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“... 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 ...”

“... scepticism and his apparent credulity about some of the implausible tales in Pliny and Plutarch. How can he, who made a motto of the question ‘Que sçais-je?’, credit the story of the Spartan boy who hid a fox under his tunic and would not reveal that it was there even though it gnawed away at his chest? Hartle argues that being willing to ...”

“... the belief ‘that every Hare is both male and female’ – the ‘affirmative of Archelaus, of Plutarch, Philostratus and many more’ – leads him on a remarkable and extended meditation on ‘Retromingency or pissing backward’: for men observing both sexes to urine backward, or aversly between their legs, they might conceive there was a feminine part ...”

“... son of the great conservative statesman Cimon, lodged a formal charge against him, which Plutarch cites verbatim. Summoned back from Sicily to stand trial, Alcibiades jumped ship en route; his case went by default, his property was seized and auctioned off, he was formally cursed by the priesthood, and condemned to death in absentia. ‘I’ll show ...”

“... pertinent treatises by Galen, we are lucky enough to have two more essays on anger control: one by Plutarch and another by the Epicurean Philodemus, recovered from the ashes of the volcano at Herculaneum, near Naples. But we know the authors and titles of numerous other works on anger which have not survived. Evidently, anger was a subject of intense ...”

“... who set up honorary inscriptions in gratitude for the shortlived liberation of their country. Plutarch, a contemporary of his and a Greek, tells a strange story about the tyrant’s soul undergoing remodelling in the Underworld in order to be sent back above ground in a new incarnation. The matricidal viper seems at first the obvious choice for his fat ...”

“... father.’ More obviously, Shakespeare makes his hero’s benefactor ‘a poor man’, though in Plutarch he is patrician. Coriolanus, to whom names are very important, finds it hard to allow them to plebeians. The chapter on Hamlet – a sketch, a promise of more to come – returns to that famous old article by W.W. Greg which argued that the reason why ...”

“... literary sources. Various writers have drawn attention to the accounts of triumphs by Appian and Plutarch, and some have also argued that he consulted a contemporary text, Valturio’s De Re Militari. But one name conspicuously absent from most of the scholarly literature is that of Flavio Biondo. It is an astounding omission, since Biondo was easily the ...”

“... were not confined to her teens but were carried on into old age, when she translated Boethius, Plutarch and Horace (see Queen Elizabeth’s Englishings, 1899). When Sir Henry Savile published in 1591 his groundbreaking translation of the histories of Tacitus, a difficult author, he congratulated Elizabeth on her own Tacitus translations, which he said were ...”

“... Scott found the monster’s learning to read and becoming acquainted ‘with Werter, with Plutarch’s Lives, and with Paradise Lost’ as improbable as if he had ‘acquired, in the same way, the problems of Euclid, or the art of book-keeping by single and double entry’. Frankenstein’s pretext is that the monster eavesdrops as Felix de Lacey ...”

“... does he refer to this obscure writer instead of his own work? Is ‘Themistogenes’ a pseudonym? Plutarch thought so, believing that Xenophon used it as a way of making his rosy account of his own actions more palatable. The long speeches which Calvino found so tedious have been seen by others as signs of persecution mania. When the troops reach Cotyora on ...”

“... of their changing situation. Common law builds on custom and precedent. Shardlake reads Pliny and Plutarch as well as Erasmus and More, and daydreams about the Knights Templar worshipping in the Temple church as he wanders among their graves. Catherine Parr likes old coins: ‘They remind us we are but specks of dust amid the ages.’ Monasteries echo with ...”

“... that cuts grandiloquence off at the knees as much by what it doesn’t say as by what it does. Plutarch found in the terseness of Spartan diplomacy plenty of ammunition for his own campaign against garrulity. When King Philip II of Macedon sought to intimidate the Spartan leadership by declaring that ‘If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out,’ their ...”

“... whose barely defeated invasion is his main subject (one reason he was labelled philobarbaros by Plutarch). He also wondered, with typical Ionian curiosity, why they fought each other, and set himself the task of finding out, in a work twice as long as Homer’s Iliad. Most of the reasons I liked Herodotus were, I soon found out, precisely those which ...”