Word: plutarch
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...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...
...Emperor's appetite for eminence, the authors write: "History was for him, as for Carlyle, a worship and rosary of heroes, especially those who guided na tions or molded empires. He loved Plutarch even more than Euclid; he breathed the passions of those ancient patriots, he drank the blood of those his toric battles...
...where they went after they disappeared from sight. (Aristotle suggested that they were fiery "exhalations" in the atmosphere.) Whenever a comet appeared, it was taken as a sign from heaven of impending calamity: a flood, an outbreak of disease or even the fall of a king or empire. Plutarch wrote that a brilliant comet shone for seven nights in the sky over Rome after the assassination of Julius Caesar. In Shakespeare's dramatization of that event, Caesar's wife echoes the same theme: "When beggars die, there are no comets seen. The heavens themselves blaze forth the death...