“... ancient. There was a pre-Christian Mesopotamian and Iranian tradition of propitiating malign gods. Plutarch tells us of dark sacrifices offered by Iranians in the first century to Angra Mainyu, the Zoroastrian equivalent of Satan. (Such sacrifices were usually creatures of the night, such as bats or wolves.) A Christian writer at the end of the seventh century ...”

“... the Aeneid in the storm scene in Book IV. They may even have realised how often Rabelais draws on Plutarch, notably The Decline of Oracles. But few of us will have realised that the famous episode of the ‘thawing words’ (Fourth Book, Chapters 55-6) is not just a parodied traveller’s tale, Munchhausen-style, but also a reference to a Classical debate on ...”

“... Shakespeare makes his mother, Volumnia, a much more formidable and important figure than she is in Plutarch. ‘She is a far subtler portrait than Lady Macbeth, of a woman who has absorbed the dominant values of her culture, and upholds them fiercely.’ Not more subtle, for Macbeth is not about culture values. But Coriolanus certainly is. As Dr French ...”

“... reads the Odyssey; at Ephesus he notes, ‘I’m thinking of Homer’; at Thermopylae he whips out Plutarch on Leonidas, and so on. But consider also what happens when all this eventually passes into one of his own fictions, L’Education sentimentale: Il voyagea. Il connut la mélancolie des paquebots, les froids réveils sous les tentes, l’étourdissement ...”

“... at keeping up with the news, would rather stay at home at his writing desk with a good book by Plutarch or Holinshed open in front of him and a pen in his hand. Studious, likeable, observant, fluent and very much of his time, this latest version of Shakespeare bears, as ever, more than a passing resemblance to his latest biographer. It is when one comes to ...”

“... from them a biography of Hannibal or Scipio is another question. As to their parallel lives, Plutarch, who invented the genre, paired Scipio Africanus with the Theban general Epaminondas, not with Hannibal (who didn’t fit Plutarch’s schema, being neither Greek nor Roman). The parallels between Hannibal and Scipio ...”

“... account of the national history: ‘Though none in this land have yet done as did among the Greeks Plutarch and among the Latins Boccaccio ... that is to say, left behind them catalogues or nomenclatures of famous and honorable women, yet hath it not at any time been barren of them. No, not in the days of most popish darkness as appeareth by Eleanor ...”

“... word, and it has been pointed out that Greville seems to have been remembering a passage in Plutarch’s Life of Alexander.’ I would agree that the story is a bit unpleasant, because it is aggressively holy: many a trooper would resent having gratitude and admiration dragged out of him at such a time. The OK thing would be to drink some of the cup ...”

“... of voluptuous cunning, and posterity has followed suit. Shakespeare struggled to improve on Plutarch, Taylor and Burton on Shakespeare, and each generation has got the Cleopatra it wanted. Most recently, Lyndsey Marshal’s drugged-up sexual acrobat – a footballer’s Wag version in the BBC Rome series – has lured thousands of priapic adolescents ...”

“... may anyway not have meant to do more than frighten Socrates out of the city. According to Plutarch, many Athenians were ready to ostracise Aristides because they were fed up with hearing him called ‘Aristides the Just’: it’s not unlikely that his accusers just wanted Socrates to go away, and were tough-minded enough not to care very much if he ...”

“... knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career. What happens is a ...”

“... of responsiveness and not mere quantity (‘Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum,’ T.S. Eliot said). In the end it comes down to the intelligence of the writer, her sensitivity to difference (difference is almost the master-theme of Munro’s work) and the strength of the writing ...”

“... credit where it seems to be due. Very little credit indeed is due to the Graeco-Roman tradition. Plutarch may have spoken out against animal abuse – ‘We should not use living creatures like old shoes or pots and pans and throw them away when they are worn out or broken with service’ – but for the Romans, cruelty was an art form. The circus apparently ...”

“... Cato comes down in the tradition as a hero, but not without a bump or two: the account in Plutarch has him rather bungling his death, stabbing himself too shallowly and knocking over an abacus; in a fit of bad temper the previous night, he hit a slave. Seneca’s highminded account in his epistles has none of this. Later readers, too, did not always ...”

“... insolent composure’ the poet felt the genius of four separate artists, the ‘finger-touch of Plutarch and Aeschylus and Michelangelo, assisted by Rabelais’: there was ‘something farcical about the scene, such as Shakespeare put in his blackest tragedies’. Always intensely literary in his responses – he never forgot how Junius Booth, the father of ...”