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Thanks for subscribing and taking the time to share your insightful comments! Perhaps Cato present for us the best of a traditional mindset, that is one that sees the gods and culture of hearth and home as best, but opens the way for the next generation to add to that tradition rather than putting the two in competition or conflict. We can’t all be Catos, but few of us aren’t inspired by some aspect of their lives.

You are most welcome! Glad to help.

Thanks! I'm 4/5 done on my actual podcast, but I'm just moving them (with cleaned up transcripts) on to RUclips now. Another one to check out is Cost of Glory. He's no gone through as many lives as I have, but he's WAY more in depth (three episodes per life, usually) and he takes breaks to cover other ancient texts too.

I recommend the Landmark editions for every historian that they've yet produced. With Herodotus, there's one caveat. The translation they used for the Herodotus edition of the Landmark Histories was public domain. Since you read Plutarch regularly, that probably won't phase you because the Dryden-Clough translation is a hundred years' older, but for those looking for crisp modern English prose, you won't get it from the Landmark. With that caveat, though, the maps and footnotes alone orient you much more effectively to his whole argument so that you can carry the context with you through the whole work and not just think "I'll re-read that someday when I know more about Greek history!" Happy reading! Plutarch did NOT like Herodotus, but I love his wide-ranging curiosity about things. If Thucydides is the father of history, Herodotus is the fun uncle!

@@_grammaticus Thank you sooo much for this!

You are so welcome! Thanks for stopping by!

This was my first video many years ago shortly after I started the podcast. I know a lot more now, so I'm thinking of re-doing it, but I'm glad it still is helpful. For example, I can now pronounce Clough (Cluff!). :)

I love Tom Holland, but haven't listened to much Dan Carlin (I know, I know... it's crazy that anyone who loves history as much as I do has still not gotten around to listening to Dan Carlin) but you'll LOVE the primary sources! Plutarch is a great entry-point, too, but it can be so cool to read Caesar in his own words, of Polybius who was a friend of the Scipios. These guys lived it! Thanks for stopping by and commenting.

Hi! Thanks for stopping by and commenting. This video is really a supplement to the longer article which goes into greater depth regarding the translations themselves, which are all high-quality but tend to use the standard stylistic idioms of their day. Plutarch's biographies comprise about 450,000 words. Half a million words of Greek are not translated easily by anyone. The list of people who've translated all of Plutarch into English probably ends before you get to ten. Thus, the people who've chosen to translate him did so from a foundation of a strong Greek and Latin education and made choices according to the idiom of their time. That's the key: all the translations are good, but if you don't like 17th-century idiom, then you should look elsewhere than Dryden. Purchasing a book (or several books), though, is purchasing more than just the words printed inside it. You're purchasing an artifact that you'll hopefully use more than once and add to a collection called a library. I have been disappointed with my Penguins because they are dog-eared and falling apart. Now, most people aren't going to read Plutarch as often as I have, but still I'd want a high-quality book to be something I can read, and then my kids can read the same copy I bought or read. This is sadly just not possible for so many paperbacks which are made so cheaply nowadays. The Penguins definitely fall into this error, while the Oxfords are a higher quality. Their translations are nearly equal, though the Oxford translations have been done at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st-century by a fantastic Greek translator who was educated at Oxford but lives now in Greece. If all you want is the information, then you'd be happy downloading the public domain version to a Kindle. For the price of a kindle and an internet connection, you can get access to all the greatest works that have ever been written in (or translated into) English. I will grant you one thing, Shakespeare only had access to the first English translation by Thomas North (mentioned in the article but not the video because his translations to my knowledge are no longer printed), which was a translation *not* from the original Greek, but from the French. That said, the translation still holds up fairly well even when compared to the original language. It's a bit like the Douay-Rheims version of the Bible being translated from Jerome's Latin rather than the original Greek and Hebrew manuscript traditions. It will be more accurate to the Latin when there is a conflict, but since the Latin is a translation of the Greek and Hebrew, they'll be really close 90% of the time. With a sacred text, I can see that 90% might not be good enough. Plutarch isn't a sacred text, though, and people will still get a lot out of reading the best translation they can get their hands on (i.e. Shakespeare didn't do so bad with North's translations: he turned them into three of the most famous plays in the English language: Coriolanus, Antony & Cleopatra, and Julius Caesar). Sorry it took me so long to respond to you. I appreciate your commentary and am hoping to be a bit more active here as I transition my podcast and bring on some Latin learning tools. Peace!

Yes. Nothing like the internet to help me figure this out once and for all. It's certainly Clough, pronounce "Cluff." Thanks for the perspective and for stopping by!

That's a good call. I hadn't thought of the Great Books series. I agree with you about the pronouns both in English and Greek. I've translated a few of the Lives and sometimes Plutarch himself uses pronouns in a way that forces me to backtrack and ensure I'm talking about the right person! I used those versions to read the Greek Tragedians, who are all contained in one volume. Not a great translation, but sometimes it's just more handy to have just one book to worry about!

@@_grammaticus Thanks, it's good to know that about Plutarch's style, I'll share that with my classmates in the Arguelles online academy with whom I'm reading and discussing the Lives. When you were translating it, did you add in more repetition of the names, or did you feel it was better to leave Plutarch's style as is?

I’m not. Would you be able to link to it? I’ll do some Googling myself, but it seems because you’re familiar with it, it may still be easy to get in print.

I got my hands on the Loomis, but haven't read enough of the translations yet to comment. I'll update this video when I have, as I've also learned a lot in the three years since this video has gone up.

Thank you for looking! I’m sorry that I didn’t link months ago. I think I got it from the library. I am looking forward to your update. I recently read a couple essays by Cicero and have come under the conviction that the goal of learning Latin really is to be able to read Latin things. I hope we will not lose this ability as a people, and that I can be a part of that! Thanks for doing this good work!

To clarify, I read a translation of Cicero, which is why I thought of it just now in your video about translations. I’m just now having my coffee so that is my excuse 😂.

Thanks for stopping by and commenting! I'm building my show notes for The Plutarch Podcast to provide the beginning of just such an enterprise: the sidebar summaries which are one of the distinguishing features of the Landmark series. My podcast notes want to outline and weave together the important people, places, and events tracked in Plutarch. I even have translated the Life of Aristides myself with maps and footnotes, but I'd rather act as editor since the translation would take me years on the side with a full time job (though the Thucydides Landmark, his first one, took Strassler 7 years and he wasn't even translating). We'll see how much momentum I can build, or if I can cobble together a team of people that can get a Landmark Plutarch out there. I'd love to be involved!