British educator Charlotte Mason saw Plutarch's Lives as key to the study of Citizenship. What character qualities does one need to be both a good subject and a great leader? When is it right to fight against tyranny? How do people manage their affairs with wisdom and justice, and what happens when they don't? The first volume in The Plutarch Project includes vocabulary, discussion questions, and other aids for students and parent/teachers, plus edited text for the Lives of Marcus Cato the Censor, Philopoemen, and Titus Flamininus.
Publicola, one of the first consuls of the Roman Republic, was "the most eminent amongst the Romans" and 'the fountain of their honour." This updated edition of The Plutarch Primer includes vocabulary, discussion questions, and other study aids for young students and their parents/teachers, plus edited text for Plutarch's Life of Publicola. It is designed especially for those who are new to the study of Plutarch.
Formation of Character is the fifth volume of Charlotte Mason's Homeschooling series. The chapters stand alone and are valuable to parents of children of all ages. Part I includes case studies of children (and adults) who cured themselves of bad habits. Part II is a series of reflections on subjects including both schooling and vacations (or "stay-cations" as we now call them). Part III covers various aspects of home schooling, with a special section detailing the things that Charlotte Mason thought were important to teach to girls in particular. Part IV consists of examples of how education affected outcome of character in famous writers of her day. Charlotte Mason was a late nineteenth-century British educator whose ideas were far ahead of her time. She believed that children are born persons worthy of respect, rather than blank slates, and that it was better to feed their growing minds with living literature and vital ideas and knowledge, rather than dry facts and knowledge filtered and pre-digested by the teacher. Her method of education, still used by some private schools and many homeschooling families, is gentle and flexible, especially with younger children, and includes first-hand exposure to great and noble ideas through books in each school subject, conveying wonder and arousing curiosity, and through reflection upon great art, music, and poetry; nature observation as the primary means of early science teaching; use of manipulatives and real-life application to understand mathematical concepts and learning to reason, rather than rote memorization and working endless sums; and an emphasis on character and on cultivating and maintaining good personal habits. Schooling is teacher-directed, not child-led, but school time should be short enough to allow students free time to play and to pursue their own worthy interests such as handicrafts. Traditional Charlotte Mason schooling is firmly based on Christianity, although the method is also used successfully by s
Plutarch's Lives, written at the beginning of the second century A.D., is a brilliant social history of the ancient world by one of the greatest of biographers and moralists of all time. Volume I contains profiles and comparisons of Romulus and Theseus, Numa and Lycurgus, Fabius and Pericles, and many more formidable personalities of ancient Greece and Rome. The present translation, originally published in 1683 in conjunction with a life of Plutarch by John Dryden, was revised in 1864 by the poet and scholar Arthur Hugh Clough.
A Companion to Plutarch offers a broad survey of the famous historian and biographer; a coherent, comprehensive, and elegant presentation of Plutarch’s thought and influence Constitutes the first survey of its kind, a unified and accessible guide that offers a comprehensive discussion of all major aspects of Plutarch’s oeuvre Provides essential background information on Plutarch’s world, including his own circle of influential friends (Greek and Roman), his travels, his political activity, and his relations with Trajan and other emperors Offers contextualizing background, the literary and cultural details that shed light on some of the fundamental aspects of Plutarch’s thought Surveys the ideologically crucial reception of the Greek Classical Period in Plutarch’s writings Follows the currents of recent serious scholarship, discussing perennial interests, and delving into topics and works not formerly given serious attention
Plutarch's Parallel Lives were written to compare famous Greeks and Romans. This most obvious aspect of their parallelism is frequently ignored in the drive to mine Plutarch for historical fact. However, the eleven contributors to the present volume, who include most of the world's leading commentators on Plutarch, together bring out many ways in which Plutarch invoked aspects of parallelism. They show how pervasive and how central the whole notion was to his thinking. With new analysis of the synkriseis; with discussion of parallels within and across the Lives and in the Moralia; with an examination of why the basic parallel structure of the Lives lost its importance in the Renaissance, this volume presents fresh ideas on a neglected topic crucial to Plutarch's literary creation.
History has not been kind to Henry Hudson. He's been dismissed as a short-tempered man who played favorites with his crew and had an unstoppable ambition and tenacity. Although he gave his name to a mighty river, an important strait, and a huge bay, today he is remembered more for the mutiny that took his life. The grandson of a trader, Hudson sailed under both British and Dutch flags, looking for a northern route to China. Although none of his voyages led to the discovery of a northwest passage, he did explore what is now Hudson's Bay and what is now New York City. Whatever his personal shortcomings, to sail through dangerous, ice-filled waters with only a small crew in a rickety old boat, he must have been someone of rare courage and vision. In Hudson, Janice Weaver has created a compelling portrait of a man who should be remembered not for his tragic end, but for the way he advanced our understanding of the world.
