Vies des Hommes Illustres
Plutarch, 15 Volumes
Paris, 1811
A collection of 15 volumes from Plutarch’s ‘Lives’, with various images inside and an original yellow leather binding with golden titles on the spines. Some of the pages show wear and tear, as well as traces of humidity.
Context
Plutarch (Greek: Πλούταρχος, Ploútarkhos; AD 46–after 119) was a Greek Middle Platonist philosopher,biographer, essayist, and priest at the Temple of Apollo. He is known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia. Upon becoming a Roman citizen, he was named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus (Λούκιος Μέστριος Πλούταρχος).
Plutarch’s best-known work is the Parallel Lives, a series of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, arranged in pairs to illuminate their common moral virtues and vices. The surviving Lives contain 23 pairs, each with one Greek Life and one Roman Life, as well as four unpaired single Lives.
As is explained in the opening paragraph of his Life of Alexander, Plutarch was not concerned with history so much as the influence of character, good or bad, on the lives and destinies of men. Whereas sometimes he barely touched on epoch-making events, he devoted much space to charming anecdote and incidental triviality, reasoning that this often said far more for his subjects than even their most famous accomplishments. He sought to provide rounded portraits, likening his craft to that of a painter; indeed, he went to tremendous lengths (often leading to tenuous comparisons) to draw parallels between physical appearance and moral character. In many ways, he must be counted amongst the earliest moral philosophers.
Some of the Lives, such as those of Heracles, Philip II of Macedon, Epaminondas and Scipio Africanus, no longer exist; many of the Lives are truncated, contain lacunae or have been tampered with by later writers. Extant Livesinclude Solon, Themistocles, Aristides, Agesilaus II, Pericles, Alcibiades, Nicias, Demosthenes, Pelopidas, Philopoemen, Timoleon, Dion of Syracuse, Eumenes, Alexander the Great, Pyrrhus of Epirus, Romulus, Numa Pompilius, Coriolanus, Theseus, Aemilius Paullus, Tiberius Gracchus, Gaius Gracchus, Gaius Marius, Sulla, Sertorius, Lucullus, Pompey, Julius Caesar, Cicero, Cato the Elder, Mark Antony, and Marcus Junius Brutus.
Plutarch stretches and occasionally fabricates the similarities between famous Greeks and Romans in order to be able to write their biographies as parallel. The lives of Nicias and Crassus, for example, have little in common except that “both were rich and both suffered great military defeats at the ends of their lives”.[24]
In his Life of Pompey, Plutarch praises Pompey’s trustworthy character and tactful behaviour in order to conjure a moral judgement that opposes most historical accounts. Plutarch delivers anecdotes with moral points, rather than in-depth comparative analyses of the causes of the fall of the Achaemenid Empire and the Roman Republic, and tends on occasion to fit facts to hypotheses.
On the other hand, he generally sets out his moral anecdotes in chronological order (unlike, say, his Roman contemporary Suetonius) and is rarely narrow-minded and unrealistic, almost always prepared to acknowledge the complexity of the human condition where moralising cannot explain it. (Wikipedia)
For more information on Plutarch, click here.
Praise
“What raises [Plutarch] to a level of greatness as a writer is his Lives. We have two of his lives of the Caesars, one or two stray lives, and 23 in a series of contrasting pairs, always one Greek and one Roman, usually with a summary comparison of their moral qualities… His Lives really are the stuff of poetry, though they read as unpretentious prose. With the alteration of very few words, they transmute into Shakespeare” (Levi, 464-65).
“The influence of Plutarch’s method has been constantly manifest in the biographies of the modern great and in the authors who have been inspired by it. Shakespeare relied almost exclusively on [North’s] Plutarch for the historical background of ancient Rome” (PMM 48).
Size
20 cms x 16 cms
Material
Leather & Paper
Inventory Code
ABC.28.2015.28
Other Pictures
Front Covers (Right Side)
Front Covers (Left Side)
Binding (Right View)
Binding (Left View)
Detail of Spines
Front Page, 1st Volume
Inner Pages (Romulus)
Inner Pages (Lycurgus)
Publication Details
