"[M]
[Footnote L: In Rogers's _Recollections_, Grattan is reported as
saying,--"Of all men, if I could call up one, it should be Scipio
Africanus. Hannibal was perhaps a greater captain, but not so great and
good a man. Epaminondas did not do so much. Themistocles was a rogue."
It is curious that Themistocles is the only one of these men of whom we
have a biography by Plutarch. His Lives of Scipio and Epaminondas are
lost. Hannibal did not come within the scope of his design.]
[Footnote M: _Life of Alexander_, at the beginning.]
It is his fidelity to this principle, his dealing with events and
circumstances chiefly as they illustrate character, his delineation of
the features of the souls of men, that constitutes Plutarch's highest
merit as a biographer. He is no historian; he often neglects chronology,
and disregards the sequence of events; he omits many incidents, and he
avoids the details of national and political affairs. The progress of
the advance or decline of states is not to be learned from his pages.
But if his Lives be read in chronological order, much may be inferred
from them of the moral condition and changes of the communities in which
the men flourished whose characters and actions he describes.
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