SOURCE: Lamberton, Robert. “Between Past and Present: The Dialogues.” In Plutarch, pp. 146-87. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001.

In the following essay, Lamberton examines Plutarch's predecessors in the genre of the dialogue and discusses how he developed this form beyond his models.

The Dialogue as a Genre

The Lives gained a rapid and long-lived popularity that has tended to eclipse the rest of the Plutarchan corpus. The most unfortunate victims of this neglect in modern times have been the dialogues, representatives of a literary genre that thrived in antiquity, lived on into the Middle Ages, was revived in the Renaissance and survived into the eighteenth century, but since then has had relatively few practitioners. Plutarch, to judge by the surviving evidence, considered the dialogue central to his literary activity. Despite all the work he put into the Lives, one might even argue that his creations in the...