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“... importance in it’. Or when I try to make sense of his claim that since, according to Plutarch, Antony took lessons in the art of rhetoric, and since masters of rhetoric usually came from Asiatic Greece, his reference to Octavius Caesar as ‘my countryman’ in Act Four, Scene 15 must be ‘particularly poignant’. Whatever point Bayley is ...”

“... with a beard 13½ inches long; the nine-year-old child prodigy Philippa Duke Schuyler, who reads Plutarch, plays poker, and has composed more than sixty pieces for the piano; and Commodore Dutch, ‘a brassy little man who has made a living for the last forty years by giving an annual ball for the benefit of himself’. And the book introduces Joe Gould, the ...”

“... these has been preserved; but they certainly lie behind the surviving second-century biography by Plutarch (which includes a long list of some very unfunny ‘jokes’). Modern authors have taken up the challenge, with a rate recently, in English alone, of about one new biography every five years; each new attempt claiming some fresh angle, some plausible ...”

“... it appears, if the text was his, follows North’s translation of a French translation of Plutarch. One would have thought that his ‘small Latin’ would have sufficed to warn him. Here, surely, is a case where for everyone’s, including Shakespeare’s, advantage, it is wiser to follow the usual practice of correction. ‘Corioles’ sounds ...”

“... his attempt to act like a doctor and keep the city on a strict and moderate regime.’ So writes Plutarch, in his biography of Dion, describing a moment in the turbulent politics of Syracuse in the 350s BC, when the tyrant Dionysius II had lost control, and the opposition at once divided between Dion, the friend and pupil of Plato, and those who sought the ...”

“... to find himself no more inspired than usual.’ But laurel, or its fumes, work for the Pythia. Plutarch records that her responses were unpredictably various, that sometimes things went wrong; she might, instead of prophesying, scream, collapse or run away, causing terror among the onlookers. His remarks are remembered in this book. Lacking any convincing ...”

“... they undermine the ideal of Alexander as an enlightened man, a ‘philosopher in arms’, as Plutarch called him. The texts that constitute the legend, as seen in the selection at the BL, prefer quieter, more personal episodes to large-scale violence: the young Alexander’s taming of the horse Bucephalas; his education under Aristotle; his devotion to ...”

“... there is. In Shakespeare’s principal source for Antony and Cleopatra, North’s translation of Plutarch, marginal glosses are provided to assist the reader. At this point we read: ‘Cleopatra finely deceiveth Octavius Caesar, as though she desired to live.’ If we are willing to follow this cue, we instantly discover a more coherent reading: Cleopatra ...”

“... Gaye, an anonymous serial-killer – starting appropriately with a bouncy account of reading Plutarch; the second a series of places, people and moments in the poet’s own life; the third a Mexican (and I think in one case Nicaraguan) travel journal. There is an elusiveness of reference in these poems which makes some of them hard to read, more puzzles ...”

“... the front man in many of Gellius’s essays, friend and enemy of emperors, competing with Plutarch in the volume of his literary output. It’s a curious irony that the work of these grandees survives only in fragments. The modest excerptor, brief and improving, came through the devastations of the Middle Ages almost complete, to enjoy a boom at the ...”

“... Gore, a vast and laborious book he did not enjoy writing. Robert Lowell called it the American Plutarch, which is ingenious but wrong. Patriotic Gore is probably, from the point of view of British readers, over-represented in Dabney’s selection, though it could be argued that the long pieces on Ulysses S. Grant and Justice Holmes are central to ...”

“... of Latin and German and the duties of an individual and citizen.’ His favourite author was Plutarch, though he enjoyed Socrates and Plato as well, and devised a game to play with his friends called ‘Heroes and Orators’. With tastes like these, his future seemed guaranteed. ‘From my very first steps in school,’ he writes, ‘I wanted more than ...”

“... the Golden Mean. The result is a comic sermon of extraordinary power. Rabelais could read Homer, Plutarch, Ovid, Genesis, the Psalms or the Gospels through the eyes of Lucian and then spin round on his toe and present them to us in a more straightforward way. But not even Lucian shared Rabelais’s keen awareness of the comedy inherent in the human ...”

“... water or Anaximenes’ aer were. In a text by an even later philosopher (previously attributed to Plutarch), there’s a description of Anaximander’s universe: unlike Thales’ Earth, which floats on water, Anaximander’s Earth floats on nothing at all. It is poised at the centre of the cosmos, ‘equidistant from everything’. The Earth itself is a ...”

“... Many debates took the form of bracing dichotomies (there’s a short speech attributed to Plutarch on ‘whether fire or water is more useful’ which unfortunately breaks off before reaching a conclusion). Singer includes another, much longer text, Health, which is a loosely structured compendium of Galen’s theories and advice on all aspects of ...”