Plutarch closes the paired lives of the Greek liberator Timoleon and the Roman conqueror Aemilius Paulus by weighing their victories, their honesty with captured wealth, and their very different responses to personal grief.
This short synkrisis (formal comparison) is the closing essay that Plutarch appends to his paired biographies of Timoleon of Corinth, who freed Sicily from tyranny and Carthaginian domination, and Aemilius Paulus, the Roman general who conquered Macedon by defeating King Perseus. Plutarch begins by noting that the two careers are so parallel that few real points of contrast remain: both men fought famous enemies, both won wars celebrated across the ancient world, and both ended long lines of foreign power — Aemilius by extinguishing the Antigonid succession in its seventh king, Timoleon by putting down all the tyrannies in Sicily and freeing the island.
Plutarch then works through the finer distinctions. Aemilius faced Perseus at the height of Macedonian strength, after Perseus had already beaten a Roman army, while Timoleon caught the tyrant Dionysius already exhausted and spent — but Timoleon achieved his greater feats with a scratch force of mercenaries, not with the disciplined, obedient Roman soldiers Aemilius commanded. Plutarch credits Aemilius's integrity partly to Rome's laws and civic culture, which produced disciplined, law-abiding men almost as a matter of course, whereas Timoleon, operating among Sicilian Greek commanders who were almost uniformly corrupted by power (he singles out Gylippus, Pharax, and Callippus as cautionary examples), made himself virtuous by his own unaided effort — a harder achievement. Both men refused to enrich themselves from conquered treasure, though Plutarch allows that Timoleon's acceptance of a house and estate from the grateful Syracusans was not shameful, only slightly less noble than Aemilius's total abstention. The essay ends by contrasting how each man bore adversity: Aemilius endured the deaths of his sons with the same steady dignity he showed in triumph, while Timoleon, despite acting rightly in the killing of his own tyrant brother, was so tormented by remorse that he avoided public life for twenty years — a response Plutarch judges gentle and sensitive, but short of true greatness of soul.
Comparisons like this one are the structural hinge of Plutarch's Parallel Lives, the project's real argumentative payload: each biography by itself is an exemplum, but the paired synkrisis is where Plutarch does his explicit moral philosophy, ranking virtues against each other and testing whether Greek and Roman greatness spring from the same sources. For readers of the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean, the essay is a compact record of first-century-CE elite values — incorruptibility in office, magnanimity toward defeated enemies, self-command under grief — and a reminder that ancient biography was written to train character, not merely to record deeds.
“Since the facts of the history stand thus, it is clear that the comparison does not admit of many differences or points of unlikeness.”
— Comparison Of Timoleon With Aemilius Paulus
“Since, then, both men proved themselves pure and just in their conduct of affairs, Aemilius appears to have come to his task already prepared for this by the laws and by his fatherland, whereas Timoleon made himself such by his own effort”
— Comparison Of Timoleon With Aemilius Paulus
“Yet this too is remarkable in Aemilius, that after overturning so great a kingdom he did not increase his estate by so much as a drachma, nor did he even look upon or lay hand on the money, though he gave much of it away to others”
— Comparison Of Timoleon With Aemilius Paulus
“I would not fault Timoleon for taking a handsome house and a landed estate; for it is not shameful to accept such things, but it is nobler not to accept them”
— Comparison Of Timoleon With Aemilius Paulus
“whereas Timoleon, though he acted nobly regarding his brother, could not hold out with reason against”
— Comparison Of Timoleon With Aemilius Paulus
A synkrisis is the short formal comparison Plutarch attaches after a pair of biographies, explicitly weighing the two subjects' virtues and actions against each other. This text is the synkrisis for the Timoleon-Aemilius Paulus pair, and it functions as Plutarch's summary verdict rather than a narrative of new events.
Plutarch leans toward Aemilius, chiefly because his integrity seemed second nature, produced by Roman law and upbringing, and because he bore both triumph and the death of his sons with unbroken steadiness. Timoleon is admired just as much for his achievements but is judged to fall slightly short in his prolonged, grief-stricken withdrawal from public life.
These were Greek commanders active in Sicily around Timoleon's time, and Plutarch cites them as men corrupted by greed or ambition for sole rule. Naming them lets Plutarch argue that Timoleon's honesty was exceptional precisely because almost every other Greek leader who touched Sicily in that era was compromised.
Aemilius Paulus's defeat of King Perseus of Macedon, which ended the Antigonid royal line in its seventh king, is compared to Timoleon's campaign that overthrew the tyrants of Sicily and drove back Carthaginian power, freeing the island.
Aemilius took nothing for himself from the Macedonian treasury and even avoided handling the money directly, giving much of it away instead. Timoleon accepted a house and landed estate from the grateful Syracusans, which Plutarch says was not shameful, only less exalted than total renunciation.
He uses this image to describe the ideal of a character strong enough to remain unshaken by both good fortune and hardship. He judges Aemilius closer to that ideal because his composure held steady equally through victory and through the death of his sons.
Timoleon had been responsible for the killing of his own brother, who was seeking tyranny in Corinth, and though Plutarch says he acted rightly, Timoleon was overcome by remorse and could not bring himself to appear at the speaker's platform or marketplace for two decades.
It is meant to be read as the capstone to both individual biographies, since Plutarch assumes familiarity with the events of each man's career and focuses here on evaluation rather than retelling the story.
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