Plutarch Fall of the Roman Republic [Penguin Classics L 84]

by Rex Warner (Translator)

Plutarch, as Rex Warner observes in introducing his modern translation of six of the Lives, was the last of the Greek classical historians and the first of modern biographers. Looking back from the turn of the first century A.D. he records, simply and dramatically, in the lives of Marious and Sulla, Crassus and Cicero, Pompey and Caesar, that long and bloody period of foreign and civil war which marked the collapse of the Roman Republic and ushered in the Empire. This volume forms a companion to the nine Greek lives of The Rice and Fall of Athens in the Penguin Classics.

320 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1966

About the author

Rex Warner was an English classicist, writer and translator. He is now probably best remembered for The Aerodrome (1941), an allegorical novel whose young hero is faced with the disintegration of his certainties about his loved ones and with a choice between the earthy, animalistic life of his home village and the pure, efficient, emotionally detached life of an airman.

Reviews

[Goose · Rating 3 out of 5]

my man switches between his boy crushes more that Dante Aligheri would

[Tom Schulte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Abstracted from the longer Plutarch's Lives, this is six lives charting the fall of the Roman Republic. There is the power struggle between Marius and Sulla to start the six. I couldn't help but think of our current crop of narcissistic populist autocrats:

Certainly in his Memoirs he writes that when he considers all those occasions on which he appears to have made wise decisions he finds that the most successful actions were those upon which he entered boldly and on the spur of the moment rather than after due deliberation...

Also in this depiction of Crassus, famous for battling Spartacus as recounted here.

As a politician [Crassus] was singularly inconsistent, neither a steadfast friend nor an implacable enemy. Where his self-interest was involved he found no difficulty in breaking off an attachment or in making up a quarrel. Indeed it often happened that, in a short space of time, he came forward both as the supporter and as the opponent of the same man and the same measures. He was strong because he was popular and because he was feared - particularly because he was feared.

With Crassus making up the First Triumvirate is Pompey and Julius Caesar. His bloody triumph in Gaul before his dictatorship and assassination is a natural conclusion to this history. Regardless of the eloquent oratory of Cicero, his chapter at the end feels anti-climactic and prevalent enough that it could have been left off.