La elocuencia como instrumento político en las Vidas paralelas de Plutarco

Abstract

The phrase we read in Cat. Ma. 1.5, «ό λόγος ώσπερ δεύτερον σωμα», gives us a good idea about the importance devoted by Plutarch to the rhetorical elements, as a topic of his biographical outline. Certainly, he finds this topic in the previous encomiastic and biographical literature; but he makes it his own in the Parallel Lives, underlining mainly its moral, pedagogical and political functions. In this manner, the rhetorical attitudes of Plutarch’s politicians, distinct, as a result, from the military, become an essential feature of Plutarch’s biographical technique.