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What would Plato have done?

Christopher Krebs: Plutarch’s Lives, 29 June 2017

The Age of Caesar: Five Roman Lives 
by Plutarch, translated by Pamela Mensch.
Norton, 393 pp., £28, March 2017, 978 0 393 29282 4
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... an unwieldy Tiffany-blue gift box in her gloved hands. Like numerous contemporary commentators, Plutarch of Chaeronea would have noticed that the president-elect did not wait for his wife. In the preface to his biography of Alexander the Great, he wrote that ‘a clearer insight into character is often given by a small thing or a word or a jest than by ...

See you in hell, punk

Thomas Jones: Kai su, Brutus, 6 December 2018

Brutus: The Noble Conspirator 
by Kathryn Tempest.
Yale, 314 pp., £25, October 2017, 978 0 300 18009 1
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... of Philippi tells him that he is ‘Thy evil spirit, Brutus.’ That much is straight out of Plutarch. It’s Shakespeare’s invention to have Brutus later describe the phantom, his evil spirit, as ‘the ghost of Caesar’, which he sees again at Philippi in both a literal and a figurative sense: the spirit of Caesar lives on in the victorious army of ...

What happened that night on the Acropolis?

Robert Cioffi: Hymn to Demetrius, 10 February 2022

Demetrius the Besieger 
by Pat Wheatley and Charlotte Dunn.
Oxford, 496 pp., £100, April 2020, 978 0 19 883604 9
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... nephew rather than son and his ignominious escape from a wartime assignation fill the pages of Plutarch’s biographical account, in which he pairs Demetrius with Mark Antony as examples of men whose lives, brilliantly begun, ended in disgrace. But if Demetrius lived for the show, he died in silence. Shortly after he was captured, he bequeathed his empire ...

Worrying Wives

Helen King: The Invention of Sparta, 7 August 2003

Spartan Women 
by Sarah Pomeroy.
Oxford, 198 pp., £45, July 2002, 0 19 513066 9
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... only women who give birth to men’, and best known to history from sayings attributed to them by Plutarch or, even more famously, from a mother sending her son into battle: ‘Come home with your shield, or on it.’ As Sarah Pomeroy has noted, Spartan women always had a weapon to hand since, when they wore clothes, they favoured an old-fashioned heavy ...

The First Career Politician

James Romm: Demosthenes, 20 June 2013

Demosthenes of Athens and the Fall of Classical Greece 
by Ian Worthington.
Oxford, 382 pp., £22.50, January 2012, 978 0 19 993195 8
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... techniques – analyse his career from an opponent’s perspective. Two ancient Lives, one by Plutarch, preserve portraits of Demosthenes the man, even if their free use of anecdote and rumour makes them less than fully reliable. But that isn’t all: a collection of six letters attributed to Demosthenes, four of them probably genuine, has miraculously ...

Image Problems

Peter Green: Pericles of Athens, 6 November 2014

Pericles of Athens 
by Vincent Azoulay, translated by Janet Lloyd.
Princeton, 291 pp., £24.95, July 2014, 978 0 691 15459 6
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... has been in plain view all along: Herodotus, Thucydides, Old Comedy, Protagoras, Xenophon, Plato, Plutarch’s biography and of course the remains (above all on the Acropolis) of the great civic building programme. This suggests that any interpretative changes are due more to the varying assumptions of a succession of observers than to any fundamental factual ...

Stomach-Churning

James Davidson, 23 January 1997

Hellenism and Empire: Language, Classicism and Power in the Greek World, AD 50-250 
by Simon Swain.
Oxford, 499 pp., £50, April 1996, 0 19 814772 4
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... are being rediscovered by those with an interest in narratology or sex, and the historians, Plutarch, Cassius Dio, Arrian etc, are mined for the original sources they might or might not have used, they are rarely read, as Tacitus or Thucydides are read, for themselves, and whatever of themselves they happen to bring to the subject just seems to get in ...

Orrery and Claw

Greg Woolf: Archimedes, 18 November 2010

Archimedes and the Roman Imagination 
by Mary Jaeger.
Michigan, 230 pp., £64.50, June 2010, 978 0 472 11630 0
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... Petrarch. En route we encounter the Augustan architect Vitruvius, the Greek philosopher-biographer Plutarch, the fourth-century ad astrologer Firmicus Maternus and various other witnesses. For almost none of these was the actual mathematical work of Archimedes of much interest. Archimedes has walk-on parts in various narratives of Rome’s second great war ...

Lament for Crassus

Michael Hofmann, 26 October 1989

... Who grows old in fifty pages of Plutarch: mores, omens, campaigns, Marius at sixty, fighting fit, working out on the Campus Martius? It surely isn’t me, pushing thirty, taking a life a night, my head on a bookshelf, five shelves of books overhead, the bed either a classic or remaindered? – I read about Crassus, who owned most of Rome ...

Bardicide

Gary Taylor, 9 January 1992

... narrative of bardicide. You might object that he inherited these oppositions from history. But of Plutarch’s two accounts of ‘the murder of Cinna’, only one even mentions, in passing, that the victim was ‘a poet’. Given a choice, Shakespeare chose to make Cinna a poet. He also chose to dramatise this superfluous episode. In inserting this scene and ...

Schools of History

Walter Laqueur, 26 September 1991

Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives 
by Alan Bullock.
HarperCollins, 1187 pp., £20, June 1991, 0 00 215494 3
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Stalin: Breaker of Nations 
by Robert Conquest.
Weidenfeld, 346 pp., £18.99, September 1991, 0 297 81194 0
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... level. ‘Parallel lives’ are a notoriously difficult medium, used only infrequently since Plutarch, and more suited to a long essay than a volume of almost 1200 pages. Plutarch used this form to encourage his readers to emulate the example of great men; or in a very few cases, such as Alcibiades, to deter them with ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘The Hunger Games’, 17 December 2015

... expect. Our heroes are among the six survivors, but then things go awry. The master of the games, Plutarch Heavensbee (even comic eclecticism can go too far), is secretly working for the rebels, and snatches Katniss and two other survivors to take them to join the resistance in District 13. Unfortunately, Coriolanus has managed to capture the other ...

Wilderness of Tigers

Michael Neill: Shakespeare’s Latin, 19 March 2015

Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity 
by Colin Burrow.
Oxford, 281 pp., £16.99, September 2013, 978 0 19 968479 3
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... of Greek literature seems to have been mediated through Latin and English translations, he knew Plutarch well through Sir Thomas North’s version of the Parallel Lives, and is likely to have kept up with the publication of Chapman’s Homer. Successive chapters of Burrow’s book explore Shakespeare’s engagement with Ovid, Virgil, Plautus and ...

At the Ashmolean

James Davidson: Antinouses, 7 February 2019

... means that any relationship was brief and not nearly as intimate as has previously been supposed. Plutarch refers to the Roman custom of keeping little boys called deliciae as ‘playthings’; there are the notorious cases of Tiberius’ ‘minnows’, Nero’s Sporus and Commodus’ Philocommodus, who was said to wander around the palace naked but for ...

New Man from Nowhere

James Davidson: Cicero, 4 February 2016

Dictator 
by Robert Harris.
Hutchinson, 299 pp., £20, October 2015, 978 0 09 175210 1
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... even the most fastidious student’s ability to make moral distinctions. And nearly a third of Plutarch’s Roman Lives are devoted to men who flourished in the middle decades of the first century BC, sometime(s) friends, sometime(s) rivals, but all (well-)acquainted with one another: Pompey, Crassus, Cato, Caesar, Brutus, Antony, Cicero. But above all it ...

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