Plutarch, a Greek biographer writing in the early Roman Empire, made Parallel Lives by pairing a Greek and a Roman to show character, virtue, and vice. This life is Lucius Aemilius Paullus, a Roman of the second century BC, set against the last Macedonian kings in what is now northern Greece. Plutarch pairs him with Timoleon, another man who won a war without the usual hunger for more.

Aemilius ends the Macedonian kingdom at Pydna, in northern Greece. The phalanx — a hedge of long pikes that had won Alexander his empire — slips on broken ground, and King Perseus flees. Gold from Pella, the old Macedonian capital, fills Rome's treasury so full that the citizens' war-tax is cancelled. Around his triumph he loses two sons, one before the procession and one after, and tells the people that fortune had spent her envy on his house, not on the city. The spoils were public; the grief was his.