Parallel Lives

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Part one of Volume two of Plutarch's Parallel Lives.

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Volume two of Plutarch's Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, translated by Bernadotte Perrin.

Themistocles, Part one.

In the case of Themistocles, his family was too obscure to further his reputation.

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Part 1 of Volume 3 of Plutarch's Parallel Lives.

This is a LibriVox recording.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Volume 1 of Plutarch's Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, translated by Bernadotte Perrin.

Pericles, Part 1 On seeing certain wealthy foreigners in Rome carrying puppies and young monkeys about in their bosoms and fondling them, Caesar asked, We are told, if the women in their country did not bear children, thus in right princely fashion rebuking those who squander on animals that proneness to love and loving affection which is ours by nature, and which is due only to our fellow men.

Since, then, our souls are by nature possessed of great fondness for learning and fondness for seeing, it is surely reasonable to kid those who abuse this fondness on objects all unworthy either of their eyes or ears, to the neglect of those which are good and serviceable.

In addition to this, he dispatched a thousand settlers into the Chersonesus, and five hundred to Naxos, and to Andros half that number, and a thousand to Thrace to settle with the Bisaltae, and others to Italy, when the site of Sybaris was settled, which they named Thurii.

Luckily, the unconscious purveyor of literature was a person of taste.

He brought travel books, a few plays, Plutarch's Lives, which Marie simply adored.

Thus, she also came to know Telemach, the famous book by Fénelon, which fifty years before this time offered so clear a criticism of the extravagant reign of Louis XIV that the author was publicly disgraced.

Despite the youth of the reader, the book conveyed to her the significant fact that a wise man had dared to criticize a ruling king, and without a doubt it proved a seed which was later to bring forth fruit.

...

the biggest kind of, uh, work is Plutarch's Lives.

Um, and Plutarch, very famous historian, um, court gossip is like I, what I like to think about him.

[laughs]

As a result, no other books from classical literature have come down through the ages to us with so great an influence upon the lives of the leading men of the world.

Who can recount the innumerable biographies that began thus? In his youth, our subject had for his constant reading Plutarch's Lives, et cetera.

Emerson must have had in mind this silent, irresistible force that shaped the lives of the great men of these twenty centuries when he declared, "All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons." Plutarch lived in the time of St.

Paul and wrote of the early Greeks and Romans.