The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch

Lives of Greece and Rome retold for young readers from Plutarch — Lycurgus and Solon, Pericles and Alcibiades, Cicero and Pompey, the death of Caesar — with the anecdotes kept and the moralising left as Plutarch wrote it. The Lives were a schoolbook of Europe from the Renaissance on and the source Shakespeare worked from for his Roman plays. What survives the abridgement is Plutarch's method: judge a man by a small act, not a battle. Twenty-seven plates after Corot and Monet, among others, carry the classical world into modern light, from Gethsemane to a rain-washed Rouen quay.