Primary source · literary

Parallel Lives (selected, Cato the Elder, Fabius Maximus, Marcellus, Aemilius Paullus)

Plutarch of Chaeronea

Composition

c. 110 CE

Language: greek

Reliability

literary tradition access

~300 years from events

Forty-six paired biographies (Greek and Roman, presented in matched pairs with comparative essays). Several Lives are central to Carthaginian history: Fabius Maximus and Marcellus (the Italian campaign of the Second Punic War from the Roman side), Aemilius Paullus (Cannae, where his father fell), and especially Cato the Elder (the architect of the Roman case for the Third Punic War, including the famous "Carthago delenda est" formulation). Plutarch's Lives of Pyrrhus and Timoleon are also relevant for earlier Mediterranean conflict involving Carthage.

Bias and reliability notes

Greek biographer writing under Trajan, drawing extensively on Polybius and on now-lost Hellenistic sources. The Lives are biographies, not histories: shaped by moral and characterological aims, with anecdotes selected for illustrative power rather than strict reportage. Plutarch's distance from his Roman subjects is real, and where he and Polybius overlap, Polybius is generally to be preferred. Where Plutarch preserves material absent from elsewhere, sayings, domestic details, anecdotes about Roman public life, the material may be authentic transmission from lost intermediaries or may be Plutarchean elaboration; usually impossible to tell.

Public-domain translation

Bernadotte Perrin (1916) — read at Perseus →

Claims citing this source

Roman losses at Cannae were among the highest of any single day in the history of warfare, perhaps 50,000–70,000 dead and 10,000 captured. Carthaginian losses were under 10,000.

Cited at Aem. Paullus 14, Fabius 16
Maharbal urged Hannibal to march directly on Rome immediately after Cannae and, when Hannibal refused, replied "you know how to win a victory, Hannibal, but you do not know how to use one."

Cited at Fabius 17
Cannae did not produce Roman political collapse. The senate refused to negotiate with Hannibal, refused to ransom captured prisoners, and within months had raised replacement legions and resumed the war effort.

Cited at Fabius 17-19