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“... of the First World War, he would have used a terminology which would have been recognisable to Plutarch. Today the clever 12-year-old is not only unlikely to be able to give examples of synecdoche and aposiopesis, he will not even know the battles in the Wars of the Roses: but the effect of the decline in population upon land tenure and the wool trade, or ...”

“... peroration.’ Classical Utopianism is relegated to the mythological exordium. Plato and Plutarch make their appearance, then, in distinctly odd company and not in a manner which makes quite perspicuous the degree to which they set the intellectual pattern of so many subsequent Utopias. ‘The birth of Utopia’ is delayed until the Renaissance and ...”

“... a biography of Parry. She never did – instead, as Pamela Mensch, she has translated Herodotus, Plutarch and others – but the interview proved ‘invaluable’ to Kanigel.Parry’s work was continued by Lord, who returned to Yugoslavia after the Second World War, managing to track down Avdo Međedović and record him again. In 1960, he published The ...”

“... it is rather like those ‘symbolic’ stories about rulers that were collected by Tacitus and Plutarch – that one day Hrabal overheard Kolar, who was selling dolls at the time, being asked: ‘Kolar, do you have another death?’ The question referred, apparently, to a marionette of the Grim Reaper, popular in Prague, but to Hrabal’s ears, it ...”

“... Thomas More’s non-Christian Utopians place sexual relief with scratching an itch and excreting. Plutarch says that Diogenes used to masturbate in public to show how philosophical he was; he explained that, rightly viewed, the action was no more significant than scratching a mosquito bite. Porter gets back as far as Hugh of St Victor, in the 12th ...”

“... Roman times a theatre was built so that tourists could watch the event. Among those who came was Plutarch; he claims to have seen boys flogged to death. This particular Artemis was so bloodthirsty because she came from the region of Odessa (the ‘Taurians’), where she had grown accustomed to human sacrifice. But her priestess Iphigeneia had stolen the ...”

“... his political ambitions but with his reading. He thought with and through his favourite writers: Plutarch, Seneca, Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, Catullus, Cicero, Plato, Aristotle. The Essays are woven through with quotations, around which Montaigne meditates. Sometimes a single passage will prompt a lengthy reflection; sometimes Montaigne collects quotations ...”

“... because it deflected popular anger away from him.What we do know from Thucydides, Aristotle and Plutarch is that Pericles had instituted strict racial criteria for Athenian citizenship: every citizen had to have two Athens-born parents, which caused trouble for his own immigrant second wife. He had achieved power by having his rivals ostracised, with a ...”

“... to the passage of the New Laws which gave the Indians some nugatory protection. In ancient Athens, Plutarch tells us, there were furious attacks on Pericles in the Assembly over the tributes extorted from the island colonies, which were supposed to pay for ships to protect them from the Persians but were instead lavished on the Parthenon (and piled up inside ...”

“... landowner. Her father was Henry, Lord Morley, the scholarly translator of Petrarch and Plutarch. David Starkey begins an essay on Lord Morley by wondering whether we should class him like Prufrock as an ‘attendant lord’: ‘one that will do/To swell a progress, start a scene or two,/Advise the prince.’ Lord Morley never did become a royal ...”

“... as is the opinion of the Egyptians, and the Platonists, and especially approved by Proclus. Plutarch also doth affirm ...’ This is the English version of 1651, by J.F. (Chapter 19). Augustine says that he does not believe angels have no matter, but allows them an airy matter. Psellus thought that the nature of spirits is not without a body, but that ...”

“... its safety depended. The yoke-pair exchanged vows at the tomb of Hercules’ boyfriend, Iolaus. Plutarch adds the information that a Theban erastes gave his boyfriend arms when he entered the ranks of men. It would not be completely astonishing to discover that the equipment donated by the erastes carried his own insignia, which would make the composition ...”

“... his name and lineage’.1 Motherhood was part of the public stage in another sense. According to Plutarch, the only exceptions to the rule against naming the dead on Sparta’s tombstones were men who fell in battle and women who died in childbirth: the woman, the producer of the future citizens of the city state, bore childbirth ‘just as the warrior bears ...”

“... fundamental obstacles – familiar to life-writers everywhere since the days of Suetonius and Plutarch – prompt in Malcolm a kind of epistemological distress. ‘The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,’ she says at one point; ‘Almost everything we know we know incompletely at best.’ In turn, her literary sophistication ...”

“... with Sister Wendy, then a television art historian, on the subject of this painting. According to Plutarch, Phocion’s wife gathered the ashes to her breast; according to Sister Wendy, she mixed them with water and ate them. Either way, for Gillian the act was one of good-enough love and ‘a finite act of political justice’: ‘In these delegitimate acts ...”