SOURCE: Clough, Arthur Hugh. Preface to Plutarch's Lives, Vol. I, pp. xix-xxxvi. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.

In the following introduction to his 1859 edition of Plutarch's Lives, Clough presents a biographical sketch of Plutarch and a summary of his chief weaknesses as a writer.

The collection so well known as Plutarch's Lives, is neither in form nor in arrangement what its author left behind him.

To the proper work, the Parallel Lives, narrated in a series of books, each containing the accounts of one Greek and one Roman, followed by a comparison, some single lives have been appended, for no reason but that they are also biographies. Otho and Galba belonged, probably, to a series of Roman Emperors from Augustus to Vitellius. Artaxerxes and Aratus the statesman are detached narratives, like others which once, we are told, existed, Hercules, Aristomenes, Hesiod, Pindar, Daiphantus, Crates the cynic, and Aratus...