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The age of Alexander : ten Greek lives PDF

560 Pages·2011·3.19 MB·English
by  Duff
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PLUTARCH The Age of Alexander Ten Greek Lives by Plutarch Artaxerxes • Pelopidas • Dion • Timoleon Demosthenes • Phocion • Alexander • Eumenes Demetrius • Pyrrhus Revised edition Translated by IAN SCOTT-KILVERT and TIMOTHY E. DUFF Introductions and Notes by TIMOTHY E. DUFF With Series Preface by CHRISTOPHER PELLING PENGUIN BOOKS Contents Penguin Plutarch, by Christopher Pelling Preface to the Revised Edition Abbreviations General Introduction List of Surviving Lives by Plutarch Further Reading THE AGE OF ALEXANDER ARTAXERXES Introduction to Artaxerxes Life of Artaxerxes PELOPIDAS Introduction to Pelopidas Prologue to the Lives of Pelopidas and Marcellus Life of Pelopidas DION Introduction to Dion Prologue to the Lives of Dion and Brutus Life of Dion TIMOLEON Introduction to Timoleon Life of Timoleon Comparison of Aemilius and Timoleon DEMOSTHENES Introduction to Demosthenes Prologue to the Lives of Demosthenes and Cicero Life of Demosthenes PHOCION Introduction to Phocion Prologue to the Lives of Phocion and Cato the Younger Life of Phocion ALEXANDER Introduction to Alexander Prologue to the Lives of Alexander and Julius Caesar Life of Alexander EUMENES Introduction to Eumenes Life of Eumenes Comparison of Sertorius and Eumenes DEMETRIUS Introduction to Demetrius Prologue to the Lives of Demetrius and Antony Life of Demetrius PYRRHUS Introduction to Pyrrhus Life of Pyrrhus Notes Chronology Historical Events After the Death of Alexander (323–301 BC) Biographical Notes on Alexander’s Generals and Successors Maps 1. Attica and Boeotia 2. Greece and the Aegean 3. Empire of Alexander 4. Southern Italy and Syracuse 5. Asia Minor PENGUIN CLASSICS THE AGE OF ALEXANDER PLUTARCH (c. AD 45–120) was a Greek philosopher from the small town of Chaeronea in Boeotia. He lived at the height of the Roman Empire and is author of one of the largest collections of writings to have survived from Classical antiquity. His work is traditionally divided into two: the Moralia, which include a vast range of philosophical, scientific, moral and rhetorical works, and the Lives or biographies. Almost fifty such biographies survive, most from his collection of Parallel Lives, in which biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen are arranged in pairs. Plutarch’s philosophical and moral interests are apparent in the Lives, as are his considerable literary talent, his vast knowledge of the ancient world and his careful research. Both the Lives and Moralia have been extremely influential since they were first translated in the Renaissance. IAN SCOTT-KILVERT was Director of English Literature at the British Council and editor of Writers and Their Works. He also translated Cassius Dio’s The Roman History as well as Plutarch’s The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives and Makers of Rome for Penguin Classics. He died in 1989. TIMOTHY E. DUFF is Reader in Classics at the University of Reading. He is author of Plutarch’s Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice (1999) and the Greek and Roman Historians (2003) and has published extensively on Plutarch. CHRISTOPHER PELLING is Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University. He has published a commentary on Plutarch’s Life of Antony (1988) and a commentary on Plutarch’s Life of Caesar (2011). His other books include Literary Texts and the Greek Historian (2000). Most of his articles on Plutarch were collected in his Plutarch and History (2002). Penguin Plutarch The first Penguin translation of Plutarch appeared in 1958, with Rex Warner’s version of six Roman Lives appearing as Fall of the Roman Republic. Other volumes followed steadily, three of them by Ian Scott-Kilvert (The Rise and Fall of Athens in 1960, Makers of Rome in 1965 and The Age of Alexander in 1973), and then Richard Talbert’s Plutarch on Sparta in 1988. Several of the moral essays were also translated by Robin Waterfield in 1992. Now only fourteen of the forty-eight Lives remain. It is planned to include these remaining Lives in a new edition, along with revised versions of those already published. This is also an opportunity to divide up the Lives in a different way, although it is not straightforward to decide what that different way should be. Nearly all Plutarch’s surviving biographies were written in pairs as Parallel Lives: thus a ‘book’ for Plutarch was not just Theseus or Caesar but Theseus and Romulus or Alexander and Caesar. Most, but not all, of those pairs have a brief epilogue at the end of the second Life comparing the two heroes, just as many have a prologue before the first Life giving some initial grounds for the comparison. Not much attention was paid to this comparative technique at the time when the Penguin series started to appear, and it seemed natural then to separate each Life from its pair and organize the volumes by period and city. The comparative epilogues were not included in the translations at all. That now looks very unsatisfactory. The comparative technique has come to be seen as basic to Plutarch’s strategy, underlying not only those brief epilogues but also the entire pairings. (It is true, though, that in the last few years scholars have become increasingly alert to the way that all the Lives, not just the pairs, are crafted to complement one another.) It is very tempting to keep the pairings in this new series in a way that would respect Plutarch’s own authorial intentions. After some agonizing, we have decided nevertheless to keep to something like the original strategy of the series, though with some refinement. The reason is a practical one. Many, perhaps most, readers of Plutarch will be reading him to see what he has to say about a particular period, and will wish to compare his treatment of the major players to see how the different parts of his historical jigsaw fit together. If one kept the pairings, that would inevitably mean buying several different volumes of the series; and if, say, one organized those volumes by the Greek partner (so that, for instance, Pericles– Fabius, Nicias– Crassus and Coriolanus– Alcibiades made one volume), anyone primarily interested in the Roman Lives of the late Republic would probably need to buy the whole set. That is no way to guarantee these finely crafted works of art the wide reading that they deserve. Keeping the organization by period also allows some other works of Plutarch to be included along with the Lives themselves, for instance the fascinating essay On the Malice of Herodotus along with the Lives of Themistocles and Aristides and (as before) several Spartan essays along with the Spartan Lives. Of course the comparative epilogues must now be included, and they will now be translated and printed along with the second Life of each pair, just as the prologues are conventionally printed before the first Life. Each volume will now also usually include more extended introductions to each Life, which will draw attention to the importance of the comparison as well as other features of Plutarch’s technique. This is a compromise, and an uncomfortable one; but it still seems the better way. The volumes will, however, sort the Lives into more logical groups. The early Roman figures will now be grouped together in a single volume entitled The Rise of Rome; the life of Agesilaus will migrate from the The Age of Alexander to join the rest of the Spartan Lives, and the Life of Artaxerxes will join the The Age of Alexander collection; the rest of the new translations of Roman Lives will join those of the Gracchi, Brutus and Antony in a new Rome in Crisis volume. The introductions and notes will be revised where necessary. In due course we hope to include the Moral Essays in the project as well. In a recent bibliometric study (Ancient Society, 28 (1997), 265–89), Walter Scheidel observed that the proportion of scholarly articles devoted to most classical authors had remained more or less constant since the 1920s. The one author to stand out with an exceptional rise was Plutarch. That professional pattern has been matched by a similar surge in the interest in Plutarch shown by the general reading public. The Penguin translations have played a large part in fostering that interest, and this new, more comprehensive project will surely play a similar role in the future. Christopher Pelling 2004 Preface to the Revised Edition This volume was first published in 1973. In that first edition Ian Scott-Kilvert was responsible for the translations and notes and G. T. Griffiths for the Introduction. For the new edition I have completely rewritten the General Introduction and the explanatory Notes (now printed as endnotes), added new introductions and bibliographies to each Life, and partly revised the Chronology, Historical Events and Biographical Notes. I have also added translations of two Lives which were not included in the original collection: Artaxerxes and Eumenes. To make way for them, Agesilaus has now been moved to Penguin’s Plutarch on Sparta. All the Lives included here except Artaxerxes are from Plutarch’s collection of Parallel Lives. In that collection the Lives are arranged in pairs, one Greek figure with one Roman; many pairs are preceded by a prologue, which introduces both men, and most are followed by a brief comparison of the two. This and other Penguin volumes do not reproduce this ‘parallel’ structure, but instead arrange Lives according to historical period. In the 1973 edition the comparisons were simply discarded and the prologues printed, as they usually are, as part of the first Life. In this new edition, I have added translations of the comparisons which follow the two second Lives included here (Timoleon and Eumenes); I have numbered the chapters of these comparisons separately, though giving the conventional numeration in brackets. I have also attempted to distinguish more clearly between the prologues and the start of the Lives which follow them, though in this case I have retained the conventional chapter numbering system, as to do otherwise would have meant interfering with the numeration of the whole Life. Finally, I have deleted the prologue to Aemilius and Timoleon, which in the first edition was wrongly placed at the start of

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Plutarch's parallel biographies of the great men in Greek and Roman history are cornerstones of European literature. This selection provides intimate glimpses into the lives of these men, depicting, as he put it, 'those actions which illuminate the workings of the soul'. Abstract: Offers a collectio
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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.