SOURCE: Doyle, Brian. “The Soul of Plutarchos.” American Scholar 69, no. 3 (summer 2000): 111-22.

In the following essay, Doyle provides a character sketch of Plutarch, discusses his portrayal of Mark Antony, and praises him for his ability to render the essential qualities of his subjects.

As with most of the greatest writers in Western history—Homer, Shakespeare, the gaggle of anonymous geniuses who wrote the Bible—we don't know much about Plutarch of Greece in the usual biographically fussy way. Born in the year 45 a.d. or so, died around the year 120 at perhaps seventy-five years of age, he lived an unimaginably long life at a time when living to fifty was a triumph. He was a student in Athens when the emperor Nero visited there in the year 66; a traveler to Egypt; a visitor for a long period in Rome, apparently on civic business, although he also gave a...