Plutarch's Roman Civil War Lives

I am interested in Plutarch’s biographical methods and what it can tell us about biography as a genre in antiquity. More specifically, I have been exploring how Plutarch interacted with Roman political biography as a genre, and his debt to (and interaction with) Cornelius Nepos and his predecessors who were writing a sort of Roman ‘proto-biography’. There has been some interesting scholarly development in our understanding Plutarch’s sources for his Roman Lives, especially the grouping of Roman Lives that we might categorize as “Civil War” biographies. For example, some scholars have suggested that Plutarch wrote his Lives in batches, and that these Roman Lives were all written at roughly the same time, using evidence like cross-references and overlapping topics of discussion. Christopher Pelling has argued that Plutarch relied heavily on a Pollio-source for many of these Lives, though he notes that the sections of these Lives dealing with the subject’s youth is unlikely to have been drawn from this source and likely relied on other sources. For those of the Roman “Civil War” Lives where there is substantial material pertaining to the subjects youth, there is an interesting question: who was Plutarch’s intermediary source?

Beyond Pollio, Christopher Pelling and G.B. Townend have explored Gaius Oppius as the source for the early sections of the Caesar. This is interesting, indeed. As the biographical notes on Oppius in FRHist note, Plutarch’s reliance on an Oppius-source might suggest that Oppius was writing an early form of Roman political biography. I am particularly interested in exploring what methods of organization we can discern, if any, directly from the Oppius fragments and through inference. Specifically, I believe we may be able to piece together some of this evidence from various non-contemporary accounts who, given their overlapping topics of discussion regarding Caesar’s youth, may very well have been relying on a common Oppius-source - whether that be Oppius himself or an intermediary.

I am also very interested in unpacking the “batch” theory about Plutarch’s method of composing these “Civil War” Lives. While Christopher Pelling saw evidence for six Lives being written in a batch, other scholars like Jeffrey Beneker have argued for the inclusion of additional Lives into this grouping, and Phillip Stadter argued in favor of approaching this methodologically as “biography in 3D” - that is, looking beyond individual Lives or pairs of Lives to explore interlinks across broader categories of Plutarch’s Lives. I believe this constitutes a sort of ‘intra-corpus intertextuality’ that invites interesting and challenging questions about Plutarch’s use of evidence and his sequence in writing his Roman Lives.