Saturday, June 25, 2011

Plutarch's Lives by Plutarch (meeting 2 of 3)

Our next meeting:
Friday, July 29, 2011, 7:00 PM
Kansas City Public Library/Plaza Branch, small meeting room
4801 Main Street Kansas City, MO

Our “big book” for the summer is Plutarch’s Lives by Plutarch. We have already met once and will be meeting two more times to discuss the book. Please look at the following list to see which of the remaining "lives" we will discuss in July and August. If you can't read all of the assignment, we have designated which "lives" to give first priority.

The top priority “Lives” for July:
1. Aristides and Cato the Elder
2. Nicias and Crassus

Other “Lives” for July:
1. Philopoemen and Flamininus
2. Pyrrhus and Gaius Marius
3. Lysander and Sulla
4. Cimon and Lucullus
5. Eumenes and Sertorius
6. Agesilaus and Pompey

The top priority “Lives” for August:
1. Demosthenes and Cicero
2. Demetrius and Mark Antony

Other “Lives” for August:
1. Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar
2. Phocion and Cato the Younger
3. Agis and Cleomenes
4. Dion and Brutus
5. Aratus
6. Artaxerxes
7. Galba
8. Otho

Plutarch (c. 46 – 120 AD) was a Greek historian, biographer and essayist. Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, commonly called Parallel Lives or Plutarch's Lives, is a series of biographies of famous men, arranged in tandem to illuminate their common moral virtues or failings, written in the late 1st century.

The book contains twenty-three pairs of biographies, each pair consisting of one Greek and one Roman, as well as four unpaired single lives. It is a work of considerable importance, not only as a source of information about the individuals biographized, but also about the times in which they lived.