This volume presents the first half of the proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of the International Plutarch Society (2002). The selected papers are divided by theme in sections concentrating on political, philosophical, and literary aspects of Plutarch's presentation of statesmen and their activities, and on the aftermath of this Plutarchan heritage. The volume bears witness to the ongoing, wide-ranging interest in the work of Plutarch.

The papers in this volume concentrate on political, philosophical, and literary aspects of Plutarch's presentation of statesmen and their activities, and on the aftermath of this Plutarchan heritage.

At the beginning of the second century C.E., Plutarch of Chaeronea wrote a series of pairs of biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen. Their purpose is moral: the reader is invited to reflect on important ethical issues and to use the example of these great men from the past to improve his or her own conduct. This book off ers the first full-scale commentary on the Life of Alcibiades. It examines how Plutarch's biography of one of classical Athens' most controversial politicians functions within the moral program of the Parallel Lives. Built upon the narratological distinction between story and text, Simon Verdegem's analysis, which involves detailed comparisons with other Plutarchan works (especially the Lives of Nicias and Lysander) and several key texts in the Alcibiades tradition (e.g., Plato, Thucydides, and Xenophon), demonstrates how Plutarch carefully constructed his story and used a wide range of narrative techniques to create a complex Life that raises interesting questions about the relation between private morality and the common good.

The volume puts into the spotlight overlaps and points of intersection between Plutarch and other writers of the imperial period. It contains twenty-eight contributions which adopt a comparative approach and put into sharper relief ongoing debates and shared concerns, revealing a complex topography of rearrangements and transfigurations of inherited topics, motifs, and ideas. Reading Plutarch alongside his contemporaries brings out distinctive features of his thought and uncovers peculiarities in his use of literary and rhetorical strategies, imagery, and philosophical concepts, thereby contributing to a better understanding of the empire’s culture in general, and Plutarch in particular.

This volume of collected essays explores the premise that Plutarch’s work, notwithstanding its amazing thematic multifariousness, constantly pivots on certain ideological pillars which secure its unity and coherence. So, unlike other similar books which, more or less, concentrate on either the Lives or the Moralia or on some particular aspect(s) of Plutarch’s œuvre, the articles of the present volume observe Plutarch at work in both Lives and Moralia, thus bringing forward and illustrating the inner unity of his varied literary production. The subject-matter of the volume is uncommonly wide-ranging and the studies collected here inquire into many important issues of Plutarchean scholarship: the conditions under which Plutarch’s writings were separated into two distinct corpora, his methods of work and the various authorial techniques employed, the interplay between Lives and Moralia, Plutarch and politics, Plutarch and philosophy, literary aspects of Plutarch’s œuvre, Plutarch on women, Plutarch in his epistemological and socio-historical context. In sum, this book brings Plutarchean scholarship to date by revisiting and discussing older and recent problematization concerning Plutarch, in an attempt to further illuminate his personality and work.

'Space and time' have been key concepts of investigation in the humanities in recent years. In the field of Classics in particular, they have led to the fresh appraisal of genres such as epic, historiography, the novel and biography, by enabling a close focus on how ancient texts invest their representations of space and time with a variety of symbolic and cultural meanings. This collection of essays by a team of international scholars seeks to make a contribution to this rich interdisciplinary field, by exploring how space and time are perceived, linguistically codified and portrayed in the biographical and philosophical work of Plutarch of Chaeronea (1st-2nd centuries CE). The volume's aim is to show how philological approaches, in conjunction with socio-cultural readings, can shed light on Plutarch's spatial terminology and clarify his conceptions of time, especially in terms of the ways in which he situates himself in his era's fascination with the past. The volume's intended readership includes Classicists, intellectual and cultural historians and scholars whose field of expertise embraces theoretical study of space and time, along with the linguistic strategies used to portray them in literary or historical texts.

The essays collected in this volume examine manifestations of our sublime cosmos in ancient literature and its reception. Individual themes include religious mystery; calendrical and cyclical thinking as ordering principles of human experience; divine birth and the manifold nature of divinity (both awesome and terrifying); contemplation of the sky and meteorological (ir)regularity; fears associated with overpowering natural and anthropogenic events; and the aspirations and limitations of human expression. In texts ranging from Homer to Keats, the volume's chapters apply diverse critical methods and approaches that engage with sublimity in various aesthetic, agential and metaphysical aspects. The ancient texts – epic, dramatic, historiographic and lyric – treated here are rooted in a remote world where, within a framework of (perceived) celestial order, literature, myth and science still communicated profoundly, a tradition that continued in literary receptions of these ancient works. This volume honours the intellectual legacy of Thomas D. Worthen, a scholar whose expertise and insights cut across multiple disciplines, and who influenced and inspired students and colleagues at the University of Arizona, USA, for over three decades. Beyond clarifying temporally and culturally distant contemplations of the human universe, these essays aim to inform the continuing sense of wonder and horror at the sublime heights and depths of our ever-changing cosmos.