Volume 9, Number 4 · September 14, 1967
Plutarch, Historical Novelist
By M.I. Finley
Plutarch and His Times
by R.H. Barrow
Indiana University Press, 203 pp., $6.00
Julius Caesar, A Political Biography
by J.P.V.D. Balsdon
Atheneum, 194 pp., $4.50
Thomas North's translation of Jacques Amyot's French translation of Plutarch's Lives was published in 1579. In the next generation Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar, Anthony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus, and thus at second hand Plutarch placed an indelible stamp on the images of four or five major personalities (and on one legendary one). No amount of historical scholarship has succeeded in seriously replacing or correcting those images, comparable to Tacitus's Tiberius or Nero, in the public consciousness or in the Western literary tradition, and it is to be doubted whether the future will see a radically different Brutus or Cleopatra. There's a sobering thought for the professional historian.
Review, 2911 words
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