Word: plutarch
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...they carefully roll up their shirt sleeves before going through the ritual of bathing their hands in Caesar's blood, and then--in slow succession again--shaking hands with Mark Antony. (This was a wonderful idea on the author's part, and is not found in the three Plutarch biographies that provided most of Shakespeare's material. The Bard may have taken a hint from Plutarch's sketch of Publicola, which contains a reference to a band of youths who murdered a man, tasted his blood and immersed their hands in his entrails...
Pity all those readers who had to suffer through its prolonged and tedious adolescence. History's original biographer was Plutarch, who lived, appropriately, in the 1st century A.D. If the definition is stretched a little, the entire New Testament might be considered an example of the art. The first real biography in English, however, did not come until 1791, when James Boswell published his Life of Johnson, which is still the classic by which all others are judged. "Be there a thousand lives, my great curiosity has stomach for 'em all," exclaimed Boswell; his nosy exuberance sends...
...included her totally in his vast intellectual life, fully revealed for the first time. Together they read an astonishing variety of books. Shakespeare was a leitmotif of their days. One Christmastide they slogged through Tristram Shandy, finishing it with "aversion." Turgenev, Kleist, Aristophanes, Plutarch, Xenophon, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Moliere, Balzac, Cervantes: the list runs on like the Rhine...
...plausible likeness. Readers too seem less judgmental, interested less in someone's character than in his or her "life-style." That mood could change, and if it did, so would the journalism. But an interest in people won't go away: it is as old as Plutarch, and apt to survive as long as humans...
...dressed in the majesty of centuries," wrote Plutarch, having gazed on the Acropolis above Athens. "It contains a living and incorruptible breath, a spirit impervious to age." Ever since the superb temple of the Parthenon was built atop the Acropolis in the 5th century B.C., it has survived the mutations of history. Conquering Romans turned the Parthenon into a brothel; Christians made it an Orthodox church; the Turks converted it to a mosque, and then used it as a powder magazine-which exploded when hit by Venetian artillery in 1687. But nothing in the Parthenon's history has equaled...