The Moral Philosophy of Plutarch

“While not all of his essays are explicitly moral in orientation, nearly all of Plutarch’s essays have moral instruction and guidance baked into them.”

Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, better known as Plutarch, was the finest essayist of antiquity and the author of the famous and witty Parallel Lives. Plutarch was long an influential force in the development of Western humanities; a biographer, essayist, philosopher, and historian, his writings touched on all the subjects of the humanities from history and politics to philosophy and theology. The Parallel Lives might be his most famous work, but his collection of essays remembered to posterity as the Moralia is the most enduring.

Parallel Lives

Moralia is an appropriate name for Plutarch’s essays. While not all of his essays are explicitly moral in orientation, nearly all of Plutarch’s essays have moral instruction and guidance baked into them. This is also true when properly understanding the nature and purpose of the Parallel Lives. Plutarch was, first and foremost, a moralist. His reflections on great men, history, and politics are all subordinate to Plutarch’s ambitious moral project which, in turn, was a byproduct of his Platonism.

Plutarch, like many of the new Platonists (Plutarch is generally considered belonging to the school of “Middle Platonism”), believed in an interconnected and relational cosmos. This is not necessarily surprising. The Platonist tradition in philosophy, Stoicism, and Christianity all conceived of a similar interconnected and enchanted cosmos. But this relational reality to Plutarch’s philosophical and cosmic beliefs is undeniably visible in his many writings. The moral philosophy of Plutarch is never in isolation; it is on this account that Plutarch sharply broke with the Stoics and often criticized them (even if he was not fully aware of or charitable to their beliefs).