Plutarch

Greek biographer and essayist — author of Parallel Lives and Moralia — who wrote parallel biographies of paired Greek and Roman statesmen as moral exemplars — the most influential biographer in Western history.

Creates the biographical moral exemplar tradition — Plutarch's Lives establishes biography as a moral rather than purely historical genre; his interest is in character and virtue rather than chronology; this made the Lives the founding text of the tradition that biography should teach us how to live.