ABSTRACT
L. Mestrius Plutarch1 (c. 50-c. 120) was born in Chaeronea, a small city in northern Boeotia. He authored the most celebrated Vitae parallelae and a collection of more than 70 miscellaneous works that was titled Moralia.2 In fact, the number of Moralia in the Catalogue of Lamprias indicates that more than half of them were lost over the centuries.3 Plutarch wrote the Parallel Lives over almost a quarter of a century, between the death of Domitian and his own death, early in the reign of Hadrian. Of these biographies, pairing a Greek military or political figure with a Roman, 22 survive.
