Plutarch's Lives, Volume 2

nice read about the old ages

very good

If you are into ancient Roman history this book and volume I are excellent, however, I am not into ancient Greek history and found the information confusing without some chronological reference. Apart from my pettiness everything else is fine.

I’m including the TOC because it was frustrating when comparing different publishers’ versions of Plutarch and not knowing which Lives were in which book. This doesn’t have the line/paragraph cites you often see; for reading purposes, this is better, but maybe frustrating if you’re trying to reference it to scholarship.

CONTENT: The content of Plutarch’s “Lives” is likely better summed up by a Wikipedia search, but I can take a stab at it for those not already familiar with the text.Plutarch is regarded as the first biographer, in that he didn’t precisely strive for chronological, historical accuracy in the way we moderns appreciate today, but rather, sought to offer consolidated portraits of various temperaments or characters. In the text, he yokes together a historical or mythical person of the past with a contemporary or recent public figure of his own time (e.g. Alexander The Great-Julius Caesar). This is sometimes followed by a ‘compare and contrast essay’ to better distinguish the desirable versus less desirable traits as appropriate. The text was ultimately, so popular that, in spite of being written during his life of 45-120 A.D., is one of the few texts from such a period when there are many copies of the work left behind. Further, these are all the more compelling as he has a very recent point of view, writing just after the Fall of the Roman Republic, and writes one of the more comprehensive accounts of Alexander the Great that exist, even if its reliability is somewhat questionable. One scholar notes that Plutarch was a “moralist, rather than a historian...[he wrote] to arouse the spirit of emulation.” Thus, his perspective is a consolidation of the traits a Greek assessing Romans before Christianity in the Middle Stoic Period might find to be useful toward living the good life.PRESENTATION:My ultimate problem with this text is that the paper is trash. Literally, it’s ‘recycled paper’. This wouldn’t be the end of the world if it were a Harry Potter book, but a text such as this, I can’t get into without rolling up my sleeves, taking out my color-coded needle point/fountain pens and highlighters, and proceeding to annotate and cross-reference so as to recall what I read and keep the historical dates and people fresh at hand. If you are blessed to not require this level of tactile stimulation, godspeed, this is the text for you. It even has been compressed into two volumes. However, the margins on the edge of the page are only 1/2 inch in width, and when I tried to white-out a mistake, it literally WENT THROUGH TWO SHEETS OF PAPER; FOUR PAGES! Further, there are no ‘Becker numbers’ to link to the lines of the original manuscript (standard for most Classics).