Shakespeare took the stories of Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus from Plutarch's Parallel Lives, a set of paired biographies of Greeks and Romans, which he read in Thomas North's English translation of 1579. The man who wrote them could have lived in Rome, where he lectured and had powerful friends. He chose Chaeronea, a small town in central Greece, and explained in one of those biographies that he stayed so that his small city would not become smaller still. The Lives made him famous. The other half of his writing, which later scholars collected as the Moralia, is philosophy meant for a town like Chaeronea: to be lived among neighbours, family and gods.
He trained in Athens in 66 and 67, the years of the emperor Nero's visit to Greece, under a philosopher named Ammonius. He later recalled that he was passionately devoted to mathematics at the time, and that joining the Academy — becoming a follower of Plato — soon taught him the value of the Delphic rule against excess. For the rest of his life he tried to read Plato as a single, coherent system. That meant keeping together two things some earlier Platonists had split apart: the doubting, question-asking side of the Academy and the firm doctrines, both of which he held to be Plato's. It also meant taking the creation story in Plato's Timaeus at its word. Most Platonists of his day read it as a figure of speech. Plutarch held that the world really had a beginning in time, when a divine maker brought order to a disorder that already existed — and that the leftover disorder is where badness in the world comes from.
The claim he is best remembered for as a moralist concerns the emotions. The Stoics taught that the wise person should be rid of passions altogether. Plutarch answered that virtue is emotion guided by reason, and that it comes, like any skill, from training and habit. His essays on anger, on talkativeness and on prying into other people's affairs are exercises in that training. The same confidence in a reasonable world shaped his religion: the gods are good, so superstition, which imagines them cruel, is a worse mistake than atheism.
He wrote this as a man at home in the Roman order. His Roman citizenship came through Mestrius Florus, a former consul and friend. Florus had served against his will with the emperor Otho in the civil war of 69, and on the battlefield of Bedriacum in northern Italy he showed Plutarch an old temple and told him the dead had been piled as high as its gable. Plutarch addressed the Lives to another consul, Sosius Senecio, and wrote the Table-Talk for him as well: nine books of questions argued at dinner among family and friends. From about 95 he was one of the two priests of Apollo at Delphi, and in old age he could say he had served the god for many Pythiads, the four-year cycles of the Delphic games.
The philosophy met its hardest test at home. His two-year-old daughter Timoxena died while he was away from home; the news reached him at Tanagra. Two of his sons had already died young. His letter to his wife praises her for holding the funeral without display, and comforts her with a teaching that ancestral tradition and the Dionysian mysteries share: the soul cannot perish.
An ancient list attributed to his son Lamprias names 227 of his works, not all of which survive. Later Platonists, Plotinus among them, took up his project of reading Plato as a system, though most rejected his literal reading of the creation story. Jacques Amyot put the Lives into French in 1559, Montaigne returned to Plutarch again and again in his Essays, and Rousseau read the Lives as a boy with his father, a watchmaker in Geneva. Modern scholars long treated him as an unoriginal borrower from other schools; recent work has taken him seriously as a philosopher of the tradition now called Middle Platonism.