Trajan died A.D. 117.
"The plan of Plutarch's Biographies is briefly explained by himself in
the introduction to the Life of Alexander the Great, where he makes an
apology for the brevity with which he is compelled to treat of the
numerous events in the Lives of Alexander and Caesar. 'For,' he says, 'I
do not write Histories, but Lives; nor do the most conspicuous acts of
necessity exhibit a man's virtue or his vice, but oftentimes some slight
circumstance, a word, or a jest, shows a man's character better than
battles with the slaughter of tens of thousands, and the greatest arrays
of armies and sieges of cities. Now, as painters produce a likeness by a
representation of the countenance and the expression of the eyes,
without troubling themselves about the other parts of the body, so I
must be allowed to look rather into the signs of a man's character, and
thus give a portrait of his life, leaving others to describe great
events and battles.' The object then of Plutarch in his Biographies was
a moral end, and the exhibition of the principal events in a man's life
was subordinate to this his main design; and though he may not always
have adhered to the principle which he laid down, it cannot be denied
that his view of what biography should be, is much more exact than that
of most persons who have attempted this style of composition. The life
of a statesman or of a general, when written with a view of giving a
complete history of all the public events in which he was engaged, is
not biography, but history.
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