Pompey and Caesar as the greatest figures in the Roman biographies. His biography of Caesar has been cited as proof that Plutarch is "loaded with perception". Carl Rollyson's Essays in Biography states that "no biographer has surpassed him in summing up the essence of a life - perhaps because no modern biographer has believed so intensely as Plutarch did in 'the soul of men'."

Within each translation and reiteration of Plutarch's Lives, translators and editors have manipulated his original work in order to put forward their own ideologies.