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Author

Plutarch

Greek philosopher and historian (c. AD 46 – after AD 119), born at Chaeronea. From Wikidata; Wikipedia.

Lived
1st–2nd c. AD
Kinds of writing
Biography (65), Philosophy (48), Philosophic Dialogue (11), Rhetoric (6), History (2), Polyhistory (2), Physics (2), Biology (2), Medicine, Narrative, Astronomy/Astrology
Dialect
Attic/Koine
In the library
145 works, 142 with an English translation; 1,116,170 words analysed

Where to begin

The works here with a translation and the most familiar vocabulary: the fewest rare words to look up. That is vocabulary only; grammar, dialect and ideas may still be demanding.

What Plutarch wrote

In The Painted Stoa

Entries that quote or point to Plutarch's Greek.

Voting a man out of Athens for ten years, on a broken potOstracismOnce a year the citizens of Athens could decide to hold a strange election.430 BC: a city under siege meets a disease no one could nameThe Plague of AthensIn the summer of 430 BC, with the Spartan army burning the fields of Attica and the whole population crowded inside the city walls, a disease broke out in the port of Piraeus.The people who fed Sparta, and how Sparta kept them downThe helots and the krypteiaSparta's citizens could spend their lives training for war because someone else grew their food.Where kings asked Apollo, and the answers could ruin themDelphi and the oracleOn a ledge of Mount Parnassus, for a thousand years and more, a woman sat on a tripod in the innermost room of Apollo's temple and spoke for the god.The aristocrat who led the Athenian democracy for a generationPericlesFor about thirty years in the middle of the fifth century BC, the most powerful man in Athens held only an office the Assembly filled by vote every year: general.Barefoot, hungry and encouraged to steal: the most famous education in historyGrowing up SpartanEverywhere else in Greece a father decided how to bring up his son.A crown of wild olive, a truce, and statues paid for by cheatsThe Olympic GamesEvery four years for more than a thousand years, Greeks from all over the Mediterranean travelled to the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia to watch naked men run, wrestle, box and race chariots.Where Greeks went when doctors failed: a night in the god's hallAsclepius and the healing sleepA sick Greek who could afford the journey might go to a sanctuary of Asclepius, the god of healing, wash, make an offering, and lie down for the night in a special hall, hoping the god would come in a dream and cure him.Minos' city in legend, and the palace Arthur Evans dug up and rebuilt in concreteKnossos and the labyrinthHomer knew Knossos as "a great city" where Minos was king, and later Greeks told of the labyrinth that Daedalus built there for the Minotaur.Carved for Athena, shattered in 1687, divided between Athens and London: the history, and both sides of the argumentThe Parthenon MarblesThe sculptures carved for the Parthenon in the fifth century BC now live in two museums.

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μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρίʼ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγεʼ ἔθηκε

Greek text size
20 px
Line spacing
1.8

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