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This chapter addresses Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. By the time Plutarch launched into the composition of this text, biographical material was already displaying a wide diversity. Plutarch’s biographical corpus—one of the biggest in the ancient world—displays this variety, as it comprises three different types of biography: individual Lives, the Lives of the Caesars, and the Parallel Lives. (On the first two, see Chapter 14.) Parallel Lives is a collection of biographies structured according to the organizing principles of parallelism and ‘sameness’: each pair of Greek and Roman Lives forms a volume (a book unit), while together the pairs constitute a series. The process of comparison and parallelism is relevant to each pair of Lives in various ways. In the prologues, Plutarch states both the purpose and the method of his work, names the two protagonists, and offers an outline of the similarities between the characters of the two protagonists. In the formal syncrisis (comparison), he sums up the points of contact and, especially, the differences between the two protagonists.

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