This chapter examines the influence of William Bartram´s Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida on the writing of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the 1790s and highlights the uniqueness of Bartram´s eco-centric approach to sublimity in early American thinking about the natural world. A practiced botanist and natural illustrator, Bartram delights in cataloguing plant and animal lives, but the Travels also offers a significant intervention into trans-Atlantic discourses of sublimity. Bartram´s sublime overwhelms the perceiver with plentitude rather than terror, and he narrates experiences of sublimity from amidst the rich life he delights to describe rather than at a distance. He emphasizes continuity between human and more-than-human lives. Bartram also resists the nationalistic orientation of his American contemporaries, attending to native and local epistemologies. The chapter concludes with comparisons between passages of the Travels, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” and Wordsworth’s “Ruth.”

This chapter traces the use of the sublime in ancient Greek and Latin literature from Homer through Augustine. Starting from the basic premise that the study of the classical sublime cannot be restricted to a reading of Longinus, it demonstrates that the sublime was a recognizable phenomenon, an ethical stance, a marker of ideology and value, and a topic of debate from at least the fifth century BCE. Ancient writers make sublime spectacles out of practically anything, from the starry sky to the gemstone, from monumental architecture to architectural ruins. Numerous texts imbue human subjects, such as mythological figures and natural philosophers, with a greatness of soul that electrifies readers with the thrill of the sublime, and when such figures falter or collapse, their fall from greatness is equally spectacular. The chapter concludes with a sample of texts that reject or problematize the value of the sublime or that police its use.

This chapter explores the genealogy of the phrase ‘from the sublime to the ridiculous’, tracing the saying from Romantic period attributions to Thomas Paine and Napoleon back to seventeenth-century debates about the sublime as a literary style. Ridiculousness haunts sublimity from Longinus’s discussions of the comic in his treatise to Kant’s consideration of humour as an affect uncannily akin to the sublime. Returning to Romantic period theorizations of the ridiculous, the chapter considers Jean Paul Richter’s aesthetics and his influence on S. T. Coleridge’s thinking about humour as providing alternative perspectives on key Romantic concepts including our relationship to nature, society, and childhood.

Very few ancient Greek authors were read in any form in the Latin West during the Middle Ages. Though hugely popular in antiquity – and in Byzantium – Plutarch’s works are no exception to this. When the early Italian Renaissance humanists permanently changed the course of Greek studies in the West, Plutarch became one of the most widely read authors of the period. This chapter will discuss how Plutarch’s name first began to resurface in twelfth-century Latin writers, how he was among the earliest Greek writers to be translated into the modern vernaculars, and how, in a long series of Latin translations, the Parallel Lives became bestsellers in the fifteenth century. The chapter will also discuss how his works influenced Renaissance ideas about ethics and political thought.

This chapter examines the transmission of Plutarch’s works from late antiquity to the fourteenth century and then looks at some striking examples of his appropriation. Although in the early centuries of this period over half his works were lost, a key factor ensuring the survival of the rest was the fact that their moral outlook was so compatible with that of orthodox Christianity. The watershed moment comes in the thirteenth century when Maximus Planudes devoted himself to collecting and copying the still existing works. Among the examples provided here to show his works were being closely read are the use Photius makes of them in his Bibliotheca; the influence of the structure and purpose of the Lives on the scholars at the court of Constantine VII Porphyrogenitos and later on Michael Psellos; Anna Komnena’s knowledge of various Moralia treatises; and Theodorus Metochites’ self-fashioning as an early-fourteenth-century Plutarch.

The vision of the Republic that emerges from Shakespeare’s plays is a tragic one: fought over and lost in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra; perhaps, in Coriolanus, just too hard to live with. At the end of Shakespeare’s dramatic career, he left all this behind, and he returned to a fanciful, allusive use of Plutarch – the Greek Lives, rather than the Roman. We find Plutarchan names cut loose from their histories: Pericles, Prince of Tyre (in the sources the character was called “Apollonius”); Cleomenes and Dion, courtiers in The Winter’s Tale. In the last play of all, the collaboratively written Two Noble Kinsmen, Duke Theseus returns, together with the Cretan labyrinth: the play suddenly, decisively echoes North’s wording from the Theseus. Plutarch has ceased to be a deep “source”; he is now, again, a fund to dip into, a resource; perhaps, by this time, an old friend.

The Introduction situates Plutarch in his literary context, as a vivid and original thinker and writer whose popularity remains enormous, as well as his historical context as an innovator in the writing of biography. Some authors discuss Plutarch’s role in the development of the biographical tradition and his relationship to the classical Greek past. Others examine his Roman context as a Greek living in an occupied country, and his views on politics, particularly those involving barbarians or "others." Multiple essays illuminate Plutarch’s relationship to Plato and Platonism, often in the context of his influence on education, while other essays look at Plutarch in his everyday life, investigating his thoughts on gender, sexuality, wealth, and animals. Five essays focus on reception.

Plutarch is often seen nowadays as a champion of the animal cause, and virtually as a precursor of the modern pro-animal argument. It is important, however, to recognize that the prominence of animals in Plutarch’s work is symptomatic of the widespread and vibrant textual experimentation with animals in imperial Greco-Roman literature. The trend peaks in the second century AD, but animals were relevant within imperial philosophical thought too. Like many authors (and their ancient readers), Plutarch draws upon and responds to (a) the rich and abiding literary tradition of mobilizing animal imagery and themes and (b) the long-established philosophical debate on animal psychology and rationality, with far-reaching ethical implications about how animals should be treated. The chapter surveys the attitudes toward animals across the Plutarchan corpus and offers in-depth contextualization of the dialogues De sollertia animalium and the notoriously ironic Gryllus.

The impact of classical literature in Spain during the so-called Golden Age ("Siglo de Oro") of the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries among intellectuals (not only theologians but also other men and women linked to the imperial court and to the major universities) was to a large degree contingent upon the dominant influence of the Catholic Church. Plutarch (in particular, his Moralia) was viewed by the Spanish Renaissance as one of the more “legitimate” authors from ancient Greece. This chapter will deal with translations of Plutarch’s works into Spanish and look at the intertextual footprint of the Lives and Moralia in Spanish theological and philosophical thinking in scholarship and historiography. Finally, Plutarch’s role in the discourse of visuo-textual allegorism of the Spanish Renaissance will be addressed.

Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) credited his contemporary Jacques Amyot’s (1513–93) translations of Plutarch (Lives, 1559; Moralia, 1572) with lifting him out of the mire of ignorance and inspiring him to write the Essays.1 Together, Amyot and Montaigne ensured the tremendous cultural importance of Plutarch in France from the late sixteenth century onwards.2 After a decline during the Enlightenment when the Encyclopédistes deemed his ideas obscure, Plutarch again rose to prominence at the close of the eighteenth century thanks to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and the revolutionaries. A republican Plutarch had replaced Plutarch as the “mirror for princes” whose works the playwright and historiographer Jean Racine (1639–99) had read to an ailing Louis XIV.

Plutarch is commonly viewed as a major exponent of a shared Greco-Roman culture among the imperial elite to which he belonged. However, while dealing with the Greek and Roman worlds on fairly equal terms, he essentially expects the protagonists of his Lives, both Greek and Roman, to display virtues grounded in Greek culture and conforming to Greek role models. Thus, Philopoemen–Flamininus analyzes the Roman conquest of Greece with a strong focus on Greek historical experience; Marius shows the adverse consequences of anti-Hellenism and lack of paideia in a Roman statesman; and Lucullus presents a Roman career shaped by philhellenic benefactions on the one hand and barbarian luxury on the other. Beyond the Lives, the Roman Questions frequently invoke Greek concepts and traditions to explain Roman customs and institutions, whereas Advice on Statesmanship is predominantly concerned with the autonomy of the Greek cities and the power of the local aristocracy, thus epitomizing the Hellenocentric perspective that characterizes Plutarch’s oeuvre as a whole.

Though a priest at Delphi, Plutarch resolutely refuses to give us what we would most like to have: an insider’s view of the oracular shrine and an account of the religio sacerdotis. What he does tell us about varieties of religious belief is largely negative (On Superstition), and the corresponding positive account is difficult to reconstruct. He has, however, a commitment to inquiry and to the interrogation of the polyvalent symbols of religion and of myth. Reductive solutions are rejected, along with any interpretations that would lead to a decrease of piety. In the myths that he creates for his own dialogues, in imitation of Plato, he generates his most characteristic and memorable rhetorical exercises in the sublime.Once misleadingly branded "theosophical essays," these myths are in fact virtuoso display pieces that show Plutarch at his best as a writer and educator.

Plutarch considered content infinitely more important than style. He deprecated excessive attention to words by writers or by readers and believed that the right way to read classical poetry was to concentrate on its moral lessons and not so much on information (historia) or brilliance of language. Nevertheless, he was himself a master of the formal prose (Kunstprosa, in the idiom of German philology) of his day, and had enough versatility to vary his style not only according to genre but sometimes even within a work, especially in dialogue. At the same time, his writing always shows two very marked characteristics: abundance, and richness of imagery and allusion.

Plutarch’s biographies often – not always – come close to modern expectations of a “biography,” so much so that it is easy to lose track of how many choices he had to make and how many alternative paths he might have chosen. This chapter compares those choices with those made by other ancient life-writers and measures them against “ten rules for biography” outlined for modern authors by Hermione Lee: (1) The story should be true. (2) The story should cover the whole life. (3) Nothing should be omitted or concealed. (4) All sources used should be identified. (5) The biographer should know the subject. (6) The biographer should be objective. (7) Biography is a form of history. (8) Biography is an investigation of identity. (9) The story should have some value for the reader. (10) There are no rules for biography.

This chapter explores the depictions of the barbarians, and indeed the very concept barbaros, in Plutarch’s works. It reviews Plutarch’s rhetoric dealing with non-Greeks, which was circumscribed on the one hand by the Roman imperial political reality and on the other by memories of the old Hellenic valor, which was filtered only through texts and oratory. The chapter examines Plutarch’s play with the established stereotypes in a way that shows ethnic labeling to be elusive. It studies Plutarch’s ethnic taxonomic schemes (i.e. a twofold arrangement of barbarians vs. Greeks/Romans and a threefold scheme of Greeks vs. Romans vs. barbarians), and the subtle moral and political implications thereof. It also looks into the literary significance of the use of barbarians in the narrative and of the mismatch between Greek and barbarian practices as presented mostly in the Lives.

Plutarch the philosopher is present in all his texts. His allegiance is not in doubt: he is a follower of Plato, who is open-minded to other schools, as far as their views are reconcilable with Plato’s. He is above all committed to the dialogical spirit pervading Plato’s works. In several more technical treatises, he develops the core of his philosophical views. These have to do with the composition of the world-soul and its image, the human soul. From there, Plutarch develops his views on moral psychology: it is the task of reason, the divine presence in us, to control the irrational passions. This idea forms the basis of various texts in which the therapy of the soul and the development of character are the central goals. Plutarch’s concept of philosophy and his doctrinal stance are quite different from what we find in later Platonism. Later doxographical reports on Plutarch are not always reliable.

Our modern age has modified somewhat the definition of “family” as a way of thinking about relationships between men and women, parents and children, and brothers and sisters. Plutarch did not imagine these relationships in terms of sexuality and gender. Rather, affection, love, marriage, and the family were the key concepts in his study of “private life.” He also lived, however, during an era of change. This change had consequences for the idea of marriage, justifying a more in-depth analysis of Plutarch’s view of the subject. In order to distinguish between contemporary attitudes and original ideas in his works, we will clarify the notion of “private life,” the philosophical tradition, and contemporary idea(s) of the family before reintegrating familial relations into Plutarch’s view of human nature and code of ethics.