SOURCE: Tyrrell, Robert Yelverton. “Plutarch.” In Essays on Greek Literature, pp. 171-200. London: Macmillan and Co., 1909.

In the following essay, Tyrrell explores the qualities of the Lives that make it a literary classic.

‘And would they take the poor boy's life for the like o' that?’ ‘Bedad they would, if he had as many lives as Plutarch.’ This little dialogue was overheard not long ago in an Irish county. It may, perhaps, fitly introduce the present paper, as showing what a world-wide fame has been won by Plutarch's Lives. It will be observed that the phrase Plutarch's Lives, coming down to the peasantry from a distant and obscure tradition of the Hedge-Schoolmaster, had lost its meaning for them, and Plutarch had become not the author but the possessor of many lives. Mr. Strachan Davidson in his ‘Cicero’ couples the Lives with the philosophical works of Cicero, as having...