"Plutarch" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mysteriously penetrates through both, and communicates itself with the speed of an arrow.' [Lodestone was probably known in China before the Christian era.] Other electrical effects were also observed by the ancients. Classical writers, as Homer, Caesar, and Plutarch, speak of flames on the points of javelins and the tips of masts. They regarded them as manifestations of the Deity, as did the soldiers of the Mahdi lately in the Soudan. It is recorded of Servius Tullus, the sixth king of Rome, that his hair emitted sparks on being combed; and that sparks ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... about a great many other things, and who acted on his knowledge in a variety of swift and surprising ways. As with this hero, so with others, till Peggy came to look forward, actually, to the history hour; which shows what a teacher can do when she understands her girls, and knows enough to call Plutarch and his peers (if any!) to aid ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... know of none superior to that paid to Menander by the great Byzantian grammarian Aristophanes, who, on reading his comedies exclaimed in an ecstasy, "O MENANDER! O NATURE! WHICH OF YOU HAVE COPIED THE WORKS OF THE OTHER?" Ovid held him in no less admiration; and Plutarch has been lavish in his praise: the old rhetoricians recommend his works as the true and perfect patterns of every thing beautiful and graceful in public speaking. Quintilian advises an orator to seek in Menander for copiousness of invention, for elegance of expression, and all that universal ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... composition and division, and verge to matter. But ideas are perfect, simple, immaterial, and impartible natures. And what wonder is there, says Syrianus, if we should separate things which are so much distant from each other? Since neither do we imitate in this particular Plutarch, Atticus, and Democritus, who, because universal reasons perpetually subsist in the essence of the soul, were of opinion that these reasons are ideas: for though they separate them from the universal ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor
... seems to be an error here made either by Dio or by some scribe in the course of the ages. For, according to many reliable authorities (Plutarch, Life of Brutus, chapter 21; Appian, Civil Wars, Book Three, chapter 23; Cicero, Philippics, II, 13, 31, and X, 3, 7; id., Letters to Atticus, Book Fifteen, letters 11 and 12), it was Brutus and not Cassius who was praetor urbanus and had the games given ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. III • Cassius Dio
... was the one man whom, living and dead, Caesar evidently dreaded. The Dictator even assailed his memory in a brace of pamphlets entitled Anti-Cato, of the quality of which we have one or two specimens, in Plutarch, from which we should infer that they were scurrilous and slanderous to the last degree; a proof that even Caesar could feel fear, and that in Caesar, too, fear was mean. Dr Mommsen throws himself heartily into Caesar's ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... more accurate narrative of Polybius, a considerable mass of information on this subject maybe found; while a clear light has been thrown on many parts of their latter history by the narrative of Appian, the Lives of Plutarch, and, above all, by the Commentaries of Caesar. But all this information, scattered over a multiplicity of authors, could give us no conception of their history as a people. An author was still wanting to collect all these together, so as to present us with something ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... in need of such reflections to comfort us for the loss of some illustrious characters, which in our eyes might have seemed the most worthy of the heavenly present. The names of Seneca, of the elder and the younger Pliny, of Tacitus, of Plutarch, of Galen, of the slave Epictetus, and of the emperor Marcus Antoninus, adorn the age in which they flourished, and exalt the dignity of human nature. They filled with glory their respective stations, either in active or contemplative life; their excellent ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... of age I left all the wild ones and betook myself to read the better sort of them, which, though they were not probable, yet carried no seeming impossibility in the picturing." By the time Flamsteed was fifteen years old he had embarked in still more serious work, for he had read Plutarch's "Lives," Tacitus' "Roman History," and many other books of a similar description. In 1661 he became ill with some serious rheumatic affection, which obliged him to be withdrawn from school. It was then for the first time that he received the rudiments of a scientific education. He had, ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... pedant and the self-conceit of a lout can be carried.[1126] In their memoirs and even down to their epitaphs, Barbaroux, Buzot, Petion, Roland, and Madame Roland[1127] give themselves certificates of virtue and, if we could take their word for it, they would pass for Plutarch's model characters.—This infatuation, from the Girondins to the Montagnards, continues to grow. St. Just, at the age of twenty-four, and merely a private individual, is already consumed with suppressed ambition. ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... ourselves, none more striking than our respective ideas of friendship. Grecian friendship was indeed so ethereal, that it is difficult to define its essential qualities. They must be sought rather in the pages of Plato, or the moral essays of Plutarch perhaps, and in some other books not quite as well known, but not less interesting and curious. As for modern friendship, it will be found in clubs. It is violent at a house dinner, fervent in a cigar shop, full of devotion at a cricket or a pigeon-match, or in the gathering of ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... Plutarch compares the soul's mortal experience with that of the initiate in the Mysteries. "There are wanderings, darkness, fear, trembling, shuddering, horror, then a marvellous light: pure places and meadows, dances, songs, and holy ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... patriotic purposes was no novelty. Plutarch, in his "Life of Lycurgus," says that "Thales was famed for his wisdom and his political abilities; he was withal a lyric poet who, under cover of exercising his art, performed as great things as the most excellent lawgivers. For his odes were so many persuasions to obedience and unanimity, ...
— A Popular History of the Art of Music - From the Earliest Times Until the Present • W. S. B. Mathews
... give weight to their opinions, that the generality of the French who have read a little are mere pedants, nearly unacquainted with modern nations, their commercial and political relation, their internal laws, characters, or manners. Their studies are chiefly confined to Rollin and Plutarch, the deistical works of Voltaire, and the visionary politics of Jean Jaques. Hence they amuse their hearers with allusions to Caesar and Lycurgus, the Rubicon, and Thermopylae. Hence they pretend to be too enlightened for belief, and despise all governments not founded ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... Fathers, praised heretics, when they deserved it, and occasionally even commended the Popes. It was extremely popular, though all were not pleased with its liberal spirit. A Comparative Biography of Asiatic and Indian Heroes, after Plutarch's style; A short Historical Account of his Native Town; The Narrative of Niels Klim; His Autobiography; and a History of the Jewish Nation, digested from the works of Josephus, Prideaux, and Basnage, close the list of ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... of fear upon the mother's mind are illustrated by Plutarch, who, in his Life of Publicola, mentions that, 'at a time when a superstitious fear overran the city of Rome, all the women then pregnant brought forth imperfect children, and were prematurely delivered.' But we have already ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... sympathy, good understanding and responsiveness between the brain and the digestive apparatus are so close and intimate that the physician must take into consideration the inter-relationship of these organs before deciding which one is reporting reflex nervous symptoms, and which direct symptoms. Plutarch says in one of his essays: "Should the body sue the mind before a court judicature for damages, it would be found that the mind had been a ruinous tenant to its landlord." The digestive apparatus is, or should be, a farm for the mind, ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... with an army in which a little before there was neither discipline, courage, nor sense of honour! Ancient history has no exploit superior to it; and it will ennoble the modern whenever a Livy or a Plutarch shall arise to do justice to it, and set the hero who performed it in a ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... cities, Rome in the days of her freedom, and while she was still fighting for the mastery, preserved a system of political education, both in the hearth and the Senate, which was suited to her character. Cato, the Censor, according to Plutarch, 'wrote histories for his son, with his own hand, in large characters; so that without leaving his father's house he might gain a knowledge of the illustrious actions of the ancient Romans and the customs of his country': and what is of importance to ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... in the rest of the world up and down, to wit, from the bottom of the cellar to the great chamber. A melancholy man would find here matter to work upon, to see heads as brittle as glasses, and often broken; men come hither to quarrel, and come hither to be made friends: and if Plutarch will lend me his simile, it is even Telephus's sword that makes wounds and cures them. It is the common consumption of the afternoon, and the murderer or maker-away of a rainy day. It is the torrid zone that scorches the[25] ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... the mind expands with the horizon, and becomes broad as the blue heaven above us. With Homer, we breathe the fresh air of the pristine world, when the light of poetry gilded every mountain top, and peopled the earth with heroes and demigods. With Plutarch, we walk in company with sages, warriors, and statesmen, and kindle with admiration of their virtues, or are roused to indignation at their crimes. With Sophocles, we sound the depths of human passion, and learn the sublime lesson of endurance. We are charmed with an ode of ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... mainly from Erman, op. cit., pp. 267-9, but with certain alterations which I shall mention later. In another version of the legend wine replaces the beer and is made out of "the blood of those who formerly fought against the gods," cf. Plutarch, De Iside ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... the homes of these men and women have not been equaled since Plutarch wrote his forty-six parallel lives of the Greeks and Romans. And these were given to the world before the first rosy dawn of modern civilization had risen to the horizon. Without dwelling upon their achievements, Plutarch, with a trifling incident, a simple ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... Lady and Sir James Mackintosh. Aspasia and Pericles. Portia and Brutus. Arria and Pertus. Paulina and Seneca. Calpurnia and Pliny. Timoxena and Plutarch. Castara and Habington. Faustina and Zappi. Jeanne and Roland. Caroline and Herder. Lucy and John Hutchinson. Sarah and John Austin. Elizabeth and Robert Browning. Leopold Schefer and his Wife. John Stuart Mill and his Wife. Lady and Lord William Russell. Artemisia ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... of Plutarch's heroes, if I mistake not,[II-E] dreamed once upon a night, that the figure of Proserpina, whom he had long worshipped, visited his slumbers with an angry and vindictive countenance, and menaced him with vengeance, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... they studied the laws of travel, the more they knew about commerce, the greater their power as salesmen. His journal about this time shows, "Expense five shillings for Benjamin Franklin's 'Essays,'" and the same for "'Plutarch's Lives.'" And from these books he read aloud at ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... Plutarch says, in the Life of Theseus, that at Megara, an ancient town of Greece, the tombstones, under which the bodies of the Amazons lay, were shaped after that form, which some conjecture to be the cause why ladies have their ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... Pascal Paul, St. Pericles Philips the Fair Philo Pico della Mirandola Plato Pliny the Younger Plotinus Plutarch Poincare, Henri Polemo Polystratus Pomponazzo Porphyry Prodicus Protagoras ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... Harvard Register" was published by students and recent graduates. Three articles were contributed by him to this periodical. Two of them have the titles "Conversation," "Friendship." His quotations are from Horace and Juvenal, Plato, Plutarch, Bacon, Jeremy Taylor, Shakespeare, and Scott. There are passages in these Essays which remind one strongly of his brother, the Lecturer of twenty-five or thirty years later. Take this ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... another letter he happens to tell his man of business that shops (tabernae) belonging to him were tumbling down and unoccupied. It is more than likely that many of the insulae were badly built by speculators, and liable to collapse. The following passage from Plutarch's Life of Crassus suggests this, though, if Plutarch is right, Crassus did not build himself, but let or sold his sites and builders to others: "Observing (in Sulla's time) the accidents that were familiar ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... temple, for adorning the altars and sweeping the pavement, was supplied by a tree near the fountain of Castalia; but upon all important occasions, they sent to Tempe for their laurel. We find, in Pausanias; that this valley supplied the branches, of which the temple was originally constructed; and Plutarch says, in his Dialogue on Music, "The youth who brings the Tempic laurel to Delphi is always attended by a ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Plutarch tells us that Flora, the mistress of Cn. Pompey, used to say in commendation of her lover, that she could never quit his arms ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... into the groups of history, tragedy, and comedy, so his chief sources are three in number: biography, as found in the Chronicle of Holinshed and Plutarch's Lives; romance, as found in the novels of the period, which were most of them translations from Italian novelle; and dramatic material ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... he answered simply. "I wish I could. But that feller there," he pointed to a volume of Plutarch, "wrote that Cato said the soul of a lover lives in the body of ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... was a noble and matchless gentleman, and it may be said justly of him, without these hyperboles of faction, as it was of Cato Uticensis, that he seemed to be born only to that which he went about, VIR SATILIS INGENII, as Plutarch saith it; but to speak more of him were to make ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... school he was much engaged just now with the history of Rome, and it was his greatest delight to tell the listeners at home the glorious stories which were his latest acquisitions. All to-day he had been reading Plutarch. The enthusiasm with which he spoke of these old heroes and their deeds went beyond mere boyish admiration of valour and delight in bloodshed; he seemed to be strongly sensible of the real features of greatness in these men's lives, and invested ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... [44] Plutarch, in his Life of Marius, describes somewhat differently the arms and equipage of the Cimbri. "They wore (says he) helmets representing the heads of wild beasts, and other unusual figures, and crowned with a winged crest, to make them appear taller. They were covered with iron coats ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... Ireland by foreign writers are, as might be expected, of a contradictory character. Plutarch affirms that Calypso was "an island five days' sail to the west of Britain," which, at least, indicates his knowledge of the existence of Erinn. Orpheus is the first writer who definitely names Ireland. In the imaginary route which he prescribes for Jason and the Argonauts, he names Ireland (Iernis), ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... AGESILA'US (5 syl.). Plutarch tells us that Agesilaus, king of Sparta, was one day discovered riding cock-horse on a long stick, to please and amuse ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... contrasted by personal examples with unrevealed Pilkington, M., reference to sermon on "Doing Good" Plato, his maxim on worship his divine precept his doctrine of happiness Platonic philosophy, its relation to the early church Plays, their bad influence on morals Pluralities Plutarch Politics, dangerous to upright men Poor, the, are not the object of envy less subject to temptations than the rich the blessings they enjoy their power for doing good to others have a greater share of happiness than the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... pride was most predominant, which a moderate exercise of ill fortune might have corrected and reformed; and which was by the hand of Heaven strangely punished by bringing his destruction on him by two things that he most despised—the people and Sir Harry Vane. In a word, the epitaph which Plutarch records that Sylla wrote for himself may not be unfitly applied to him—'that no man did ever pass him either in doing good to his friends or in doing harm to ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the Pilgrim's Progress, my first collection was of John Bunyan's works in separate little volumes.... Plutarch's Lives there was in which I read abundantly, and I still think that time spent to great advantage. There was also a book of De Foe's, called an Essay on Projects, and another of Dr. Mather's, called ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... Athenians has been sketched by Plutarch[29] with considerable minuteness, and his representations have been permitted, until of late years, to pass unchallenged. He has described them as at once passionate and placable, easily moved to anger, and as easily appeased; fond of pleasantry and repartee, and heartily enjoying ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... though his friends, they themselves should be deceived. This disposition, so fatal to Vernon, his daughter inherited. With a dark, bold, and passionate genius, which in a man would have led to the highest enterprises, she linked the feminine love of secrecy and scheming. To borrow again from Plutarch and Lysander, "When the skin of the lion fell short, she was quite of opinion that it should be eked out ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Fine examples of brown varnish, all of them. Thence to the library, lined with its carved-oak dwarf bookcases, containing books which nobody had opened for a generation—Livy, Gibbon, Hume, Burke, Smollett, Plutarch, Thomson. These sages, clad in shiny brown leather and gilding, made as good a lining for the walls as anything else, and gave an air of snugness to the room in which the family dined when there ...
— Vixen, Volume I. • M. E. Braddon
... their city and perfecting themselves in all the arts of civilization, and their progress in the next half century will always be a subject for wonder. It is especially wonderful that works of art of the character produced at this time should have been the outcome of political maneuvering: for if Plutarch is to be credited the scheming of Pericles to obtain and hold possession of the government of Athens was the immediate cause of the erection of these marvellous monuments. In order to increase his influence with the ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 08, August 1895 - Fragments of Greek Detail • Various
... Women, who could be taxed with adultery, had to surrender one-half of their dower to the abused husband. Thereupon there were men who married out of speculation on the adultery of their wives. This caused Plutarch to observe: "The Romans marry, not to obtain ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... "And there the battle was hard and fierce, for the French were barely more than the English."[97] These simple folk, seeing that one man is as good as another, admitted the risk of fighting one to one. Their minds had not fed on Plutarch as had those of the Revolution and the Empire. And for their encouragement they had neither the carmagnoles of Barrere, nor the songs of Marie-Joseph Chenier, nor the bulletins of la grande armee. Why did these captains, these men-at-arms go and fight ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... for a man who has just quitted the rank of pages, you don't manage badly, Sire Olivier d'Entraigues? and you will be among our illustrious men if we find a Plutarch. All is well organized; you arrive at the very moment, neither too soon nor too late, like a true party chief. Fontrailles, this young man will get on, I prophesy. But we must make haste; in two hours we shall have some of the archbishops ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... the other hand Plutarch, Seneca, Tertullian, even Pliny, writers who have chiefly contributed to our defective knowledge of the ancient table. They were no gourmets. They were biased, unreliable at best, as regards culinary ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... With Horace and Plutarch, and one or two more Of the best wits that lived in the age before; With a dish of roast mutton, not venison or teal, And clean, though coarse, linen at every meal. May I ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... fire eating, full of sound and fury [Macbeth]. Adv. with a high hand; ex cathedra [Lat.]. Phr. one's bark being worse than his bite; beggars mounted run their horse to death [Henry VI]; quid times? Caesarem vehis [Lat.] [Plutarch]; wagahai wa [Jap.] (expressing ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... we have of Thomas Lodge's dramatic work is The Wounds of Civil War, or, as its other title ran, The Most Lamentable and True Tragedies of Marius and Sylla (about 1588). The author went to Plutarch for his facts and characters, and shows, in his treatment of the subject, that he caught at least a measure of inspiration from that famous biographer's vivid portraits. Marius and Sylla are clearly, though not impartially, discriminated, the former appearing as the dauntless ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... [Footnote 92: Plutarch is read for his matter, rather than for his style. In style as well as for the time in which he lived, he does not belong to the classical writers of Greece. For this reason he may be read in English almost as satisfactorily as in his own language. He is described ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various
... and of morality. Thus it happened that art, which, on the purely hedonistic hypothesis, had been treated as a beautiful courtezan, became in the hands of the moralist, a pedagogue. Aristophanes and Strabo, and above all Aristotle, dwell upon the didactic and moralistic possibility of poetry. For Plutarch, poetry seems to have been a sort of preparation for philosophy, a twilight to which the eyes should grow accustomed, before emerging into ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... but were permitted to make up the deficiency by hunting in the woods and mountains of Laconia. They were even encouraged to steal whatever they could; but if they were caught in the fact, they were severely punished for their want of dexterity. Plutarch tells us of a boy, who, having stolen a fox, and hid it under his garment, chose rather to let it tear out his very bowels than be ...
— A Smaller History of Greece • William Smith
... tinge of mysticism, which, though it did not affect the mechanical reproduction of the native texts, appealed to the Oriental mind as well as to certain elements in Greek religion. Persian influence probably prepared the way for the Platonic exegesis of the Osiris and Isis legends which we find in Plutarch; and the latter may have been in great measure a development, and not, as is often assumed, a complete misunderstanding of the ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... destroying its father and violating its mother, cited before from Damascius, is to be found in Plutarch, De Solert. Anim., c. 4. Pausan. (viii. 46. Sec. 4.) mentions a Greek statue, in which the face was made of the teeth of the hippopotamus instead ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 58, December 7, 1850 • Various
... sunk below the level of ancient Paganism, and the books which I read on my first awaking to a consciousness that I was wrong, were Pagan works. I read much in Plato and Aristotle, Cicero and Seneca, for a time, and then in Plutarch, M. A. Antonine, and Epictetus. The works of Epictetus, with the comments of Simplicius, proved exceedingly profitable. I then read the writings of Theodore Parker, Dr. Channing, and some of the works ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... who is storied to have slept seventy-five years; and another of a rustic in Germany, who, being accidentally covered with a hay-rick, slept there for all the autumn and the winter following, without any nourishment Or, if we must needs feed upon something else, why may not smells nourish us? Plutarch, and Pliny, and divers other ancients, tell us of a nation in India, that lived only upon pleasing odours; and it is the common opinion of physicians, that these do strangely both strengthen and repair the spirits. ...
— A Voyage to the Moon • George Tucker
... into his own melodious verse; yet, while adhering to the substance of each tale, he has in minor matters taken such liberties as have been allowed to poets since the earliest times. Shakespeare, in his "Julius Caesar," makes a like use of Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch; the speech of Mark Antony over the body of Caesar, to cite the most striking instance among many, is almost a literal transcription of North's version, but subjected to the laws ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... and, if they saw a shooting star, it was understood to indicate that the kings of Sparta had disobeyed the gods, and their authority was, in consequence, suspended till they had been purified by an oracle from Delphi or Olympia. [W. H. S.] This statement rests on the authority of Plutarch, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... man,"—"He is undoubtedly insane." So they proceed to live their sane, and wise, and altogether admirable lives, reading their Plutarch a little, but chiefly pausing at that feat of Putnam, who was let down into a wolf's den; and in this wise they nourish themselves for brave and patriotic deeds some time or other. The Tract Society could afford to print that story of Putnam. You might open the district schools with the ...
— A Plea for Captain John Brown • Henry David Thoreau
... continued, "you're a very wicked young fellow! and I won't let you sit next to Mrs. Hemans!" so she placed Plutarch between them. "But you and Shelly," Daisy said, resting her hand on Keats, "you are different sort of persons; you are too earnest and beautiful to be impure; and you shall sit side by side between L. E. L. and our own Alice Cary. And Chatterton! poor ...
— Daisy's Necklace - And What Came of It • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... "Triumvirate." I know no mention of it by any Roman writer as applied to this conspiracy, though Tacitus, Suetonius, and Florus call by that name the later coalition of Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus. The Langhornes, in translating Plutarch's life of Crassus, speak of the Triumvirate; but Plutarch himself says that Caesar combined "an impregnable stronghold" by joining the three men.[236] Paterculus and Suetonius[237] explain very clearly ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... sees in the legend about the axe related by Plutarch, a reminiscence of a primitive gynocracy. The axe is the emblem of the god of war, and, as such, belongs to the king: the coins of Mylasa exhibit ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 8 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... tastes may be seen in his essays on men so different as Thackeray, Swift, and Plutarch. Hardly any one knows that he even wrote about these authors. Lowell preferred Thackeray to Dickens, a judgment in which many people to-day no longer agree with him. As a young man he hated Swift, but he gives us a sane study of him. The review ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... place of resort, and law was not a specialized profession, the case was different. Maximus of Tyre tells us that the children had their laws and tribunals; condemnation extended to the forfeiture of toys. Cato the younger, according to Plutarch, had his detestation of tyranny first awakened by the punishment inflicted on a playmate by such a tribunal. One of the younger boys had been sentenced to imprisonment; the doom was duly carried into effect; but Cato, moved by his ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... part I do much admire, with what soul or with what appetite the first man, with his mouth touched slaughter, and reached to his lips the flesh of a dead animate."—PLUTARCH. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 20, Issue 558, July 21, 1832 • Various
... were written in the most distinct and elegant manner. But the use which he made of his collection was still more honorable to that princely Roman than the acquisition or possession of it. "It was a library," says Plutarch, "whose walls, galleries, and cabinets were open to all visitors; and the ingenious Greeks, when at leisure, resorted to this abode of the Muses, to hold literary conversations, in which Lucullus himself loved to join." But although both ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... doubtless derived from Linum, the classic and botanic name of flax. In Holy Writ, Moses called down the hail upon the growing flax of Lower Egypt, and Isaiah speaks of those "that work in fine flax." According to Herodotus, the ancient Egyptians wore linen. Plutarch informs us that the priests of Isis wore linen on account of its purity, and mentions a tradition that flax was used for clothing "because the color of its blossom resembles the ethereal blue which surrounds the world"; and he adds, that the priests of Isis were buried in their sacred ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... greatest of Shakespeare's creations. Much of the glory of the creation is due to Plutarch. There can be no great art without great fable. Great art can only exist where great men brood intensely on something upon which all men brood a little. Without a popular body of fable there can be no unselfish art in any country. Shakespeare's art was selfish till he turned to the great ...
— William Shakespeare • John Masefield
... a fact well known, that in Greece the most illustrious of both sexes thought it honourable to exercise themselves in the exhibitions of the theatre, and even to appear in the athletic games. Plutarch, it is true, will have it, that all scenic arts were prohibited at Sparta by the laws of Lycurgus; and yet Cornelius Nepos assures us, that no Lacedaemonian matron, however high her quality, was ashamed to act for hire on the public ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... cited by the author of the treatise "On Isis and Osiris," attributed to Plutarch (c. 47), already pointed out this doctrine as ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... known to us from the Theages of Plato. But of the nature of this genius, spirit, or voice, we have no certain indications from the ancients, though the subject has been much investigated in numerous writings, beginning with the monographs of Apulejus and Plutarch. The first (Apulejus), De Deo Socratis, makes the strange assertion, that it was a common thing with the Pythagoreans to have such a spirit; so much so, that if any among them declared he had not one, it was ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... glory that we find in nature and the grandeur that we find in man, his bravery, his honor, his self-sacrifice, his virtue. Realism does not mean the unattractive. A rose is as real as a toad. And a realistic novel of the days of Caesar would be worth more than Plutarch's Lives. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... a sublime fact in Plutarch, or an unselfish deed in a line of poetry, or thrill beneath some heroic legend, it is no longer fairyland—I have seen ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... Plutarch was a freethinker, notwithstanding his being a priest; but indeed he was a heathen priest. His freethinking appears by showing the innocence of atheism, (which at worst is only false reasoning,) and the mischiefs of superstition; and explains what superstition ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... measure of Elizabethan self-conscious elegance. Scarcely a fault is his other Elizabethan habit of seldom, perhaps never, inventing the whole of his stories, but drawing the outlines of them from previous works—English chronicles, poems, or plays, Italian 'novels,' or the biographies of Plutarch. But in the majority of cases these sources provided him only with bare or even crude sketches, and perhaps nothing furnishes clearer proof of his genius than the way in which he has seen the human significance ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... there a river-fish; whole towns adore a dog. This place fears an ibis saturated with serpents; that adores a crocodile. It is a sin to violate a leek or onion, or break them with a bite." Cruel wars were waged between different towns, as Plutarch tells us, because the people of Cynopolis would eat a fish held sacred by the citizens of Latopolis. Bulls, and dogs, and cats, and rats, and reptiles, and dung beetles, were devoutly adored by the learned Egyptians. ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... great part of Horace, some of Ovid, and some of Caesar's 'Commentaries,' in writing, besides a number of Tully's orations. ... In Greek his progress has not been equal, yet he has studied morsels in Aristotle's 'Poetics,' in Plutarch's 'Lives,' and Lucian's 'Dialogues,' 'The Choice of Hercules,' in Xenophon, and lately he has gone through several books ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... the only child of the family, was given up. The parents stopped the cries of their children by fondling and kissing them, for the victim ought not to weep; and the sound of complaint was drowned in the din of flutes and kettledrums. Mothers, according to Plutarch,[11126] stood by without tears or sobs; if they wept or sobbed they lost the honour of the act, and their children were sacrificed notwithstanding. Such sacrifices took place either annually or on an appointed day, or before great enterprises, or on the ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... Auffray family, were soon charmed by the beauty of Pierrette's nature and the character of her old grandmother, whose feelings, ideas, and ways bore the stamp of Roman antiquity,—this matron of the Marais was like a woman in Plutarch. ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... As my method of reforming, Is by laughing, not by storming, (For my friends have always thought Tenderness my greatest fault,) Would you have me change my style? On your faults no longer smile; But, to patch up all our quarrels, Quote you texts from Plutarch's Morals, Or from Solomon produce Maxims teaching Wisdom's use? If I treat you like a crown'd head, You have cheap enough compounded; Can you put in higher claims, Than the owners of St. James? You are not so great a grievance, As the hirelings of St. Stephen's. You are of ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... better to have no opinion of God at all, than such an opinion, as is unworthy of him. For the one is unbelief, the other is contumely; and certainly superstition is the reproach of the Deity. Plutarch saith well to that purpose: Surely (saith he) I had rather a great deal, men should say, there was no such man at all, as Plutarch, than that they should say, that there was one Plutarch, that would eat his ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... learned of good men, and the best of learned men; while his intimate friend, the great printer, Aldo Manuzio, has immortalized his memory in the beautiful epistle in which he dedicates the Moralia of Plutarch to this man, whose name, he prays, may go down to future ages linked with his own. Both of these secretaries proved able assistants in the great revival of art and learning which is Lodovico's lasting title to fame. Chief among these ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright
... book, you will encounter more malignant people who will jeer at you, and will say that you and I have cheated them of your purchase-money. To these you will reply, with Plutarch, Non mi aurum posco, nec mi pretium. Secondly you will say that, of necessity, the tailor cuts the coat according to his cloth; and that he cannot undertake to robe an Ephialtes or a towering Orion suitably when the resources of his shop amount to only a few yards of cambric. Indeed had ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... pronouncements may be fortuitous. Their relative priority uncertain chronology obscures. The date that orthodoxy has assigned to Moses is about 1500 B.C. Plutarch said that Zarathrustra lived five thousand years before the fall of Troy. Both dates are perhaps questionable. But a possible hypothesis philology provides. The term Jehovah is a seventeenth-century expansion of the Hebrew Jhvh, now usually written Jahveh and commonly translated: He who ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... saw in Geometry the keystone of all Knowledge, because, among all other channels of thought, it alone was the exponent of absolute and undeniable truth. He tells us that "Geometry rightly treated is the Knowledge of the Eternal"; and Plutarch gives us yet another instance of Plato's teaching concerning this subject, in which he looks upon God as the Great Architect, when he says, "Plato says that God is always geometrising." Holding, therefore, as Plato did, that God was a great Geometer, and that the aim of philosophy was the acquisition ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... simplicity of cause. How many are the acts of one man in which we recognize the same character! Observe the sources of our information in respect to the Greek genius. We have the civil history of that people, as Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have given it; a very sufficient account of what manner of persons they were and what they did. We have the same national mind expressed for us again in their literature, in epic and lyric poems, drama, and philosophy; a very complete form. Then we have it once more in ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of African birth and of good family, his mother having come of Plutarch's blood. The second century of the Roman Empire, when he lived (he was born at Madaura about A. D. 139), was one of the most brilliant periods in history,—brilliant in its social gayety, in its intellectual activities, and in the splendor of its achievements. The stimulus of the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... [Footnote 67: Plutarch, in Marc. Anton. [c. 67.] And yet, if we may credit Orosius, these monstrous castles were no more than ten feet above the water, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... grieved when he is at a great distance from them. She eulogises his great qualities to her son, and advises him "to study all that she was able to tell him of the Emperor, and write about it when he grew up," and the boy exclaimed, "Mother, what you have told me sounds like one of Plutarch's lives!" ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... amalgam of two fragments. The first sentence is quoted by Diogenes Laertius, ix. 1: the second by Plutarch, de Pyth. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Capua. This was in effect a declaration of war; and Curio, after a last attempt at resistance, left the city, and betook himself to Caesar. (See the close of Book IV.) (12) Marcus Marcellus, Consul in B.C. 51. (13) Plutarch, "Pomp.", 49. The harbours and places of trade were placed under his control in order that he might find a remedy for the scarcity of grain. But his enemies said that he had caused the scarcity in order to get the power. ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... born (Plutarch tells us) on the 361st day of the year, say the 27th December. He too, like Mithra and Dionysus, was a great traveler. As King of Egypt he taught men civil arts, and "tamed them by music and gentleness, ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... philosophy was Sextus of Chaeroneia, a grandson of Plutarch. What he learned from this excellent man is told by himself (I. 9). His favorite teacher was Rusticus (I. 7), a philosopher, and also a man of practical good sense in public affairs. Rusticus was the adviser of Antoninus after he ...
— The Thoughts Of The Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus • Marcus Aurelius
... compiled by Ralph Holinshed in 1577. This was Shakspere's English history, and its strong Lancastrian bias influenced Shakspere in his representation of Richard III. and other characters in his historical plays. In his Roman tragedies Shakspere followed closely Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives, made in 1579 from the French version of ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... search the old papers in one of my large deal boxes for Dryden's letter of thanks to my father, for some communication relating to Plutarch, while they and others were publishing a translation of Plutarch's Lives, in five volumes 8vo. 1683. It is copied in the yellow book for Dryden's Life, in which there are about 150 transcriptions, in prose and verse, relating to the life, character, and writings of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... C. refers to a passage of Plutarch De Communibus Notitiis (c. xiv.), where Chrysippus is represented as saying that a coarse phrase may be vile in itself, yet have due place in a comedy as ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius
... he took from English chronicles and English ballads; and as the ancient writers were made known to his countrymen by versions, they supplied him with new subjects; he dilated some of Plutarch's lives into plays, when they had ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... individuality, but it is not enough. It is in a thorough acquaintance with his private life that this disillusioned age will find the secret springs of the drama of his marvelous career. The great men of former ages were veiled from us by a cloud of prejudice which even the good sense of Plutarch scarcely penetrated. Our age, more analytical and freer from illusions, in the great man seeks to find the individual. It is by this searching test that the present puts aside all illusions, and that the future will seek to justify its judgments. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... emerged, met the ear and the eye on all occasions; and the fiery ferocity of French rebellion was nearly rivalled by the grave insolence of English "Rights of Man." But I am not about to write the history of a time of national fever. The republicanism, which Cicero and Plutarch instil into us all at our schools, had been extinguished in me by the squalid realities of France. I had seen the dissecting-room, and was cured of my love for the science. My spirit, too, required rest. I could have exclaimed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various
... quickened the budding intellect, a mother's intelligence has trained and directed the unfolding powers. The grace of foreign speech is on her tongue, and scenes and pictures of distant lands are enshrined in her memory. Ancient lore has for her a peculiar charm; history is her delight; Plutarch, Josephus, Gibbon, Macaulay, she has conned well. Poesy she loves much. The poetry of the Bible, Dante, Schiller, Herbert, Browning, are her favorites. In sacred books she finds sweet enjoyment. The Fathers of the Church afford her ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... strictly forbidden, but devoured with glorious pleasure in secret. Father was easily persuaded to buy Josephus' "Wars of the Jews," and D'Aubigne's "History of the Reformation," and I tried hard to get him to buy Plutarch's Lives, which, as I told him, everybody, even religious people, praised as a grand good book; but he would have nothing to do with the old pagan until the graham bread and anti-flesh doctrines came suddenly into our backwoods neighborhood, making a stir ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... Plutarch says, moreover, that to appear so excellent in these less necessary qualities, is to produce witness against a man's self, that he has spent his time and study ill, which ought to have been employed in the ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... old umbrellas and walking-sticks in its arms. The proprietor, with a sombre nature and a black beard so like the established shadows of his lumbered premises that he could have been overlooked for part of the unsalable stock, read Swedenborg, Plato, Plutarch, and Young's Night Thoughts—the latter an edition of the eighteenth century in which an Edinburgh parson had made frail marginal comments, yellow and barely discernible, such as: "How True!" This dealer in lumber read through large goggles, and when he had decided to admit he knew you ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... contemplated the scene only from afar, and it seemed but the more gorgeous on that account. He longed to mingle in its busy current, and delighted to view the image of its movements in his favourite poets and historians. Plutarch and Shakspeare;[4] the writings of Klopstock, Lessing, Garve, Herder, Gerstenberg, Goethe, and a multitude of others, which marked the dawning literature of Germany, he had studied with a secret avidity: they gave him vague ideas of men and life, or awakened in him ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... title-page of Coriolanus it is said at the bottom of the Dramatis Personae, 'The whole history exactly followed, and many of the principal speeches copied, from the life of Coriolanus in Plutarch.' It will be interesting to our readers to see how far this is the case. Two of the principal scenes, those between Coriolanus and Aufidius and between Coriolanus and his mother, are thus given in Sir Thomas North's ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... Ancient History; Russel's Egypt; Russel's Palestine; Plutarch's Lives, to be kept on hand, and consulted as the names appear in history; Wharton's Histories; Beloe's Herodotus; Travels of Anacharsis; Mitford's Greece; Ferguson's History of the Roman Republic; Baker's Livy; Middleton's Life of Cicero; Murphy's Tacitus; Sismondi's Decline ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... youngest of eleven children. The family was poor and the boy was brought up to hard labor, with short intervals of schooling now and then. But his thirst for knowledge seems to have been insatiable, and he read everything he could lay his hands on, even to translations of Homer and Plutarch and Rollin's "Ancient History." A century ago, a book was a far greater treasure than it is to-day, when their very number has made us in a way contemptuous of them; and the few which young Parker could secure were read and re-read ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... Plutarch was among the biographies that showed usage, and the Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself. Two Years Before the Mast he loved, and never tired of. The more recent Memoirs of Andrew D. White and Moncure D. Conway both, I remember, gave him enjoyment, as ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Uticensis is said in 56 B.C. to have ceded his wife Marcia to Q. Hortensius, and at the death of Hortensius in 50 B.C. to have taken her back again—Plutarch, Cato ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... must confess, very indifferently. I have no senses that way; and 'tis only your desire that keeps my books open. I would far rather read my Plutarch, or ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... famous Great, Good, and Just, he is said—falsely—to have written with his sword. Be this as it may, the verses have a second part, which has dropped into oblivion. For the Great Marquis, who reminded De Retz of the men in Plutarch's Lives, was not averse from the practice of poetry, and wrote, besides these numbers, a prayer ('Let them bestow on every airth a limb'), a 'pasquil,' a pleasant string of conceits in praise of woman, a set of vehement and fiery memorial stanzas on the ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... Plutarch, in his life of Numa, describes the reflectors used by the Romans for kindling the sacred fire, as concave instruments of brass, though not spherical like the Peruvian, but ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... down the barriers between Greek and barbarian, the idea was reflected in the Stoic doctrine that all men are brothers, and that a man's true country is not his own particular city, but the ecumene. [Footnote: Plutarch long ago saw the connection between the policy of Alexander and the cosmopolitan teaching of Zeno. De Alexandri Magni virtute, i. Sec. 6.] It soon became familiar, popularised by the most popular of the later philosophies of Greece; and just as it ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... Mary wrote a little book for her boys, called "Stories of Great Men, taken from Plutarch," and had it printed and published by Gripp & Co., Middlemarch, every one in the town was willing to give the credit of this work to Fred, observing that he had been to the University, "where the ancients were studied," and might have been a ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... language by a strict imitation of Latin and Greek forms. Among these a rich and noble citizen of Prague named George Hruby must be first named;[30] also Pisecky, ob. 1511, who translated Isoerates' Epistle to Demonicus; Nicholas Konacz and Ulric of Welensky, the translators of Lucian; Krupsky, of Plutarch; Ginterod, of Xenophon's Cyropaedia. Kocyn, celebrated for his eloquence and other gifts, translated the ecclesiastical history of Eusebius and Cassiodorus; Orliczny, the Jewish wars of Josephus, several of the Latin ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... Diomedes raised his mighty spear, And leaping towards her just did graze her hand; ("Iliad," v. 335. It is evident from what follows that Plutarch interprets [Greek omitted] in this passage HAVING LEAPED TO ONE ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... for her gifted son, she read with him, and for him, certain of the masters whom to know well is to possess the foundations of true culture. It is a pretty scene and suggestive—the lad and his mother, reading together "till the wee small hours" Plutarch, Grote's History of Greece, Bullfinch's Mythology, Dante and the plays of William Shakespeare. Fortunately his mother was not his only helper. Near at hand was Theodore Parker who was said to possess the best private library in Boston, ...
— Starr King in California • William Day Simonds
... knowledge of the Deity, the Pagan nations retained sufficient vestiges of primitive tradition to admonish them of their obligation of appeasing the anger and invoking the blessings of the Divinity by victims and sacrifices. Plutarch, an ancient writer of the second century, says of these heathen people: "You may find cities without walls, without literature and without the arts and sciences of civilized life; but you will never find a city without Priests ...
— The Faith of Our Fathers • James Cardinal Gibbons
... be casting about for some new issue by which to divert attention from his faithlessness on the old. We have heard that Mr. Cowan affects the classics; we are sure, therefore, that he will thank us for reminding him of that familiar story out of Plutarch respecting Alcibiades. When the dissolute Athenian had cut off the tail of his dog, which was the dog's principal ornament, and all Athens cried out against him for the act, Alcibiades laughed, and said: "Just what I wanted has happened. I wished the Athenians to talk about this that they ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... instructive, than the sophisticated judgment of some literary matador, who is crippled in body and soul and swollen up, spider-like, with the blood of authors whom he has sucked dry. As from a huge open volume of Plutarch, which has escaped from the covers of the printed page, I read the biographies of these obscure beings in their merry or secretly troubled faces, in their elastic or weary step, in the attitude shown by members ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... monster, so that his thoughts and emotions may become articulate, and, incidentally, to accentuate his isolation from society, Mrs. Shelley inserts a complicated story about an Arabian girl, Sofie, whose lover teaches her to read from Plutarch's Lives, Volney's Ruins of Empire, The Sorrows of Werther, and Paradise Lost. The monster overhears the lessons, and ponders on this unique library, but, as he pleads his own cause the more eloquently ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... in the mysteries of Eleusis lasted nine days. The ceremonies were very imposing, and the company of the highest. Plutarch informs us that Alcibiades was sentenced to death and his property confiscated, because he had dared to turn the mysteries into ridicule in his house. He was even sentenced to be cursed by the priests and priestesses, but the curse was not pronounced ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... from stories in Ovid and dramatised with little taste or discrimination. Shakespeare had a finer conception of form, but even he was contented to take all his ancient history from North's translation of Plutarch and dramatise his subject without further inquiry. Jonson was a scholar and a classical antiquarian. He reprobated this slipshod amateurishness, and wrote his "Sejanus" like a scholar, reading Tacitus, Suetonius, and other authorities, to be certain of his facts, his setting, ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... are exchanged; mutual inquiries as to cattle and sheep, and the last horses despatched to the Indian market. Guy shows the "Lives of the Poets," Vivian asks if it is possible to get the Life of Clive, or Napoleon, or a copy of Plutarch. Guy shakes his head; says if a Robinson Crusoe will do as well, he has seen one in a very tattered state, but in too great request to ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Plutarch, in his "Life of Alexander," gives us many proofs of that great general's credulity. The historian says:—"Upon his (Alexander's) approach to the walls (of Babylon) he saw a great number of crows fighting, some of which fell down ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... and picture are arts of a like nature, and both are busy about imitation. It was excellently said of Plutarch, poetry was a speaking picture, and picture a mute poesy. For they both invent, feign and devise many things, and accommodate all they invent to the use and service of Nature. Yet of the two, the pen is more noble than the pencil; ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... his types and the excellence of his presswork. The bulk of his books were printed in Roman and Italic, of which he had several well-cut founts. He had also some good initials, ornaments, and borders. In the folio edition of Plutarch's Lives, which he printed in 1579, each life is preceded by a medallion portrait, enclosed in a frame of geometrical pattern; some of these, notably the first, and also those shown on a white background, are very effective. ...
— A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 • Henry R. Plomer
... persecution, and timid reliance on authority, are maladies of the Greek spirit, and came into the Church from Hellenistic and not from Jewish sources. It was Cleanthes who wished to treat Aristarchus as the Church treated Galileo, for anticipating Galileo's discovery. It was Plutarch, or rather his revered father, who said, 'You seem to me to be handling a very great and dangerous subject, or rather to be raising questions which ought not to be raised at all, when you question the opinion we hold about the gods, and ask reasons and proofs for everything. The ancient ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... Although Plutarch says: the tyrant never grows old, Rome, under Sylla as under Domitian, resigned itself and willingly put water in its wine. The Tiber was a Lethe, if the rather doctrinary eulogium made of it by Varus Vibiscus is to be credited: Contra Gracchos Tiberim habemus, Bibere Tiberim, id est seditionem ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... widest field of application, is not the best to learn our business in; for it is too wide, and the harvest has not been winnowed as in antiquity, and further on to the Crusades. It is better to examine what has been done for questions that are compact and circumscribed, such as the sources of Plutarch's Pericles, the two tracts on Athenian government, the origin of the epistle to Diognetus, the date of the life of St. Antony; and to learn from Schwegler how this analytical work began. More satisfying because ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... ambition and other strong passions, love has the power of changing a man's character for the time being. One of the speakers in Plutarch's dialogue on love ([Greek: Erotikos], 17) declares that every lover becomes generous and magnanimous, though he may have been niggardly before; but, characteristically enough, it is the love for boys, not for women, that is referred to. A modern lover is affected that way by love for women. ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... The odes compiled by Confucius testify to the early worship of Shangte, the Supreme Euler. The Vedas speak of 'one unknown true Being, all-present, all-powerful; the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer of the universe.' And in Egypt, as late as the time of Plutarch, there were still vestiges of a monotheistic worship. 'The other Egyptians,' he says, 'all made offerings at the tombs of the sacred beasts; but the inhabitants of the Thebaid stood alone in making no such ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... left behind there, but I brought away with me: Basil on the Hexaemeron and some of his homilies on the Psalms; the Epistles of Paul and the Acts of the Apostles; Plutarch's Lives of Romans and Greeks, and his Symposium; some writings on grammar and mathematics; some poems on the Christian religion, written, I think, by Gregory Nazianzen; some prayers, in ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... was a half-pay lieutenant, young Bonaparte was very fond of the "Lives of Famous Men" which Plutarch, the Roman historian, had written. But he never tried to live up to the high standard of character set by these heroes of the older days. Napoleon seems to have been devoid of all those considerate and thoughtful sentiments which make men different from the animals. It will be very difficult ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... of a sudden. "Those who live after us—what will they think of these killings, ... these exploits, concerning which we who do them do not even know if they are to be compared with those of the heroes of Plutarch and Corneille or with the deeds of apaches!... For all that, mind you, there is one figure that has risen above the war, a figure which will shine with the beauty and the greatness of ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... he went to bed. Scaliger maintained that no one could form a just judgment of the true Attic dialect who had not Aristophanes by heart. Of Madame Dacier's idolatry he seems to be the god: while the venerable Plutarch objects to him that he carried all his thoughts beyond nature; that he wrote not to men of character but to the mob; that his style is at once obscure, licentious, tragical, pompous and mean—sometimes inflated and serious to bombast—sometimes ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... their head, made indeed earnest protests against Latinising the vocabulary (the great fault of the contemporary French Pleiade), but they were not quite aware how much they were under the influence of Latin in other matters. The translators, such as North, whose famous version of Plutarch after Amyot had the immortal honour of suggesting not a little of Shakespere's greatest work, had the chief excuse and temptation in doing this; but all writers did it more or less: the theologians (to whom it would no doubt have been ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... first introduction of philosophy into Rome, in the dissolution of the old fables about Tartarus and the Styx, and the dissemination of Epicureanism among the people, this doctrine, notwithstanding the beautiful reasonings of Cicero and the religious faith of a few who clung like Plutarch to the mysteries in which it was perpetuated, had sunk very low. An interlocutor in Cicero expressed what was probably a common feeling, when he acknowledged that, with the writings of Plato before him, he could believe and realise it; but when he closed ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... in truth, a combination of heroes; for he was of a sturdy, raw-boned make, like Ajax Telamon, with a pair of round shoulders that Hercules would have given his hide for (meaning his lion's hide) when he undertook to ease old Atlas of his load. He was, moreover, as Plutarch describes Coriolanus, not only terrible for the force of his arm, but likewise for his voice, which sounded as though it came out of a barrel; and, like the self-same warrior, he possessed a sovereign contempt for the sovereign people, and an iron aspect, which was enough of itself ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... Edward looked at his fingers. "Barrel burn them?" asked a neighbour. "Reckon they use red-hot muskets in hell? Wish you could see your lips, Edward! Round black O. Biting cartridges for a living—and it used to be when you read Plutarch that you were all for the peaceful heroes! You haven't a lady-love that would ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... acquainted with the famous Cardinal de Retz, and that penetrating judge celebrates him in his memoirs as one of those heroes, of whom there are no longer any remains in the world, and who are only to be met with in Plutarch. Desirous of improving his martial genius, he took a journey to Germany, was caressed by the emperor, received the rank of mareschal, and proposed to levy a regiment for the imperial service. While employed for that purpose in the Low Countries, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... caused in his mind a painful feeling, which estranged him from his schoolfellows. I, however, was almost his constant companion. During play-hours he used to withdraw to the library, where he-read with deep interest works of history, particularly Polybius and Plutarch. He was also fond of Arrianus, but did not care much for Quintus Gurtius. I often went off to play with my comrades, and left him ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... last scientific historian of Greece. The writer who seems fittingly to complete the progress of thought is a writer of biographies only. I will not here touch on Plutarch's employment of the inductive method as shown in his constant use of inscription and statue, of public document and building and the like, because they involve no new method. It is his attitude towards miracles of which I ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... of translating without assimilating. It would be rash to assume that where he altered he invariably improved. His was not the unerring eye which, like Shakspere's in his dramatic transfusions of Plutarch, missed no particle of the gold mingled with the baser metal, but rejected the dross with sovereign certainty. In dealing with Italian originals more especially, he sometimes altered for the worse, and sometimes for the better; but he was never a mere slavish translator. ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... when little more than fifteen, he wrote a Greek poem, which must have some merit, because his father has prefixed it to the second edition of his Sylva. In Mr. Nicoll's Collection of Poems, are some by him. There are two poems of his in Dryden's Miscellany. He translated Plutarch's Life of Alexander from the Greek; and the History of Two Grand Viziers, from the French. When only nineteen, he translated from the Latin, Rapin on Gardens. He died in 1698. The Quarterly Review, in its review of Mr. Bray's Memoirs of Evelyn, thus speaks of this ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton |
