Robert Lamberton

Written around the year 100, Plutarch’s Lives have shaped perceptions of the accomplishments of the ancient Greeks and Romans for nearly two thousand years. This engaging and stimulating book introduces both general readers and students to Plutarch’s own life and work.Robert Lamberton sketches the cultural context in which Plutarch worked—Greece under Roman rule—and discusses his family relationships, background, education, and political career. There are two sides to Plutarch: the most widely read source on Greek and Roman history and the educator whose philosophical and pedagogical concerns are preserved in the vast collection of essays and dialogues known as the Moralia. Lamberton analyzes these neglected writings, arguing that we must look here for Plutarch’s deepest commitment as a writer and for the heart of his accomplishment. Lamberton also explores the connection between biography and historiography and shows how Plutarch’s parallel biographies served the continuing process of cultural accommodation between Greeks and Romans in the Roman Empire. He concludes by discussing Plutarch’s influence and reputation through the ages.

Standing at the very beginning of European literature, the poems and verse fragments that have come down to us under Hesiod’s name tap the vast reservoir of oral tradition constituting Greek wisdom about the ways of gods and men. The Theogony tells of the origins of the gods and the universe, and so of the world-order we know, while the Works and Days offers the first picture of the society and economy of archaic rural Greece.Robert Lamberton provides here an accessible introduction to these works of Hesiod. He discusses the historical background of the poems and the problems of accurately dating them, analyzes the major and subsidiary works, and concludes by tracing the influence of Hesiodic poetry on later Greek and Roman poetry and on Western European literature until after the Renaissance. Throughout, Lamberton restores a sense of the poetry of Hesiod in all the richness of its contradictions. He shows that this body of poetry, which sings of the creation of the universe and the generations of the gods, insists on doing so from the perspective of the humblest of men—a wretched shepherd whom the Muses initiated on Mount Helikon. The poetry speaks through this idiosyncratic, ironic, self-conscious voice, appropriating proverbial wisdom that is clearly the possession of a tradition rather than any individual and transforming it into a discourse that is as much an account of poetry as it is an account of the world.“An important and definitive book. Lamberton combines the sophistication of cultural anthropology with a refined sense for the mechanics and aesthetics of archaic Greek literature and gives Hesiod a fresh and original reading.”—Gregory Nagy, Harvard University

Here is the first survey of the surviving evidence for the growth, development, and influence of the Neoplatonist allegorical reading of the Iliad and Odyssey. Professor Lamberton argues that this tradition of reading was to create new demands on subsequent epic and thereby alter permanently the nature of European epic. The Neoplatonist reading was to be decisive in the birth of allegorical epic in late antiquity and forms the background for the next major extension of the epic tradition found in Dante.