Plutarch, a Greek writer living under the Roman Empire, wrote Parallel Lives: paired biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, looking at character as much as events. This life is Marcellus, set beside Pelopidas, a Theban general who also led from the front. The story belongs to the late third century BC, when Rome was fighting Hannibal across Italy and Sicily.

Marcus Claudius Marcellus kills a Gallic king — a leader of the peoples of what is now France and neighbors — in single combat and strips his armor, the spolia opima, a prize of personal combat Rome remembered only three times. In the war with Hannibal he is the Sword to Fabius’s Shield: he fights at Nola and spends years besieging Syracuse in Sicily. Archimedes’s engines burn and hoist the fleet; Marcellus weeps for the beautiful city but cannot stop the sack. Hannibal ambushes him near Venusia, in southern Italy, on a reconnaissance he should not have led. He loved Greek statues and died of his own courage.