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Plutarch Life Of Pericles Analysis

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“Life of Pericles” passage 11.1-2, translated by Dillon and Garland, is part of a form of a biography written by Greek philosopher Plutarch at approximately 75 AD in Athens. At the time Greece was under Roman rule, inspiring Plutarch’s parallel writing style where he would compare great Greek Generals with great Roman Generals. Specifically, “Life of Pericles” was written as a parallel to the “Life of the Roman general Fabius Maximus”. Plutarch’s knowledge of the life of Pericles came from external sources as Pericles died centuries before Plutarch was born. Consequently, this puts the reliability and accuracy of Plutarch’s work into question, especially considering many of his sources are still unknown. Plutarch thought there to be quite a difference between writing biography and history, therefore he knew that what he wrote were biographies and never professed otherwise. Along with this, he had an apparent goal to entertain and educate with his written works and was very forthright with his personal preferences. …show more content…

It showed that despite how great a leader they were if the aristocrats felt they were becoming too powerful action would have been taken in order to decrease or completely remove their power. In this case, the Athenian aristocrats were afraid Pericles’ power would escalate to the point of a monarchy so they introduced Thucydides into the political battlefield in an attempt to dampen Pericles’

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