Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the recovery of Plutarch's political philosophy and a proper understanding of his most famous and political work, the Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. The Parallel Lives was once considered to be among the most important books about politics, but recently, it has been the object of an attack by classical scholars who have argued that any political teaching that the work contains is inconsistent, derivative, and anachronistic. I contend that this attack is flawed because it is based on false and unexamined beliefs about the book's purpose and the manner in which it should be read. I conclude that the Parallel Lives can and should be an integral work in a political education in our own times. ;In Chapter One, I undertake a survey of the modern literature on the Parallel Lives and point out the crucial errors which have led scholars to misread the work in a way that was bound to prove its own assumptions that Plutarch's writings are inconsistent and simple. By discussing this scholarship in a reference to the four crucial keys to the work contained in its title, I lay out a plan for reading the work which takes into account its peculiar structure as a clue to the meaning of its content. In Chapters Two, Three, and Four, I discuss three pairs of the Lives---the Pericles-Fabius, the Theseus-Romulus, and the Lycurgus-Numa. In each chapter, I provide a detailed commentary of the pair in question that demonstrates how Plutarch poses difficult and pressing political questions in his proems and then forces his readers to consider the various contending answers to these questions by his careful narratives of and comparisons between the careers of statesmen who are reputed to be noble. I argue that Plutarch forces us to consider the claim of the political life to be the best possible life for a human being by showing us how to properly evaluate both the potential benefits and inherent defects of political action