Who Was Plutarch? A Parent's Two-Minute Guide

Plutarch was a Greek writer who lived from about 46 to 120 AD and invented the kind of biography we still read today. His most famous work, the Parallel Lives, sets a great Greek beside a great Roman, one pair at a time, and asks what each life reveals about the other. He wrote not to record dates but to show character, and for two thousand years the West used his book to teach children what a good life and a wasted one look like.

Where and when did Plutarch live?

He was born around 46 AD in Chaeronea, a small town in the Greek region of Boeotia, northwest of Athens, and he stayed loyal to it his whole life. He studied in Athens, traveled the Mediterranean, and became a Roman citizen, but he spent his later decades at home, serving as a local magistrate and, for many years, as a priest at the famous oracle of Delphi. He died around 120 AD. For a man who threw a searchlight on everyone else's life, he left very little about his own.

What did Plutarch write?

Two great bodies of work survive. The Parallel Lives is a set of paired biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen and soldiers, around forty-six of which come down to us. The Moralia is a collection of seventy-some essays on everything from how to tell a friend from a flatterer to how a young person should read poetry. The Lives are what made him immortal.

Why do classical and homeschool families still read him?

Because almost everyone who shaped the modern world read him first. Shakespeare built three plays, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, almost line for line out of Plutarch's pages. Montaigne quoted him more than any other writer. America's founders argued the Constitution under pen names taken straight from his Lives. The educator Charlotte Mason called him "a wonderful store-house of great ideas and examples," and George Grant calls the Lives the first "Book of Virtues." Every major classical curriculum still assigns him, usually starting around age nine.

How can my kids meet Plutarch?

You can start long before a curriculum does. Read one of his stories aloud, a boy taming a horse nobody else could ride, a captured young Caesar joking with the pirates who held him, and let your child carry the name forward. nüNERD publishes Plutarch's Lives for Kids at four reading levels, ages 0 to 14, so a four-year-old and a thirteen-year-old can meet the same people at the same time.

Frequently asked questions

Was Plutarch Greek or Roman? He was Greek, born in Boeotia, though he became a Roman citizen and wrote about both peoples with equal care.

When did Plutarch live? Roughly 46 to 120 AD, during the height of the Roman Empire under emperors from Vespasian to Hadrian.

What is Plutarch famous for? The Parallel Lives, a set of paired Greek and Roman biographies written to teach character, and the model for biography ever since.

What age should kids start Plutarch? Most curricula begin around age nine, but the stories can be read aloud to children far younger; nüNERD's toddler and picture books start at age zero.