Posts

Showing posts from April, 2010

Moral lessons from historical figures: Plutarch's Lives

Image
While I've got Rome on my mind, I've begun dipping into some of the biographies of ancient Romans (and Greeks) written by Plutarch, who is credited with being the author of the literary genre we know as "biography." The most famous of these are Plutarch's "parallel lives," in which he pairs off a Greek and a Roman figure who share some significant biographical features (e.g., Demosthenes and Cicero were each renowned orators), describes the life of each, and then compares the points on which each should or should not be admired (Demosthenes was more mercenary than Cicero, but Cicero engaged in unseemly boasting about his own abilities and accomplishments). I've got two different editions of Plutarch on hand to choose from: one is the Penguin Classics' Fall of the Roman Republic , a selection of Plutarch's Roman biographies that highlights figures who played a key role in the collapse of the Roman Republic (Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pom