Plutarch
(circa 45 - 125) Greece
Essayist, biographer
Born at Chaeronea, Boeotia, Mestrius Plutarchus (known as Plutarch) traveled in Egypt and Italy, visited Rome (where he lectured on philosophy) and Athens, and finally returned to his native Boeotia, where he became a priest of the temple of Delphi.
For many years Plutarch served as one of the two priests at the temple of Apollo at Delphi (the site of the famous Delphic Oracle) twenty miles from his home. By his writings and lectures Plutarch became a celebrity in the Roman empire, yet he continued to reside where he was born, and actively participated in local affairs, even serving as mayor.
At his country estate, guests from all over the empire congregated for serious conversation, presided over by Plutarch in his marble chair. Many of these dialogues were recorded and published, and the78 essays and other works which have survived are now known collectively as the Moralia. He lived a long and fruitful life with his wife and family in the little Greek town of Chaeronea.
His great work is The Parallel Lives comprising 46 surviving biographies arranged in pairs (one Greek life with one comparable Roman) and four single biographies. The English translation had a profound effect upon English literature; it supplied, for example, the material for Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Timon of Athens.
 Plutarch put special emphasis on male love affairs in his biographies of Lycurgus, Solon, Agesilaus, Alexander, and Pelopidas. The "Life of Pelopidas" is of particular importance: In it, Plutarch gives a unique account of the Sacred Band of Thebes, a regiment made up of three hundred lovers who fought as couples.
Plutarch admiringly celebrates the unique discipline, high morale, and remarkable victories of this "army of lovers," which made it possible for the Thebans to defeat Sparta and become the leading military power in Greece for forty years.
Plutarch's most striking contribution to gay literary history, however, is not his The Parallel Lives but his philosophical dialogue, the Eroticos, or "Dialogue on Love" (circa 110). The dialogue is of great interest for the light it throws on attitudes to male love in late classical times.
It takes the form of a debate on which is better, the love of males or the love of women. The debate has a lively and entertaining dramatic frame - it is sparked by a vehement quarrel among his friends and admirers about whether a favored youth should marry.
It represents opinion in Plutarch's day as fairly evenly divided, though Plutarch himself argues in favor of married love. Plutarch takes a high Platonic line on love, praises it as a kind of "erotic madness" (he quotes Sappho's Ode to establish this), and enumerates its personal and social benefits.
But in order to defend conjugal love, he feels he must first defend love in general. To do this, he draws on Greek myth, history, and literature. Such traditions were abundant but almost exclusively homoerotic.
The result is that Plutarch prefaces his defense of marriage with a long panegyric on male love extremely rich in historical anecdotes and literary material, an encyclopedia of (mainly positive) Greek ideas on the subject with much information that does not appear elsewhere.
The paradoxical result is that though conjugal love gets Plutarch's special approval, the Eroticos ranks closely after the Symposium and the Phaedrus as a document in the gay literary heritage.
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