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In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Plutarch's Lives: Exploring Virtue and ViceFrances B. TitchenerTim Duff. Plutarch's Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. xx + 423 pp. Cloth, $95.This excellent book by an able scholar will set a new standard in Plutarch studies, particularly for scholars interested in historiography and moral philosophy. Here is Duff's aim in his own words: "This book is an attempt to explore two related aspects of the ParallelLives: their moralizing purpose and the comparative [End Page 586] structure through which Plutarch's moralism is so often mediated. It will look at the ways in which the ParallelLives explore issues of right and wrong, good and evil; the ways in which they cause us to question or to understand our world" (1). Duff describes his book as "an attempt to read Plutarch's Lives not as mines for history but as an area of study in their own right, and one which throws light on the intellectual climate of Plutarch's own day. It is less concerned with the 'truth-status' of Plutarch's narrative, more with how that narrative is constructed and how it would have been read in its original context" (9). Duff succeeds brilliantly in both areas, Plutarch's moralism and his place in historiography.The book is divided into three parts. Part 1, entitled "The Moralizing Programme," presents a detailed reading of Plutarch's surviving programmatic statements (such as the question of "great natures"), examines how well he succeeds in his aim of improving the reader, and discusses his assumptions about human psychology. Part 2 uses case studies of specific pairs of biographies, a tried-and-true method for students of Plutarch, to examine the moral and literary program in practice. The pairs Duff selects are Pyrrhos-Marius,Phokion-CatoMinor,Lysander-Sulla, and Coriolanus-Alkibiades (Duff adheres to literal transliteration, not on a whim, but rather from a strong belief that "to Latinize the Greek would be a reversal of Plutarch's cultural programme, which functioned to Hellenize the Roman" [xii, Duff's emphasis]). There is a substantial discussion about the parallelism of the biographies and a plea for them to be read in pairs, as their author intended. Part 3 examines "two special circumstances," the comparisons or synkriseis and the cultural and political implications of Plutarch's program of writing in parallel.In his preface, Duff notes, "It is a pleasing coincidence, and one which Plutarch would have enjoyed (see Sertorius 1.1-8), that the last monograph to be written in English on Plutarch's Lives was by one of my predecessors at Reading (Wardman 1974)" (ix). Duff bases his comparison of his work with Wardman's on their common academic institution, but the comparison is actually much more apt. For years, Wardman's book Plutarch'sLives set an important standard in Plutarch studies. Scholars in the earlier part of the twentieth century studied Plutarch almost exclusively in terms of Quellenforschung. Most serious scholarship on the biographies began by rehearsing the argument about whether or not Plutarch had read Thucydides or was using a kind of handbook, and by necessity focused on rehabilitation of the biographer. Wardman's book took a big step forward in studying Plutarch for his own sake; Duff's is another such step forward. Duff is simultaneously thorough and methodical in his analysis of not only the daunting corpus of Plutarch's own work but also of the tremendous bibliography amassed during the past century, and yet his emphasis on synkrisis and its significance to studies of historiography (biography in particular) and of Plutarch's work moves these areas of study forward. With his careful attention and clear prose, Duff has relieved an entire generation of scholars from the tedium of rehearsing basic issues, such as whether or not Plutarch knew Latin (he did). [End Page 587] Duff's calm, organized, and clear-sighted work gracefully retires these nonproblems, and we can now hope that discussion will continue to move forward unencumbered. For scholars of Plutarch this relief is hard to exaggerate. Plutarch is a compelling and provocative author, something justly recognized by Duff in his concluding paragraph: "This book has emphasized throughout...