How Plutarch's Lives drew on The Iliad
A documented line of influence: Plutarch demonstrably engaged Homer’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Iliad
Homer · c. 750 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
Plutarch's Lives
Plutarch · c. 110
Ancient GreeceRelevance
6/10
On Plutarch's Lives’s page
- The authority Plutarch quotes more than any other — the Iliad is his touchstone for what virtue and character look like
- Homer surfaces again and again across the Lives, cited as casually as a friend recalls a shared book
- Read the Iliad first and you hear what Plutarch is hearing when he holds his generals and statesmen up to Achilles
On The Iliad’s page
- Centuries on, Homer is still Plutarch's first witness — the Iliad gets quoted throughout the Lives for moral color and the texture of heroic character
- Plutarch reaches for Homer to gloss everything from the Abantes' haircut to Aethra at Troy in his Theseus
- In the Moralia he calls him 'the divine Homer' and mines him for how a young man should read poetry at all