ABSTRACT
Plutarch’s affirmation (Alex. 1.2; Nic. 1.5) that he intends to write bioi and not historia is generally interpreted as an attempt to justify omissions, inaccuracies, distortions, and contaminations in his works, and to account for certain arbitrary decisions in choosing the material for his Lives. Apart from the fact that such programmatic declarations may be derived from the Peripatetics (who distinguish, for example, between and 1), we must not overlook that a large part of Plutarch’s material comes from works of a historical nature, and only rarely does material from other literary genres (biography, memoirs, collections of sayings and anecdotes, antiquarian and mythological handbooks, among others) suffice to compose a whole Life. Similarly, biographies like those of Aratus, Sulla, or Cato Uticensis, in addition to biographical and autobiographical sources, draw on material from historiographers whose accounts often offer interpretative approaches at variance with biographical sources,2 and constitute the very foundation of Plutarch’s narrative.
