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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... than naturalistic) approach to the human form.Phidias worked mainly in Athens, and, as Plutarch tells us, between 447 and 438 on the new temple of Athena on the Acropolis. The Parthenon was not the largest Greek temple but it was one of the most refined and certainly the most ornamented. Its two pediments were crowded with sculptures, 92 metopes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”