Order this book from Amazon.com Plutarch's Lives Plutarch, in the Dryden translation, edited and revised by Arthur Hugh Clough New York, New York: Random House, Inc., 1992 Recommended by: Sam Donaldson In my teenage years, Plutarch's Lives, one of the great classics, interested me. I've always been interested in history, in biography. Plutarch's Lives is simply the biographies of people back in an ancient era, Caesar and the Antonines. You study how they lived and what they did, and how they thought. I can't tell you I came away from it saying, "Now I'll pattern myself after this guy, and this guy." But I came away with the sense that some of the people who were very ordinary when they started out could make something of themselves. And the very title itself. Plutarch was, of course, the author, the compiler of all of this. But lives, what is it about various people's lives who are successful, who make something of themselves, who make a mark on history and on the world? That book influenced me. About the Book Plutarch's book, written at the beginning of the second century A.D., is the first great work of biography. Also known as Parallel Lives, it presents the life stories of the most famous statesmen and heroes of Ancient Greece, comparing each with the life of a celebrated Roman. It is one of our major sources of classical history and was the inspiration for Shakespeare's Roman plays. The course of public affairs after his death produced a quick and speedy sense of the loss of Pericles. Those who, while he lived, resented his great authority, as that which eclipsed themselves, presently after his quitting the stage, making trial of other orators and demagogues, readily acknowledged that there never had been in nature such a disposition as his was, more moderate and reasonable in the height of that state he took upon him, or more grave and impressive in the mildness which he used.