The Project Gutenberg eBook, Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4), by
Plutarch, et al, Translated by Aubrey Stewart and George Long

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Title: Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4)

Author: Plutarch

Release Date: November 12, 2004 [eBook #14033]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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PLUTARCH'S LIVES, VOLUME I

Translated from the Greek
with Notes and a Life of Plutarch

by

AUBREY STEWART, M.A.,
Late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge

and the late

GEORGE LONG, M.A.,
Formerly Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge

IN FOUR VOLUMES.

London

George Bell & Sons, York St., Covent Garden, and New York

1894

Reprinted from Stereotype Plates by Wm. Clowes & Sons, Ltd., Stamford
Street and Charing Cross

PREFACE.

No apologies are needed for a new edition of so favourite an author as
Plutarch. From the period of the revival of classical literature in
Europe down to our own times, his writings have done more than those of
any other single author to familiarise us with the greatest men and the
greatest events of the ancient world.

The great Duke of Marlborough, it is said, confessed that his only
knowledge of English history was derived from Shakespeare's historical
plays, and it would not be too much to say that a very large proportion
of educated men, in our own as well as in Marlborough's times, have owed
much of their knowledge of classical antiquity to the study of
Plutarch's Lives. Other writers may be read with profit, with
admiration, and with interest; but few, like Plutarch, can gossip
pleasantly while instructing solidly; can breathe life into the dry
skeleton of history, and show that the life of a Greek or Roman worthy,
when rightly dealt with, can prove as entertaining as a modern novel. No
one is so well able as Plutarch to dispel the doubt which all schoolboys
feel as to whether the names about which they read ever belonged to men
who were really alive; h