LIVES, Parallel (Mot irapa.17/Aoi), the work upon which Plutarch's fame chiefly rests, were published by him late in life after his re turn to Chzronea, and, if one may judge from the long lists of authorities given, must have taken many years in the compilation. The bi ographies appear in pairs, each of which places a Greek and Roman in juxtaposition. For ex ample, Theseus and Romulus are compared as the legendary founders of states. Twenty-two pairs are extant: Theseus and Romulus, Ly curgus and Numa, Solon and Valerius Publi cola, Themistocles and Camillus, Pericles and Fabius Maximus, Alcibiades and Coriolanus, Timoleon and /Emilius Paulus, Pelopidas and Marcellus, Aristides and Cato the Elder, Philo pcemen and Flaminius, Pyrrhus and Caius Ma rius, Lysander and Sulla, Cimon and Lucullus, Nicias and Crassus, Sertorius and Eumenes, Agesilaus and Pompey, Alexander and Julius Cesar, Phocion and Cato the Younger, Agis and Cleomenes and Tiberius and Cams Grac chus (a double comparison), Demosthenes and Cicero, Demetrius Poliorcetes and Antony, Dion and Brutus. To these are added the four single lives of Aratus, Artaxerxes Memnon, Galba and Otho, making a total of 50 lives. There are traces of perhaps 12 more biogra phies that are now lost. Eighteen of the 22 pairs close with a sort of balanced judgment (cirtp(ige) of the two careers and characters. These formal comparisons abound in con trasts rather than in resemblances, the latter in deed being sometimes a trifle forced. This need not be wondered at, inasmuch as Plu tarch's object was not to write history, hut to prove that the more remote past of Greece could show its men of action and achievement as well as the nearer and, therefore, more pressive past of Rome. In these biographies, therefore, the interest is primarily ethical, though they have no mean historical value. In spite of his lack of judicious discrimination in the use of authorities and the consequent rors and inaccuracies, Plutarch gives an dance of citations and incidentally a large ber of valuable bits of information which fill up numerous gaps in the historical knowledge obtainable elsewhere. Owing to the liveliness
and warmth of portrayal and the moral ness and enthusiasm displayed by their author, the 'Lives' have not failed to attract a large circle of readers throughout the ages, in spite of a certain degree of uniformity inherent in the very plan of the series. Their wide appeal is instanced by the fact that Caesar,' the first of Shakespeare's Roman plays, like those that followed, namely, and tony and Cleopatra,' was based on Plutarch's 'Lives' as translated from the French lation of Jacques Amyot (1559) and published by Sir Thomas North in 1579. of Athens' likewise is based, at least in part, upon Plutarch's life of Mark Antony. The chief manuscripts of the 'Lives' date from the 10th and 11th centuries; the first edition appeared at Florence in 1517. The most generally cepted text is that of the minor edition of Carl Sintenis in the Teubneriana' (5 vols., Leipzig 1852-55; reissued without much change in 1873-75). There are annotated tions by I. C. Held, E. H. G. Leopold, Otto Siefert and Friedrich Blass and Carl Sintenis, all in German; and by Holden, in English. sides North's translation (mentioned above), there are English translations by John and William Langhorne (1770), by Dryden and others (1683), and, of the Roman lives, by George Long. A. H. Clough's revision of the so-called Dryden edition was published in five volumes in 1859 and reprinted in one large tavo volume in 1876 and 1880. Finally, mention must be made of Bernadotte Perrin's tion, with the Greek and English texts en gard, in the Classical Library,' in 10 volumes, five of which have already appeared. HERBERT F. WRIGHT, • Sometime of The Department of Latin, The Catholic University of America.