The Malice and the Lives

Abstract This chapter first surveys the criticism of earlier scholars that Plutarch when writing the Parallel Lives ignored the strictures that he established in On the Malice of Herodotus, and is occasionally himself guilty of hypocrisy or even malice. In considering this issue, the chapter looks at the differences and similarities between biography and historiography, and it is argued that in the Lives Plutarch was working in a different genre from that of the Malice, and, though not himself a historian, nevertheless followed the methodology for non-contemporary history that had developed over the centuries before him. Although he uses many of the tools found in historians, he has a particular interest in the relationship between the character of the historian and the content of his history, and this unites his approach in both the Malice and the Lives.