Plutarch's Lives by Plutarch (meeting 1 of 3)

Friday, June 24, 2011, 7:00 PM
Kansas City Public Library/Plaza Branch
4801 Main Street Kansas City, MO
Our “big book” for the summer is Plutarch’s Lives by Plutarch. We will be meeting three times this summer to discuss this book. Therefore we have divided the book into three reading assignments, and we have designated which “Lives” to read first if you are unable to read the complete assignment.

The top priority “Lives” for June:
1. Pericles and Fabius Maximus
2. Alcibiades and Coriolanus

Other “Lives” for June:
1. Theseus and Romulus
2. Lycurgus and Numa Pompilius
3. Solon and Poplicola
4. Themistocles and Camillus
5. Timoleon and Aemilius Paulus
6. Pelopidas and Marcellus

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.