Alexander, the Macedonian conqueror, and Caesar, the great Roman consul, are the most celebrated figures of Plutarch's parallel Lives, a series of biographies of illustrious men matched by the similarity of their designs. Masterfully, Plutarch examines both the formation of both characters as their intellectual and political evolution, with a psychological insight and an immense rhetorical skill, which underlines that beyond a brilliant historian, Plutarch was above all a great philosopher and an extraordinary psychologist.