Plutarch

A priest of Apollo at Delphi and Roman citizen, Plutarch wrote paired biographies of Greeks and Romans that judged men by their moral character rather than their conquests. His Parallel Lives became the single most-read source on antiquity in the Renaissance and the template for the modern biography.

• Composed the Parallel Lives, 48 biographies arranged as Greek–Roman pairs with comparative essays
• Wrote the Moralia, some 78 essays on ethics, religion, education, marriage and politics
• Served for decades as a priest at Delphi, preserving Greek religious tradition under Roman rule
• Established biography as a genre distinct from history, focused on the revealing small act over the great battle

Shakespeare lifted the plots of Julius Caesar, Coriolanus and Antony and Cleopatra almost verbatim from Thomas North's 1579 translation of the Lives, so every modern staging or film of those plays transmits Plutarch's judgements. The American founders read him as a manual of republican virtue and civic collapse; his account of demagogues capturing free assemblies is still quoted in constitutional argument. Modern leadership studies and the whole biography industry inherit his method.

Plutarch married Timoxena and had at least five children; four sons are named in his writings and a daughter, also called Timoxena, died in infancy — his Consolation to His Wife on her death is one of antiquity's most tender letters.