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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... case studies of Greek mentality in the early Roman period than the closeted bibliophiles like Plutarch and Aulus Gellius who hog the limelight in modern scholarship; religious crackpots gave advance warning of the religious upheavals of the Constantinian world. Indeed, it is hard not to suspect that Lucian has a sneaking admiration for his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... such ironies at face value. In fact, Walpole clearly set himself the goal of becoming the British Plutarch: it is from this source (not Clarendon or the French 17th-century memoirists) that his blend of narrative, discursive comment and set-piece portraiture derives. So, too, the elaborate parallels and contrasts: Robert Walpole and Bolingbroke, Walpole and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the women and children all feared they might never see each other again. Half a millennium later, Plutarch imagined the shrieks, tears and embraces as they parted, and the desperate howls of the pet dogs left behind. Worst of all, they had to abandon the tombs of their ancestors to desecration and cut themselves off from their religious rituals. We do not ...”