Plutarch wrote the surviving biography titled Life of Lycurgus.
Life of Lycurgus forms part of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, a collection pairing notable Greek and Roman figures or presenting individual biographies. In this work, Plutarch describes Lycurgus as the legendary lawgiver associated with Sparta and discusses institutions traditionally attributed to him.
The biography is an important source for later ideas about Spartan society, but it was written centuries after the period in which Lycurgus was supposed to have lived. Plutarch was not a contemporary witness, and modern historians treat many details in the work as traditional, idealized, or difficult to verify.
This distinction matters because ancient Sparta left no single contemporary constitutional manual that settles every question about its early institutions. Plutarch’s account strongly influenced later European views of Spartan discipline, education, and communal life, even where the historical evidence remains uncertain.