La mirada de Plutarco: significados y funciones de su testimonio visual en las Vidas Paralelas.

On the numerous occasions in which Plutarch mentions places, monuments, objects or events in his Parallel Lives, there are few examples in which we are assured that he had seen those personally, either because he states so outright or uses formulaic expressions that indicates his experience, or because we can deduce it from his descriptions and comments. In this paper we study the value of the author's findings from his own eyewitness testimony. A key aspect is the role of the author's eye witness testimony in the discussions and in the descriptions of the nature of the characters and its relationship with other elements of the biography. The eyewitness testimony of Plutarch also has the purpose, highly important in the biographical genre, of recognising the permanent validity of the facts of the past in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]