redfiona99

Or "Come for Alexander, stay for Alcibiades".

I wanted to better my knowledge of Alexander the Great but my copy of Herodotus's Histories was looking excessively large so when I saw "Greek Lives" for sale I snapped it up.

I wish I'd bought a "Complete Lives" instead. It's so good.

Plutarch brings the lives and times to life in an interesting way, and the translator does a very good job of making the work flow and be understandable without resorting to artificial modernising.

I could have done with some of the chapter introductions being fuller, some of them assumed knowledge I most certainly didn't have (the 4 out of 5 is because of that, Plutarch himself gets 5/5). Some of the footnotes/endnotes were a bit enigmatic too.

I think I agree with the idea put forward in the introduction that Plutarch wrote these to suggest good ways to be a public person of power, particularly if you consider the different way Cimon is treated depending on the message Plutarch is conveying in a life.

Poor Agesilaus who, after a certain point, couldn't get anything right for trying to the right thing, was completely new to me, and I learned a lot about Ancient Greece.

Definitely worth reading.

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I still say Alcibiades or the entire Peloponnesian War would make for a fantastic tv show. I know Bruno Heller is probably sick of chitons and togas but he'd be just the man and he could get Simon Baker to play Alcibiades.

Next book - The Mauritius Command, because I finally have both a copy and time after long periods without one or the other.

The Histories by Herodotus
Roman Lives: A Selection of Eight Lives (Oxford World's Classics) by Plutarch
History of Rome, books 1-5 by Titus Livy
History of the Twelve Caesars by Suetonius
The Letters by Pliny the Younger
The Annals by Tacitus
The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
Thucydides: The Reinvention of History by Donald Kagan
The Histories by Polybius
Life Stories of Men Who Shaped History from Plutarch's Lives by Eduard C. Lindeman

Skipping two which are different collections of the same thing. Several of these are things I'd like to read and I have a copy of one of them.

Unsuggester is still borked.