Dear S,
Nobody needs to read 800 pages on anybody. This is the conclusion I came to after reading Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton and the first volume of The Last Lion. They’re really just too big to be useful.
Do I need to know, in the span of 200 pages, how Winston Churchill felt about his mom, or about how badly he did in school, or how poorly he wrote in first grade? Sure — maybe in 200 words. In a good study Bible Jesus gets around 300 pages, about half of them are notes, and another quarter — maybe more — is just bald repetition. Yet according to Christians, God decided that was all we needed on Him.
The fact the we remember so little about modern biographies is probably a result of their size. Plutarch’s Lives run anywhere from 30-60 pages per figure and what we take away from them is far more useful — especially from a good translation. We get a short childhood, a slew of great quips, some moral triumphs and failures, some background history, a solid battle or two, and then somebody dies.
Likewise, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s bios on great Englishmen run anywhere from 50-80 pages, are packed full of big theories and moral instruction, and die off before hearing what anyone ate for dinner. What about Macaulay’s biography? Not written by Macaulay, unfortunately, and thus almost a thousand pages long. Will anybody read it? Despite an almost fanatical love for the man, I almost certainly won’t.
For this reason I have directed and edited the following version of Plutarch’s Lives — a new edition, faithful to the Greek, in flowing, modern, high-school English. Too many books about ancient Greeks and Romans have been written by “modern” Americans and Brits, which defeats the whole purpose. The main value of reading about Greeks and Romans is to get away from modernity. It’s to see the great and ancient up close, and get a real whiff of their character: the things “modern” men usually lack — and, in consequence, things many writers today don’t even have a nose for.
Plutarch writes, in his Life of Aemelius Paulus,
I first took up the writing of these Lives for the sake of others, but I have continued and grown fond of the work for my own sake as well. History serves me like a mirror: I try, as best I can, to shape my life and bring it into harmony with the virtues of the men I describe. The experience is really a kind of daily companionship. Through history I receive each of them in turn as a guest, welcome him into my home, and study, in Homer’s words, “how great he was, and what kind of man.” Then I select from his actions the most important and finest qualities for us to know. […]
By studying history and writing about it, I train myself to keep the best and most respected men always present in my memory. If daily contact with other people brings anything mean, malicious, or degrading into my thoughts, I can push it back and clear it away by calmly turning my mind toward the finest of these examples.
Proof that reading Plutarch's Lives — like all the other books we read, for better and for worse — isn’t about somebody else. In the end, it’s really about you, and what kind of person you want to be. Plutarch knew this and lived by it. Most modern biographers don’t.
A good dose of Plutarch reminds us that virtue is eternal. The real possession of it, especially in leadership and academia, is more likely to be ephemeral. And if this is the case, it's best to soak in these oases of goodness when we find them — if not in always in person, then at the very least in Plutarch.
This edition gets the job done, without a hefty investment into a good translation, or going “public domain” and slogging through a bad one. It has been my honor to get to know Plutarch — and an even greater one to share him. I only hope that after reading him, you feel the same way.
Yours,
-J
August 10th, 2026
P..S. I talked a lot about virtue above, but one thing that Plutarch is an expert on writing about is vice. And I don't think you can be truly good at the first without being a maestro at the second. In the end they’re two sides of the same coin.
As such, although I made this for my boys, they won't be getting the Lives until later, and even then with a warning. In these biographical essays you’ll find acts of lust both straight and homosexual. There will be murders and tortures and, in one life in particular, almost-unspeakable acts of serial-killer execution. There is incest, prostitution, rape, and polygamy. Drunks and degenerates exist side-by-side (and sometimes even in the same person) as saviors and sages. If you’re looking for the purely wholesome and kind, go watch Bluey. Plutarch’s Lives is a character examination of real-life pagans who got to the top — not Lives of the Saints, or William Bennett’s Book of Virtues.
What I’m trying to say is that Plutarch's Lives is a little nicer than Game of Thrones and about on par with the Old and New Testaments. As such, some discretion, especially when handing this to somebody under 16, is strongly advised. If your kid already knows exactly how Jesus was murdered, or about Lot and his daughters, or about Amnon and Tamar, or what Absalom did to David’s concubines, he’s probably good to go — or already ruined, depending on your perspective. Plutarch is about making judgments; and I advise you, before getting started, to exercise some good judgment about Plutarch.
P.P.S. When I was ready to finish the ebook and handed this preface to ChatGPT, it was kind enough to offer some unsolicited advice. It said it smoothed over some rough sentences, fixed some grammatical errors, and even patched a bad spelling of Aemelius. About the last one I was grateful, but upon further review I noticed one glaring error: the preface just didn’t sound quite like me.
So I kindly told ChatGPT to disregard all changes except the spelling. And then I had an epiphany. I realized that Mick Jagger, Joey Ramone, Jello Biafra, Tom Waits, David Lee Roth, Louis Armstrong, John Lennon, Brian Johnson, Bob Dylan, and Dave Mustaine are all technically “bad” singers — people whose virtuosity may be called into question, and who could have “benefited” greatly from some kind of vocal coaching. And I doubt the coaching would have improved anything. In certain cases, especially for Tom Waits and Louis Armstrong and Jello Biafra, it might have actually ruined them.
What I’m trying to say here is that, maybe for what you’re trying to do, there isn’t a “perfect” voice. Maybe a voice brings something to the show that can’t be measured with a tuning fork. You might have a swagger, a rhythm — a sneer — that carries more than the right pitch ever could. We know that in conversation, the way you say something conveys more, most times, than the words do themselves. I believe the same is true for singing, and I believe the same is true for writing. The modern age has raised the standard of singing to pitch-perfect — and the result has been a slew of technically professional, entirely replaceable, totally plastic sluts. The process works well enough for a machine, but it fails to really carry a soul.