ИСТИНА

Though “tragedy” often appears in Plutarch as a synonym for deception or pomposity, tragic quotations and theatrical images in Lives play a significant role and have various functions depending on the principles of the presentation of the material: a maxim from tragedy can act as a decorative citation, the dramatic episode can be used to analogy with the episode from the biography of the hero, the narration can cause allusions to the tragedy and, finally, the structure of the biography as a whole can be subordinated to the dramatic principle and in that way tragedy becomes a mode of organizing a narrative. The poster presents an attempt to define and analyze different functions (information, decoration, estimation, analogy and allusion, plot-forming) of tragic contexts in Plutarch (not, as usual, selected biographies, but the whole corpus of Lives, what leads us to a table form as well). This subject is a part of a broader theme which is “forms of intracultural reception of tragic genre”.