Mestrios Plutarchos (Mestrius Plutarchus), c.46 CE - c.122 CE, the Greek historian, biographer, and essayist, is best known for his Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, also known as Parallel Lives, intended as pared moralistic Lives rather than biographies of famous Greeks and Romans.
In Alexander, Plutarch writes:
It being my purpose to write the lives of Alexander the king, and of Caesar, by whom Pompey was destroyed, the multitude of their great actions affords so large a field that I were to blame if I should not by way of apology forewarn my reader that I have chosen rather to epitomize the most celebrated parts of their story, than to insist at large on every particular circumstance of it. It must be borne in mind that my design is not to write histories, but lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries of virtue or vice in men; sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest, informs us better of their characters and inclinations, than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments, or the bloodiest battles whatsoever. Therefore as portrait-painters are more exact in the lines and features of the face in which the character is seen, than in the other parts of the body, so I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks and indications of the souls of men, and while I endeavor by these to portray their lives, may be free to leave more weighty matters and great battles to be treated of by others.
There are two general websites on Plutarch: Website of The International Plutarch Society and CHAIRONEIA, Plutarch's Home On The Web. Unfortunately, the latter has some broken links.
Biographies: At www.livius.org, and a longer one at Project Gutenberg. There is also Wikipedia.
"They just don't come any better than old Plutarch." (Harry S. Truman)
Translations from the Greek:
Lacus Curtius covers a selection only, as explained by Bill Thayer: "Although Plutarch lived under the Roman empire and was a Roman citizen, his career even including tenure as a Roman civil servant, he was still Greek, writing in Greek, and very often on Greek history and philosophy, subjects I'm only marginally interested in. The works of Plutarch on LacusCurtius will therefore be confined to the Roman Lives, those Greek Lives that impacted Roman history, and those few works in the Moralia that deal with Roman matters." the Lacus Curtius site includes minor works too: De Fortuna Romanorum (On the Fortune of the Romans), De Fortuna Alexandri (On the Fortune of Alexander), De capienda ex inimicis utilitate (How to Profit by One's Enemies), and the so‑called Parallela Minora (Greek and Roman Parallel Stories), on which latter Bill Thayer comments, "…and minor indeed they are. A bizarrer, more ill-constructed hotchpotch of stuff would be hard to imagine from the pen of one of Antiquity's best writers; and these 'Parallel Incidents' that supposedly happened once to a Greek, once to a Roman, are probably not Plutarch's at all. Theories abound."
More Moralia texts.
The Parallel Lives are complete on Ancient/Classical History at About.com, including the "Comparisons," on an easily accessible page. Perseus has text in several sections. It also has The Life of Octavius Caesar Augustus on this page. (click on "Table of Contents"). At the bottom of this Wikipedia page is another listing of the Lives texts.
