Word: plutarch
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...hated talking in 20- second sound bites. But he was politician enough to recognize the importance of Good Morning, 13 Sovereign States. Two minutes to explain the Virginia Plan, a few banal questions, and the ordeal would be over. Madison remembered his instructions: no Locke, no Montesquieu, no Plutarch. Just simple declarative sentences, a confident smile and don't fiddle with your wig. "Jimmy, all you got to do is emote," his media consultant had told him. "Flash those baby blues at the camera, and the dollies back home will eat it right...
...love returned, and the other side of that coin, anguish of affection repulsed. So far as adult experience is concerned, to one who will bear a few of its stripes to the grave, it seems a thing to be avoided. Thomas North put it pithily in his introduction to (Plutarch's) Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans: 'Experience is the schoolmistress of fools.' North meant that those persons, individually or in association with others . . . unwilling to study history are condemned to relive its tragedies...
...instructor, who holds a master's in history from UCLA, fires questions that leave no room for faked answers: "What does Herodotus say? Plutarch? Xenophon?" demands Paul Mertens, 53. And that is just for starters. "Where do they agree and disagree?" he asks. "Why? How much of a democracy was Athens...
...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...