Word: plutarch
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Abraham Lincoln once made a list of the books that had influenced him. Mostly he went for the heavy hitters--Plutarch, the Bible, The Pilgrim's Progress--but one of his choices sticks out for its total obscurity: James Riley's An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce, a memoir by a luckless sea captain who was shipwrecked on the Saharan coast of Africa, where unspeakably horrible things happened to him. Dean King, the author of a biography of Patrick O'Brian (of Master and Commander fame), stumbled on a copy of Riley's memoir...
...world gets nostalgic for great men. Plutarch felt similarly wistful around A.D. 100, when he wrote his wonderful Parallel Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans--shrewd side-by-side comparative biographies of dozens of bygone political characters: Demosthenes and Cicero, for example, Caesar and Alexander...
...Everything we know about Cleopatra comes from later Roman writers," including Plutarch, says Higgs, "and it's nearly all negative." That "prudish and snobbish" Romans would see Egypt's queen as a barbarian and a seductress is unsurprising, he adds, given that "she had taken away from them both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony." Still, says Higgs, even Cleopatra's critics acknowledged that she had some admirable qualities. Apart from her beauty, she is said to have been a humorous and charming conversationalist. Intelligent and savvy, she was a skilled diplomat who spoke several languages-and was clearly loved...
...Alexander Helios is believed to be represented, in a bronze statuette, as the Prince of Armenia. According to Plutarch's writings, Mark Antony gave his sons by Cleopatra the title of kings, bestowing Armenia, Media and the Parthian Empire on Alexander and Phoenicia, Syria and Cilicia on his younger brother Ptolemy Philadelphus. After the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, their three children were made to live out their lives in obscurity. Half-brother Caesarion was not so fortunate. He was executed by Octavian...
...black n-----" idea a hundred times over the years. It was not convincing when I was a kid, in the days before the Brown decision. Coming, the other day on Fox Television, from Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, the only ex-Klansman who plays the fiddle and reads Plutarch both, it seemed a period piece brought down from the attic, to the surprise and confusion of those gathered in the parlor - an item of yesteryear's genteel insincerity with the mildew of viciousness still...