The Introduction situates Plutarch in his literary context, as a vivid and original thinker and writer whose popularity remains enormous, as well as his historical context as an innovator in the writing of biography. Some authors discuss Plutarch’s role in the development of the biographical tradition and his relationship to the classical Greek past. Others examine his Roman context as a Greek living in an occupied country, and his views on politics, particularly those involving barbarians or "others." Multiple essays illuminate Plutarch’s relationship to Plato and Platonism, often in the context of his influence on education, while other essays look at Plutarch in his everyday life, investigating his thoughts on gender, sexuality, wealth, and animals. Five essays focus on reception.

In Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography, his influential work of 1997, John Marincola examined various ways in which historians used tradition to claim and bolster their own authority, identifying five specific techniques: (1) reference to ‘gods and fortune’, (2) a ‘pretence of necessity’, (3) ‘commonness of action’, (4) ‘praise in the mouth of others’, and finally (5) ‘magnification of actions’. The dust jacket of the original volume features busts of Herodotus and Thucydides, fine historians both. As a biographer, Plutarch is not in the same league, but nevertheless he appears in the index locorum a satisfying thirty-seven times thanks to Marincola’s own authoritative and expansive view of historiography. About one third of Marincola’s Plutarch citations are to the Lives, and the rest to the Moralia, with the majority from De se ipsum citra invidiam laudando (hereafter De se laudando), the work that most Plutarchan scholars consult for Plutarch’s view on self-presentation in the form of praise. In that essay, Plutarch gives us multiple situations when it is appropriate to praise oneself, and various techniques to avoid incurring ill will while doing so since self-praise is a tricky thing. Marincola sums up Plutarch’s advice in De se laudando as ‘praise the audience too (542a–b), ascribe some success to chance or god (542e–f), use slight corrections or amendments (ἐπανορθώσεσι) to others’ praise of you (543a–b), throw in some shortcomings (543f)’.