The Atlantic. Review of Plutarch’s Lives, by Arthur Hugh Clough, John Dryden, and Plutarch. January 1860. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1860/01/plutarchs-lives/627616/
Some excellent quotes and evidence for the importance of Plutarch's Lives, almost more so than the importance of this particular translation.
He is said to quote two hundred and fifty authors, some eighty of whom are among those whose works have been wholly or partly lost.
Plutarch’s highest merit as a biographer. He is no historian;
It has taken its place on the clockshelf, with only the Bible, the “Pilgrim's Progress,” and the Almanac for its companions. No other classic author, with, perhaps, the single exception of Æsop, has been so widely read in modern times; and the popular knowledge of the men of Greece and Rome is derived more from Plutarch than from all other ancient authors put together.
importance of Plutarch's Lives
What’s the Best Translation of Plutarch’s Lives? – grammaticus by [[grammaticus]] on 2020-09-23
μοι δυσκολώτερον ἦν εἰπεῖν ἢ πρᾶξαι It is harder for me to say it than to do it.
"CAESAR AND THAT ARMY, WHO HAD STORMED A THOUSAND CITIES, SUBDUED OVER 3000 NATIONS, GAINED NUMBERLESS BATTLES OF THE GERMANS AND GAULS, TAKEN A MILLION PRISONERS AND KILLED AS MANY IN THE FIELD"
The Greek historian Plutarch, who lived in the first century A.D., wrote that the epics owed their existence as complete poems to Lycurgus, an early ruler of Sparta, who encountered them during his travels in Asia Minor
Solon
Solon (c. 638 – c. 558 BC) was an Athenian poet, statesman, and lawmaker. In Plutarch's telling, he is particularly notable for his efforts to legislate against political, economic, and moral decline in pre-Socratic Athens.
Plutarch’s Lives
Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans is also called Parallel Lives or Plutarch's Lives. A series of biographies of famous leaders from ancient Greece and Rome, they are arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings across the two civilizations and were likely written at the beginning of the second century AD. The Lives seem to give the Creature a stirring ideal of the human life that is unlike his own experience of existence.