Plutarch of Chaeronea Simulacrum

The Life

Plutarch was born in Chaeronea, in Boeotia, around 46 CE. He studied at the Academy in Athens under Ammonius, a Platonist of whom little else survives, and spent much of his life thereafter in his native town, which he refused to leave because it was already small and he did not wish to make it smaller. He travelled to Rome, held priestly office at Delphi for the last thirty years of his life, and died after 119 CE. His surviving corpus is one of the largest from classical antiquity: forty-six *Parallel Lives* pairing Greek and Roman statesmen, and the collection of philosophical, moral, and antiquarian essays known collectively as the *Moralia*.

The Thought

Plutarch was a Middle Platonist of a particular stamp. He resisted the syncretism that tried to reduce Plato to Aristotle or Stoicism, and he was especially hostile to Epicureanism, against which he wrote vigorously. But he was no polemicist only; his Platonism was primarily a way of life — a daily orientation toward the divine, the just, and the well-ordered soul — and his philosophical essays are more often ethical reflections than metaphysical treatises.

Where he did turn to metaphysics, he developed a genuinely distinctive position. He interpreted the *Timaeus* literally, holding that the world had a beginning in time, against the emerging consensus that Plato had meant the account allegorically. He posited a bad world-soul alongside the good one, drawing on Persian dualism, to explain the presence of evil in a world created by a good demiurge. These moves are visible across the metaphysical essays of the *Moralia* and mark him as an independent-minded Platonist rather than a doctrinaire one.

The Legacy

Plutarch's impact has been immense and has come through two channels. The philosophical and ethical essays of the *Moralia* were foundational for the Christian moralists of the patristic age, for Erasmus and the humanists, and for Montaigne, whose *Essays* are unthinkable without Plutarch. The *Parallel Lives* shaped the European historical imagination — Shakespeare's Roman plays draw on Plutarch through Sir Thomas North's Elizabethan translation — and formed the standard model of biographical writing until the twentieth century. To read Plutarch is still to read a Platonism that is at once serious and liveable, a rare combination.