Plutarch - Selected Essays on Love, The Family and The Good Life

the long version

This brilliant translation by noted classical scholar Moses Hadas makes some of Plutarch's warm, humane essays on personal relationships readily available in English for the first time. Love--"Love makes a man acute, though he had been a dullard before--and courageous when he had been timorous, just as men make soft wood tough by passing it through fire." Family-- "Anyone may very easily calculate that new friends and boon companions may be acquired when the old, like worn-out tools and implements, are gone. But for a brother there can be no substitute, just as there cannot be for a hand that has been amputated...." The Good Life-- "No costly mansions, no mass of gold, no pride of race, no grandeur of office, nor charm, or force of eloquence can bestow upon life so clear-skied a serenity as a soul purged of evil."