Plutarch wrote Parallel Lives, paired biographies of Greeks and Romans that weigh character, virtue, and vice. This is the life of Philopoemen of Megalopolis, a city in the Peloponnese of southern Greece.

Philopoemen trained the Achaean League, a federation of Peloponnesian cities trying to stay free in a world of kings, to fight like Macedonians. Plutarch calls him the last of the Greeks, as if the line of commanders ended in this stubborn cavalryman. He beat the Spartans, unmade the tyrant Nabis, and kept trying to make Greece able to use the freedom Rome had begun to announce. The Roman Flamininus had already brought that liberation. Captured at Messene, Philopoemen was given poison in a cell. Greece buried its last captain and kept the funeral.