Summarising chapter 3 of:

Licona, Michael R. Why Are There Differences in the Gospels?: What We Can Learn from Ancient Biography. Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.

Parallel Pericopes in Plutarch’s Lives

In this chapter, Michael Licona examines differences within thirty pericopes that appear two or more times within nine Lives written by Plutarch.

Here, I shall simply reproduce Licona’s own chapter summary:

In the fifty Lives written by Plutarch that have survived, we have focused our attention on nine, since they feature main characters who, for the most part, knew the main characters in the other Lives: Sertorius, Lucullus, Cicero, Crassus, Pompey, Cato Minor, Caesar, Brutus, and Antony. Of these, we identified thirty-six pericopes that appear in two or more of these Lives. Of the thirty-six, thirty contain many differences worth noting.

We often observe Plutarch writing in accordance with the law of biographical relevance. He provides more details of a story in a Life where it bears greater biographical relevance for the main character. When the relevance to the main character is minimal, Plutarch abbreviates, omits, and moves the story along more rapidly. He often emphasizes the roles played by his main characters in certain events while minimizing the roles of others involved. Sometimes he represents the main character of each Life from that character’s viewpoint, rather than taking a consistent position of his own…

To be expected, Plutarch employs numerous techniques observed in the compositional textbooks. He alters using synonyms, using different wording, different syntax, and changes a statement to a question (or vice versa). He describes monetary values in different manners…and inverts the order of names presented. There are two occasions in which Plutarch possibly uses inflection, changing a singular to a plural or vice versa… On occasion, Plutarch substitutes a term in order to emphasize a point, such as the greatness of his main character… He paraphrases logia and content, sometimes by summarizing a large amount and recasting it. For the most part, his paraphrasing appears to have had no objective other than to follow the literary conventions of his day.

Plutarch often shines a literary spotlight on a character. It is usually, though not always, on the main character. He simplifies by omitting details that would complicate either his narrative or the portrait he is painting of his main character, or to cast a slightly distorted picture in order to make a point about his main character. He often compresses and conflates accounts. He also takes the words or actions he had assigned to a certain character in one Life and transfers them to a different character in another Life. On occasion, Plutarch displaces an event or logion from its original context and transplants it in a different one, sometimes conflating elements from both contexts…

Sometimes Plutarch will redact elements of a story in order to support the portrait he is painting of his main character. This may result in placing the main character or his adversary in a light that is more or less favorable. Even if Plutarch had no credible reports supporting his redaction, he still believed the point he was emphasizing was true. Plutarch may also have altered a detail slightly to create irony. He occasionally portrays motives differently, usually in a manner that provides some illumination on the protagonist’s character in that Life.

On a few occasions there are differences pertaining to the names provided in the narratives. In one instance, it is clear Plutarch was using different components of the person’s tria nomina. In the others, the differences may be due to the same reason (using different components of the person’s full name), a slip of memory, a different spelling, textual corruption, or a reason unknown to us. Numerical differences exist in six of the nine Lives we are considering: Cicero, Brutus, Antony, Caesar, Pompey, and Cato Minor. While some of these differences probably result from Plutarch’s rounding a number or providing a general figure, a few of them appear to be erroneous. There is a difference pertaining to the location of an event. And he occasionally narrates events with conflicting chronologies. Plutarch sometimes acknowledges the existence of conflicting reports. Though not always, these often relate to the main character. We observed that numerous differences in details were not limited to the manner in which Plutarch reported a story in multiple Lives, but also appear when the same pericope is reported by other historians of that era…

In light of instructions for good literature writing by Lucian and Quintilian, we determined that historians were permitted to craft peripheral details and connect events synthetically in order to produce a narrative that flows smoothly. We deduced that this might have been practiced especially when numerous details were unknown, and we suspect that this may be the reason behind many of the differences that appear when Plutarch reports the same pericope in multiple Lives. This hypothesis gains even more plausibility when the same pericopes are also reported with differences by additional historians of that era. Accordingly, we plausibly conjectured that the creative reconstructions of different historians may have resulted in a number of the differences we observed between their accounts.

Having carefully analyzed the differences that appear when the same story is told in two or more of Plutarch’s Lives, we are now prepared to render some final conclusions for this section. On occasion, Plutarch errs. Only rarely do his accounts disagree on so many details that we are left puzzled and entirely unaware of what he was doing… The differences we observe almost always could have resulted from Plutarch’s use of the compositional devices that have been noted by classical scholars for some time and who have contended that these were standard conventions for writing history and biography of that day and were practiced by virtually all. Moreover, these differences appear to occur only in the peripheral details. And we must consider the possibility that, in many instances, the differences result from Plutarch’s recalling the story from memory rather than checking his source(s) and even what he had written earlier in another Life.

(Underlining added)