Mary Beard

Plutarch, when he's doing his series of lives of people of the past, writing the second century CE.

And I mean, we tend to read these lives as singletons.

I'm going to go and read Plutarch's life of Caesar.

In fact, Plutarch...

wrote them as pairs, so he was always pairing a Greek and a Roman, and then at the end comparing them.

And those comparisons that he opts for are really interesting, but one of the most obvious ones is he's got Alexander the Great for his Greek half and Julius Caesar for his second half.

But I think, I mean, Plutarch has quite a few military conquerors in his repertoire of great Greeks and Romans.

So, I mean, I think there is the kind of added extra that you get with them.

Well, you know, Plutarch is on the same wavelength as us, isn't he, in thinking, right, who are the really big guys here?

And just on Alexander, we're doing Caesar.

That's exactly Plutarch.

Yeah, I mean, the big contrast for me is we know something about Caesar.

I mean, with Alexander, you're always saying, well, why would he have done that?

Actually, in Caesar's case, we have autobiography.

I mean, we call them the commentaries on the war in Gaul, etc.

But it's essentially autobiography.

And we have people, contemporary observers.

And then we have, both from the pen of Plutarch, but also from, you know, your favourite Roman biographer, Tom, your lad, we have independent biographers.

Not quite birth to death, because ancient biographies are never quite that, but still, we've got a systematic account, written a century or so later, but much closer in time than anything we have today.

for Alexander.