Plutarch's Lives

Sitting with those magazines, it was as if he were studying the chess equivalent of Plutarch’s lives of the Roman generals or Vasari’s lives of the artists.

It was as if his brain was broken, and he went from writing term papers analyzing Plutarch's "Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans" to finger-painting.

He wrote him as a patient, learned man who falls asleep with his nose buried in "Plutarch's Lives," humbled by a divorce and deflated by a paltry paycheck.

Anyone under the impression that he or she was merely cramming for a standardized exam was in for an awakening when my father offered a modern poem or a passage of Confucius or Plutarch’s “Lives” to mull over.

To find juicy plots, poor old Shakespeare had to slog through “Holinshed’s Chronicles” and “Plutarch’s Lives.”