HIS CURIOSITY AND HIS PATRIOTISM
Plutarch was a widely read man. The world in which he lived was rather the world which his mind portrayed than that upon which his eyes looked. In other words, he lived in his past much more fully than in his present. For everything that had happened he had a gentle but persistent curiosity. Customs hallowed by time evoked in him the utmost tenderness; but his nature was without a vestige of fanaticism. To the hot, strenuous youth of his age, to zealots for preserving the old, and to harsh innovators alike he seemed probably a trifler and perhaps a bore. They must have turned with impatience from his universal charity; for he was a widely loyal man, loyal to his petty civic duties, his family obligations, his friends, his reputation, his race.
By his interest in, and profession of, practical morality Plutarch was called to be a biographer, but it is to his loyalty to his people that we owe his “Parallel Lives.” In their composition he was guided by the desire to show the arrogant Romans and the later Greeks in whose midst he lived, that a great Hellenic man of affairs could be put in worthy comparison with every outstanding Roman general and statesman.