Plutarch, as is well known, is a prolific author of ancient Greek literature. He was born and spent his life in Chaeronea, Boeotia (46-119 AD), however, during his lifetime, he traveled extensively; he went to Athens, Rome (many times), Sparta, Corinth, Patras, the Asian city of Sardis, and the Egyptian Alexandria.

His spiritual experiences shaped a multi-volume corpus (over two hundred books), consisting of material borrowed from earlier works of our literature, unfortunately no longer extant today, and original studies on various topics of social life. The latter have been included in that part of his work which has been established under the title 'Ethics'. There are more than sixty essays on ethical, natural, religious, political, literary, and philosophical themes.

A distinctive feature of his work is selectivism, meaning he gathers borrowed elements from philosophical theories that preceded him: Platonic, Aristotelian, Pythagorean, Stoic. Nevertheless, Plutarch is better known for his famous 'Parallel Lives', in which he parallels the historical data of two noteworthy figures (usually one Greek and one Roman, less frequently two Greeks or two Romans, in one case a Greek and a Persian, and in a dozen cases, there is no parallelism, but portraits of Romans are provided).

These figures are politicians, lawmakers, orators, and military leaders. Among this vast array of biographies of various historical figures, there are also two pairs of mythical figures, one of Theseus and Romulus (which is the focus of this volume) and one of Lycurgus and Numa.