PREFACE,
CONTAINING A LIFE OF PLUTARCH.
The collection so well known as "Plutarch's Lives," is neither in form nor in arrangement what its author left behind him.
To the proper work, the Parallel Lives, narrated in a series of Books, each containing the accounts of one Greek and one Roman, followed by a Comparison, some single lives have been appended, for no reason but that they are also biographies. Otho and Galba belonged, probably, to a series of Roman Emperors from Augustus to Vitellius. Artaxerxes and Aratus the statesman, are detached narratives, like others which once, we are told, existed, Hercules, Aristomenes, Hesiod, Pindar, Daiphantus, Crates the cynic, and Aratus the poet.
In the Parallel Lives themselves there are gaps. There was a Book containing those of Epaminondas and Scipio the younger. Many of the comparisons are wanting, have either been lost, or were not completed. And the reader will notice for himself that references made here and there in the extant lives, show that their original order was different from the present. In the very first page, for example, of the book, in the life of Theseus, mention occurs of the lives of Lycurgus and Numa, as already written.
