek priest at Delphi, writing around AD 100, a subject of the empire these men made. He wrote about Romans for Greek readers who needed to understand their rulers, and for Roman readers who wanted to be told what they had come from. That angle of vision is why the book reads unlike any Latin source.

He is a biographer, not a historian, and says so. He wants the anecdote, the habit, the thing said at dinner. Where Sallust and Tacitus give you the machinery of Roman politics, Plutarch gives you the men operating it, in a domestic light.

Why It Matters

Sir Thomas North translated Plutarch into English in 1579, and Shakespeare read him closely. Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus come out of that book, in places nearly verbatim. It is the single most productive act of translation in English literary history, and this is the material.

The influence beyond the theatre is larger still. The men who made the American and French revolutions read Roman lives as an instruction manual, argued in Roman terms and took Roman names. When a modern politician is called a Caesar or a Cato, the reference is not to Rome. It is to Plutarch's Rome.

Which is worth stating plainly: Plutarch is the reason we instinctively think this period was a story about men rather than about land, debt and money. Every historian since who has tried to correct that has had to argue with him first, and has usually lost in the public imagination. He is that persuasive, and you should read him knowing it.

Before You Read

Fifteen hours or so. The prose is easy; the politics is not. Roman offices, factions and family names arrive without ceremony.

You will get much more out of this if you know the bare outline of the late Republic before you begin. Waterfield's introduction and notes will give it to you in an hour, and that hour is the best investment you will make in the book.

Read Caesar and Cicero back to back. They are the two best lives in the volume and they show you the same crisis from inside two entirely different temperaments. The earlier lives, Cato the Elder and Aemilius Paullus, are the slowest going for a modern reader.

Which Translation to Read

• Robin Waterfield (Oxford World's Classics) — recommended. The best modern Plutarch in English, and this volume is the best of the three: clear, quick, faintly dry, exactly the register the material wants. Philip Stadter's introduction and notes are outstanding on Roman politics and on how Plutarch handles his sources. The cost: the Greek partners are absent, so the paired structure is lost, and Waterfield's plainness gives up some of the grandeur older versions found in these men. View on Amazon →
• Penguin Classics: Fall of the Roman Republic and Makers of Rome (Ian Scott-Kilvert), revised by Christopher Pelling. Between them these two volumes cover most of the same ground plus lives Oxford omits. Pelling is the finest Plutarch scholar working and his revisions are worth having. The cost: you need two books to do what Oxford does in one, and the underlying translation is sixty years old.
• Pamela Mensch, The Age of Caesar: Five Roman Lives (W. W. Norton, 2017), edited by James Romm. Pompey, Caesar, Cicero, Brutus and Antony in vigorous contemporary English, with excellent notes and maps and a preface by Mary Beard. The most enjoyable of the three to read. The cost: only five lives, and the selection is built around a single story rather than around Plutarch.

Take Waterfield for the best single volume, Mensch if you care only about the generation of Caesar and want to enjoy yourself, Pelling's Penguins if you want the fullest coverage. If you collect, the object to hunt is North's Plutarch of 1579, the book Shakespeare had open beside him. It is a monument of English prose and it is not what you should be reading from.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the introduction first. This is one of the few books on the list where knowing the history in advance improves the reading rather than spoiling it, because Plutarch is not building suspense. He is building portraits.

Notice how much of the book is not politics. Plutarch will tell you what a man ate, how he treated his slaves, whether he could take a joke. He believed those things were evidence. Decide, as you read, whether he was right.

Then read Shakespeare. Take Antony, then read Antony and Cleopatra, and watch what a poet does with a biographer's sentence. There are few better ways to understand what literature is for.