SOURCE: Russell, D. A. “Language, Style and Form.” In Plutarch, pp. 18-41. London: Duckworth, 1973.

In the following essay, Russell examines characteristic traits of Plutarch's literary style.

There are extant forty-eight Lives by Plutarch, all but four of which belong to the series of Greek and Roman ‘parallels’. There are also over seventy short works of miscellaneous content. These are commonly called Moralia, a translation of the Greek ēthika, a title used in the Middle Ages for one considerable group of them concerned with topics in practical ethics. The corpus as we have it is in fact the result of various mediaeval Byzantine efforts at collecting books by Plutarch, culminating in the magnificent manuscripts written under the direction of Maximus Planudes at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth century.¹ It contains a number of works which are certainly spurious, though some of them are...