Plutarch His Life His Parallel Lives And His Morals PDF Download

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1874 edition. Excerpt: ...or The Heaven-City,1 a title which reads strangely in the light which the writings of Juvenal, of Tacitus, of St. Paul cast on the things which were perpetrated there. But there is as little trace in Plutarch of the one unfairness as of the other. If he loved Greece and his Greek worthies the best, Rome and her institutions, and the virtues by which she had attained to her preeminence, and the men who had helped her to this pre-eminence, filled him with a continual marvel and admiration. He had ever an open eye for her points of superiority, and was very free in acknowledging these; as, for instance, the tuXa/Stm, the reverent accuracy of the great men of Rome, and of the Romans in general, in the performance of divine offices, as set over against the comparative slovenliness and irreverence of his own countrymen, --the 1 Essays, vi. 32. G2 Athentzus, I, 36. Quotation from Dean Menvale. 85 subject being one to which he recurs again and again.1 Dean Merivale, who has excellent right to speak, has borne witness to the moral dignity of the man, the just weights and balances which, in making these comparisons, he never fails to use. It is only in part that I can quote his words: ' Throughout this long series of lives, this glittering array of virtues and vices, personal and national, there is no word, I think, of subservience or flattery, of scorn or vanity, of humiliation or triumph, to mark the position of the writer in the face of his Roman rulers. Whether we consider the book as addressed to the Greeks or to the Romans, the absence of any such indications of feeling is undoubtedly remarkable. To 1rie it seems most honourable to the one people and to the other'2--assuredly honourable above all to the writer himself. Yet with all this, it is..