Plutarch’s readers and the Moralism of thel lives

Abstract

This paper examines the moralism of the Lives by looking at how the response of the reader is constructed or implied in the text itself. Moral judgements on the behaviour of Plutarch’s subjects, or injunctions to the reader to certain sorts of behaviour, are rarely made explicit, because the reader is assumed to share the narrator’s value-system. This sense of shared values stems in part from a common culture: although the Lives are dedicated to a Roman, the ideal reader is constructed in the text as Greek. But the Lives do not simply reinforce this value-system; they also invite the reader to question it - that is, to engage in what Plutarch’s age would have called ‘philosophy’.