Books by Plutarch
How to Be a Leader: An Ancient Guide to Wise Leadership
by Jeffrey Beneker & Plutarch
"Should an Old Man Engage in Politics?" is the title of one of Plutarch's essays, translated in Jeffrey Beneker's How to Be a Leader: An Ancient Guide to Wise Leadership. The book is part of Princeton University Press's "Ancient Wisdom for Modern Readers" series and we can safely say that many of the issues Plutarch worried about remain relevant today.
We spoke to Jeff Beneker about the Best Books on Leadership (from Ancient Greek and Rome).
“in The Rise and Fall of Athens, you get to see four stages in the development of Athens over time. In the early stages, Plutarch has to push back into legendary and mythological times, with the founders like Theseus and even Solon…Then we get into the lives of the earliest real historical figures, such as Themistocles and Aristides. They were living at the time of the Persian Wars, when Greece was under attack by this large power and managed to fight it off. The Greeks that were living at this time realized that things were different before and after the invasion of the Persians” Read more...
The best books on Leadership: Lessons from the Ancients
Jeffrey Beneker, Classicist
“The Lives is a big folio book with a lot of close type. I don’t know where Shakespeare got it, but he seems to have had it early in his career. Some people think that episodes in an early play like Titus Andronicus may borrow from it, but he uses Plutarch all the way through his Roman plays—Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra—through to Timon of Athens, which comes out of a small story in the Lives. So, Plutarch’s Lives was a great fund of Roman and Greek history for Elizabethan dramatists.” Read more...
Robert S Miola, Classicist
Interviews where books by Plutarch were recommended
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1
The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives
by Plutarch -
2
Pericles of Athens
by Vincent Azoulay -
3
Socrates in Love: The Making of a Philosopher
by Armand D'Angour -
4
Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens
by David Stuttard -
5
Agricola
by Harold Mattingly, James Rives & Tacitus -
6
The Twelve Caesars
by Suetonius and Robert Graves (translator)
Biographies of Ancient Greeks and Romans
Biographies of Ancient Greeks and Romans
The art of biography has been a work in progress down the millennia. These days, leaders are no longer celebrated for the number of enemies killed in war, nor are we as impressed with territorial conquests. Here’s a roundup of all the biographies recommended on Five Books about ancient Greeks and Romans, from contemporary accounts to more recent works.
Shakespeare’s Sources, recommended by Robert S Miola
William Shakespeare has a strong claim to be the most influential writer of all time. But whose works influenced him? And how? Robert S Miola discusses the breadth of Shakespeare’s reading, the vexed question of how we can reconstruct what he read, and the staggeringly innovative ways that Shakespeare shaped his sources
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1
The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives
by Plutarch -
2
The Greek Alexander Romance
by Richard Stoneman -
3
Atticus
by Cornelius Nepos & Nicholas Horsfall -
4
Agricola
by Harold Mattingly, James Rives & Tacitus -
5
Lives of the Eminent Philosophers
Diogenes Laertius (ed. James Miller, trans. Pamela Mensch)
The best books on Leadership: Lessons from the Ancients, recommended by Jeffrey Beneker
The best books on Leadership: Lessons from the Ancients, recommended by Jeffrey Beneker
Whatever modern leadership books may say about what’s required to be a good leader, for the ancients there was only one vital requirement: studying philosophy. Jeffrey Beneker, Professor of Classics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, talks us through what ancient biographies reveal about how to be a leader.
