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Title: Plutarchs Lives, Volume 2
Author: John Dryden (translator), Plutarch
Narrator: Bernard Mayes
Format: Unabridged
Length: 41 hrs and 11 mins
Language: English
Release date: 04-28-11
Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 50 votes
Genres: Bios & Memoirs, Political Figures
Publisher's Summary:
This book was the principal source for Shakespeares Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra. It was also one of two books Mary Shelley chose for the blind hermit to use for Frankensteins monsters education, with the other being the Bible.
Plutarchs Lives remains one of the worlds most profoundly influential literary works. Written at the beginning of the second century, it forms a brilliant social history of the ancient world. His parallel lives were originally presented in a series of books that gave an account of one Greek and one Roman life, followed by a comparison of the two. Included are Romulus and Theseus, Pompey and Agesilaus, Dion and Brutus, Alcibiades and Coriolanus, Demosthenes and Cicero, and Demetrius and Antony.
Plutarch was a moralist of the highest order. It was for the sake of others that I first commenced writing biographies, he said, but I find myself proceeding and attaching myself to it for my own; the virtues of these great men serving me as a sort of looking glass, in which I may see how to adjust and adorn my own life.
This second volume includes Alexander and Caesar, Demetrius and Antony, Dion and Marcus Brutus, the aforementioned Demosthenes and Cicero, as well as biographies of Alexander, Caesar, Cato the Younger, and others.
Critic Reviews:
Plutarch is my man. (Montaigne)
Away with your prismatics. I want a spermatic book Plato, Plotinus, and Plutarch are such. (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
Members Reviews:
Biographies to Adjust and Adorn our Lives
To be ignorant of the lives of the most celebrated men of antiquity is to continue in a state of childhood all our days
Plutarch
Vol 2., includes the following micro-biographies and comparisons*:
Sertorius v. Eumenes
Agesilaus v. Pompey
Alexander & Csar &
Phocion & Cato the Younger
Agis & Cleomenes v.
Tiberius Gracchus & Caius Gracchus
Demosthenes v. Cicero
Demetrius v. Antony
Dion v. Marcus Brutus
Aratus & Artaxerxes
Galba & Otho
Probably the best review, summary of this book was written by Plutarch himself, so why re-invent the wheel:
"It was for the sake of others that I first commenced writing biographies; but I find myself proceeding and attaching myself to it for my own; the virtues of these great men serving me as a sort of looking-glass, in which I may see how to adjust and adorn my own life. Indeed, it can be compared to nothing but daily living and associating together; we receive, as it were, in our inquiry, and entertain each successive guest, view
** Their stature and their qualities, **
and select from their actions all that is noblest and worthiest to know.
** Ah, and what greater pleasure could one have? **
or, what more effective means to ones moral improvement? Democritus tells us we ought to pray that of the phantasms appearing in the circumambient air, such may present themselves to us as are propitious, and that we may rather meet with those that are agreeable to our natures and are good, than the evil and unfortunate; which is simply introducing into philosophy a doctrine untrue in itself, and leading to endless superstitions. My method, on the contrary, is, by the study of history, and by the familiarity acquired in writing, to habituate my memory to receive and retain images of the best and worthiest characters.
