Plutarch’s Lives, vol 1 by Plutarch; translated by John Dryden; Plutarch’s Lives, Book 1; Unabridged MP3 Audio Book; Narrator Bernard Mayes

This book was the principal source for Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra. It was also one of two books Mary Shelley chose for the blind hermit to use for Frankenstein’s monster’s education, with the other being the Bible.

Plutarch’s Lives remains one of the world’s most profoundly influential literary works. Written at the beginning of the second century AD, it forms a brilliant social history of the ancient world. His “parallel lives” were originally presented in a series of books that gave an account of one Greek and one Roman life, followed by a comparison of the two. Included are Romulus and Theseus, Pompey and Agesilaus, Dion and Brutus, Alcibiades and Coriolanus, Demosthenes and Cicero, and Demetrius and Antony.

Plutarch was a moralist of the highest order. “It was for the sake of others that I first commenced writing biographies,” he says, “but I find myself proceeding and attaching myself to it for my own; the virtues of these great men serving me as a sort of looking glass, in which I may see how to adjust and adorn my own life.”

Volume One: One of the world’s most influential literary works, Plutarch’s Lives forms a brilliant social history of the ancient world by comparing the “parallel lives” of notorious Greeks and Romans. Volume I compares Theseus and Romulus, Alcibiades and Coriolanus, and Aristides and Marcus Cato, among others.

“Plutarch is my man.”—Montaigne

“Away with your prismatics. I want a spermatic book....Plato, Plotinus and Plutarch are such.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson

Plutarch (c. 46–120 A.D.) was a Greek historian, biographer, and essayist. For many years Plutarch served as one of the two priests at the temple of Apollo at Delphi. He actively participated in local affairs in the town of his birth, Chaeronea, in the Greek region known as Boeotia, and was also a magistrate, representing his home on various missions to foreign countries.