Whereas Tatum looks at the epilogues more generally, Simon Verdegem undertakes a detailed examination of one formal syncrisis, the problematic comparison of Coriolanus and Alcibiades. He shows how these formal syncriseis are part of a conventional, rhetorical game that compels judgment he also argues that Plutarch’s process of employing parallels is essentially a Roman approach, and suggests a cultural competitiveness between Greek and Roman that would lose some of its potency without these formal epilogues.
Jeffrey Tatum tackles these comparisons as a whole, noting how scholars have traditionally found them perturbing, distracting, and rife with inconsistencies. The first two essays discuss the formal, comparative epilogues, or syncriseis, that cap most pairs of Lives. The book concludes with an essay on the publications of the Lives in translations of the Italian Humanists that serves as a fine coda to the compilation. Three complementary pairs of essays on specific types of parallelism in the Lives start the collection, then a single essay is concerned with the unpaired Artaxerxes, and three expansive discussions illustrate the theme of Plutarch’s parallelism more broadly. The individual authors have taken advantage of this rather broad request and generated a wide variety of essays on parallelism in Plutarch’s Lives ranging from discussions of one biography to discussions of them all. The editor states that those invited were “told only that parallelism is the theme” (xi). The work is a collection of papers originally presented at a conference in Cork in 2005. Humble’s collection demonstrates that the contemporary scholar cannot adequately examine the purpose of even a single Life of Plutarch’s biographies without engaging with the vital role of parallelism. Such collections fail to show the utility of reading Plutarch’s Lives as they were originally published-as paired biographies. English collections do not publish the Lives as parallels, but instead contain of Greco-Roman Lives that tend to be organized by a historical era. Most modern readers of translations of Plutarch’s Lives are likely to be unaware of the importance of parallelism to his biographical purpose.
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