The problem with real people is that they’re not characters in stories.
—Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon, "Hearst didn't have a sled called Rosebud"
In this book I will write the biographies of King Alexander and of Caesar...Now, given the number of their exploits available to me, the only preamble I shall make is to beg the reader not to complain if I fail to relate all of them or to deal exhaustively with a particularly famous one, but to keep my account brief. I am not writing history but biography, and the most outstanding exploits do not always have the property of revealing the goodness or badness of the agent; often, in fact, a casual action, the odd phrase, or a jest reveals character better than the battles...just as a painter reproduces his subject's likeness by concentrating on the face and the expression of the eyes, by means of which character is revealed, and pays hardly any attention to the rest of the body, I must be allowed to devote more time to those aspects which indicate a person's mind and to use these to portray the life of each of my subjects, while leaving their major exploits and battles to others.
— Plutarch, Parallel Lives: Life of Alexander, proving that the problem of reconciling biography with history is Older Than Feudalism and common in all mediums (fiction, non-fiction, literature, film).
