Or "Come for Alexander, stay for Alcibiades".

I wanted to better my knowledge of Alexander the Great but my copy of Herodotus's Histories was looking excessively large so when I saw "Greek Lives" for sale I snapped it up.

I wish I'd bought a "Complete Lives" instead. It's so good.

Plutarch brings the lives and times to life in an interesting way, and the translator does a very good job of making the work flow and be understandable without resorting to artificial modernising.

I could have done with some of the chapter introductions being fuller, some of them assumed knowledge I most certainly didn't have (the 4 1/2 out of 5 is because of that, Plutarch himself gets 5/5). Some of the footnotes/endnotes were a bit enigmatic too.

I think I agree with the idea put forward in the introduction that Plutarch wrote these to suggest good ways to be a public person of power, particularly if you consider the different way Cimon is treated depending on the message Plutarch is conveying in a life.

Poor Agesilaus who, after a certain point, couldn't get anything right for trying to the right thing, was completely new to me, and I learned a lot about Ancient Greece.

Definitely worth reading. ( )

Includes short (30-50 page) biographies of selected Greek statesmen and philosophers and generals living prior to Plutarch’s life. Each contains basic facts about the men’s lives, their beliefs, actions, deaths, their legacy, and saying attributed to them, with some editorializing on the author’s part. An introduction by Philip Stadter, bibliographies, maps, chronology, explanatory and textual notes, and indexes of sources and names cap off the biographies of Lycurgus, Solon, Themistocles, Cimon, Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades, Agesilaus, and Alexander. Violence, discussions of sex and sexuality, including homosexuality in a favorable light.