PLUTARCH’S “Lives” carried the art of the biographer to its climax, and in his “Morals” this remarkable artist invented the modern essay as it comes to us through Montaigne. He is sometimes called a “historian,” and it is possible that he should be so described. But if he is sometimes a historian, he is always an artist. Perhaps no other man of his time had studied so deeply the history, the philosophy, and the poetry of the “Divine age” of his country; but we can never be sure that the men whose portraits he draws with such loving and careful art, are not in their heroic essence the product of art. They existed certainly, and the actions he attributes to them are not of his invention. His whole “plot” is historical, but under his pen human nature is transformed as it is under Doré’s brush. The Greeks who followed Alexander to overthrow the Persian Empire were probably as much below the physical standard of the Teutonic races as Cæsar’s legionaries were; but when Doré shows them surrounding the dying Darius, we recognize them as conquerors of the world by the subtle suggestion of an etherealized, superhuman, superiority of physique he puts into every line with which he draws their bodies. They are men, but we could not mistake them for mere men. They are Doré’s men. So Plutarch’s heroes who were once men—perhaps mere men—became “Plutarch’s men,”—a glorious race who inspire all after times to emulation of their heroic virtues. An idealist and a philosopher, one of the greatest of the later disciples of Plato, Plutarch expressed his own ideals by bringing into strong relief all he most admired in the characters he described. His “Morals,” which are not so much read as his “Lives,” are a series of essays and disquisitions on almost every imaginable subject. He is the only ancient writer on the Homeric mode in verse who seems to have had an adequate conception of the high and careful art underlying the apparent simplicities of Homeric technique. He goes much beyond Aristotle in this respect, and it will be a great gain to higher education when the whole of his treatise on Homeric verse is adequately translated and studied in the universities. From Homeric prosody he could shift without visible effort to a discussion of the man in the moon, or the causes of the apparent delay of the gods in punishing the wicked. This latter essay contains passages as remarkable as are to be found in literature. It would be hard for the most ardent admirer of Plato to find in his works anything to surpass Plutarch’s demonstrations that the kingdom of hell, like that of heaven, is an interior reality before it becomes an exterior phenomenon.

  Plutarch was born at Chæronea, in Bœotia, about 45 A.D. Little is known of his life, except that the better part of it is immortal in works whose influence on modern times is too great to be estimated. It has been said that if the cabin of the typical American frontiersman of the first quarter of the nineteenth century contained half a dozen books, Plutarch’s “Lives” was almost sure to be one of them. Axmen and riflemen who read almost no other book but the Bible, read the “Lives” and named their sons after Epaminondas, Leonidas, and Miltiades. And though Plutarch might have smiled at the incongruity of the blending of Greek and English names, thus brought about, he would not have needed to blush for many things done in nineteenth-century America, under his inspiration.