Plutarch's Apophthegms of Kings and Commanders

Plutarch, Edward Hinton (T) · Hellenic and Hellenistic Papers Series · 48 pages

Plutarch's Apophthegms of Kings and Commanders in Edward Hinton's translation, presented under the title “Garland of Graeco-Roman Witty Utterances,” with a full table of contents naming every figure and the page where his sayings begin. The work opens with Plutarch's own dedicatory letter, in which he wishes prosperity to Trajan the Emperor. Its companion in this section is the collection of Laconic apophthegms, which applies the same method to Sparta alone.

The form is the point: an apophthegm is a terse saying that carries a whole character in a sentence, and Plutarch's method is to give the remark with just enough circumstance to make it land. Seventy-two collections are arranged broadly by region and period. The Persian sequence comes first — Artaxerxes, Cyrus, Darius, Semiramis, Xerxes, a second Artaxerxes, Cyrus the Younger, Artaxerxes Mnemon, Parysatis, Orontes and Memnon — followed by the Egyptian kings, and then a run of Thracian and Scythian rulers including Poltys, Teres, Cotys, Idathyrsus, Ateas and Scilurus. The Sicilian tyrants Gelo and Hiero open the Greek portion, and the sequence continues through the Athenian, Spartan, Macedonian and finally Roman commanders. Because each entry is short and independently headed, the collection is built to be opened anywhere rather than read through, and the contents page functions as an index of names.

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