SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHIC BIOGRAPHY IN ANTIQUITY
Biography in antiquity was a branch of science and also a branch of philosophy. Scientific biography was interested in facts as such, in the collocation of miscellaneous information about persons. It laid claim to objectivity of details, but left free room for individuality to display itself in their selection. The principle of choice might be pruriency, political, class, or philosophic animosity, or mere love of scandal. Such biography might be with or without style, with or without painstaking: it was commonly without critical method. The precipitate of much lost scientific biography lies before us in the “Lives of the Twelve Cæsars” by Plutarch’s contemporary, Suetonius.
In Plutarch’s “Parallel Lives,” we have, on the other hand, the precipitate of much lost philosophic biography. He stands for us at the end of a long development, in the course of which many contemporary, or approximately contemporary, biographies were produced, each to be superseded perhaps by its successor, as they all were finally superseded and destroyed by those of Plutarch. The plundering of the countless books and pamphlets, plays, and memoirs, cited in the “Parallel Lives,” the culling of the multitude of anecdotes and bons mots with which they are set and enlivened, were by no means the personal work of Plutarch. Many, if not most, of them he found gathered for him by his nameless predecessors. He was under no professional sense of duty to look up and verify his references, and he regularly omitted to do it. Mistakes abound in Plutarch’s “Lives.” But even the historian finds them pardonable when he has the assurance that the materials in conjunction with which they appear were taken by men of greater patience and leisure than Plutarch from works, many of them lost, reaching back over the centuries to the earliest Greek literature.