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\"The philosopher, statesman, and moralist Plutarch of Chaeronia (first and early second centuries CE) begins his essay Political Advice, wherein he advises a man about how to embark upon a career in government and how to become an effective leader by saying: 'First of all, let the primary motivation for political activity be a conscious choice based on judgment and reason, which serves as a firm and strong foundation, and let the choice not be rashly inspired by the vain pursuit of glory, a sense of rivalry, or a lack of other meaningful activities.' In How to Lead, classicist Jeffrey Beneker translates three of Plutarch's political essays: To an Uneducated Leader, Political Advice, and The Role of the Elder Statesman. In these essays Plutarch seeks not only to advise these budding, practicing, and even aging politicians about the problems of governing their Greek cities under Roman rule, but also to educate them about general principles of leadership. Plutarch thought quite a lot about political leadership. The management of public affairs at all levels is one of the most important of human endeavors. It requires education, character, and commitment. He encourages those who desire to lead, and he gives advice based mainly on the experiences of great leaders of the past. These essays are timeless reflections on the proper way to lead and serve, publicly, at least with respect to the European and American political traditions. The essays emphasize the importance of personal integrity and friendships, how best to persuade one's fellow citizens, the dangers inherent in rivalry, and that the successful management of public affairs demands respect for the state's institutions, cooperation among politicians, and the subordination of one's own glory to the welfare of the state\"-- Provided by publisher.

In Luke 6.11, the scribes and Pharisees are filled with ἄνοια after they witness Jesus’ healing on the Sabbath. Modern English translations, beginning with the RSV, translate the word ἄνοια as rage or fury, whereas older English translations render it as madness, and modern German translations follow Martin Luther by rendering the phrase with terms such as unsinnig (‘wurden ganz unsinnig’) or Unverstand (‘wurden mit Unverstand erfüllt’). This article argues that Plato's explanation of the word ἄνοια in Timaeus 86b provides the typical semantic range of the word; it includes ἀμαθία (the folly of ignorance) and μανία (the folly of madness, or the loss of one's rational faculties), but not anger.1 This twofold usage is reflected in Greek literature from the fifth/fourth century bce through the fifth century ce, including in 2 Tim 3.9, the only other text in which ἄνοια occurs in the New Testament. To say that the scribes and Pharisees are filled with rage in Luke 6.11, therefore, both exceeds the typical function of the word ἄνοια and risks further dehumanising two groups of people who are too often dehumanised by Christian tradition.

Lorenzo Valla's 1452 Latin translation of Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War has gone down in history as the first full rendering of this important classical Greek text into a language that made it accessible for large groups of western European readers. Valla's version is also important because it became the major gateway for the Greek historian into other European vernaculars during the first decades of the sixteenth century, when it spawned a series of indirect translations which constitute an important part of the history of Thucydides's early reception during this period: in 1550 Thomas Nicolls published his English rendering from the French translation of Valla's Latin text by Claude de Seyssel, first distributed in manuscript around 1515 and printed in 1527. This essay will first survey a few samples that illustrate the fragmentary nature of the early reception of Thucydides and then proceed to an examination of the context within which the French version was produced, its political significance, its paratexts, and its material format. It will finally look into the way in which Nicolls repurposed Seyssel's text for his own ends within the milieu of early sixteenth-century English Hellenism.

Andrew Marvell's commendatory poems to Robert Witty and Milton constitute his most explicit statements regarding not only translation but also writing in general, their commonalities revealing a remarkable steadiness in poetics over a period of two decades. The ethics of translation Marvell advocates in \"To His Worthy Friend Doctor Witty\"—ones that are rooted in Puritan tradition and overlap with key ideas from modern-day translation theory—provide a helpful basis for considering the specific issue of handling scripture that is raised in the poem to Milton. In both works, Marvell advocates that an exact essence of meaning is to be translated from source text to target.

In his earliest three books of poetry and prose, Henry Vaughan does not quote any Greek; yet beginning with Flores Solitudinis (1654), he supplies nearly a score of Greek phrases taken from his source text. This interest in Greek is probably the joint product of his enthusiasm for the Jesuit Juan Eusebio Nieremberg and his exposure to texts that incorporated Greek medical terminology. Comparing the original Greek texts and their accompanying Latin translations with Vaughan’s English translations in Flores shows that he had a more than rudimentary knowledge of Greek but was seldom independent of the Latin glosses. While there is enough evidence to establish that Vaughan could read Greek—he certainly read the koine Greek of the New Testament—his use of Greek in his translations seems calculated to demonstrate his command of the language. Vaughan uses Greek text in his writing for an effect: it helps establish his ethos as a learned man at a time when he was refashioning himself as a medical practitioner.

Ancient Rome was a source of widespread and growing fascination in Elizabethan England, and Roman history was ubiquitous in public argument and imaginative writings alike. Translations of classical historians proliferated, as did original works about ancient Rome. Yet the extent and character of Roman influence on the period's literary and political culture have yet to be properly explained. Paulina Kewes illustrates the richness and diversity of contemporary writings on Roman themes, and, second, challenges recent approaches to the uses of the Roman past in the Elizabethanfin de siècleby providing a rigorous reassessment of a key translation: Henry Savile's Tacitus of 1591. Contrary to those who either anachronistically interpret Savile's book as a quasi-republican manifesto or else read it as an intervention in court politics, Kewes shows that at its inception Savile's Tacitus was first and foremost a pointed commentary on international politics and the succession.

Here the stakes involved in rhetorical vividness could scarcely have been higher as the preacher's invocation of the Holy Spirit-brought through language before the faithful- ravished, uplifted, and exhilarated communities of believers, reinforcing their devotion to something vastly greater.14 In the Catholic tradition of identifying with the suffering Christ, emotional intensity became a spiritual tool as each believer's pity for the broken body of Christ, and suffering Christians more generally, pricked the desire to perform good works.15 But even as an innovative Christian grand style was developing in England, pulpit eloquence was criticized as an affront to unadorned spiritual expression-and sacred rhetoric eventually became \"a polemical issue, possibly even a heresy. \"20 Besides referencing these key sources, scholars have also recently detected in early modern culture the influence of Longinus's discussion of phantasia in Peri Hupsous, published in the mid-sixteenth century although not translated into English until 1652.21 Together these ancient rhetorical ideas were filtering into early modern aesthetic and literary theory, along with surviving accounts of ancient (especially Stoic) philosophies of cognition where the quality of an \"impression\" allows the soul to determine the difference between appearance and reality.22 Early modern literary theorists accordingly often praised writing in which the people or events described seemed indistinguishable from their reallife presence. Shakespeare's main source for Julius Caesar was Plutarch's Parallel Lives, which he read in Thomas North's 1579 translation, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Besides the \"Life of Marcus Antonius,\" Shakespeare surely also had Plutarch's \"Life of Marcus Brutus\" in mind: According to Thomas Wright, \"all passions may be distinguished by the dilation enlargement, or diffusion of the heart.\"

For Anne Barton, who reads the play in the context of Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy's history of early Rome, Coriolanus dramatises the futile persistence of obsolescent virtues (the valorisation of battlefield heroics) in an environment of subtler needs and growing political sophistication.2 In Shakespeare and the Popular Voice, Annabel Patterson hints at Shakespeare's sympathy with the idea of popular political representation, proposing that 'there is nothing in the play to challenge that famous interpretation of the tribunate which [. . .] According to Plutarch, Numa instituted and set upon hinges a twofold value system to reflect the respective demands of war and peace: [T]he first [month], which is January, was called after the name of Janus. [. . .] According to Barton, Aufidius' complaint 'might stand as the epigraph for this play as a whole'; for Rossiter, his comment supplies 'the essence of the play'.21 Coriolanus' political message is thus reduced to the concentrated intensity of a stock cube. According to Plutarch, however, the Volscians, having arranged a two-year truce with Rome, were unwilling to renew hostilities and were able to mingle unmolested with the people of Rome.

How does Shakespeare represent war? Guest editor Patrick Gray reviews scholarship to date on the question, in light of contributions to a special issue of Critical Survey, ‘Shakespeare and War’. Drawing upon St. Augustine’s City of God, the basis for later just war theory, Gray argues that progressive optimism regarding the perfectibility of what St. Augustine calls the ‘City of Man’ makes it difficult for modern commentators to discern Shakespeare’s own more tragic, Augustinian sense of warfare as a necessary evil, given the fallenness of human nature. Modern misgivings about ‘honour’ also lead to misinterpretation. As Francis Fukuyama points out, present-day liberal democracies tend to follow Hobbes and Locke in attempting to ‘banish the desire for recognition from politics’. Shakespeare in contrast, like Hegel, as well as latter-day Hegelians such as Fukuyama, Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth, sees the faculty that Plato calls thymos as an invaluable instrument of statecraft.

Les critiques sont divisés sur la façon de lire les références à la religion antique dans l’œuvre de Shakespeare. Bien qu’elles puissent être historiquement justes, ces références peuvent aussi se lire comme autant d’allusions indirectes à la religion chrétienne. Cet article montre que, dans Antony and Cleopatra , Shakespeare présente une version précise de la pratique religieuse antique pour se faire l’écho de débats spirituels renvoyant au contexte protestant contemporain de la représentation théâtrale. Les scènes dans lesquelles les personnages entrent en contact avec la figure antique de l’oracle montrent que Shakespeare explore la dimension spirituelle du récit historique de Plutarque. Le dramaturge utilise ces moments de rencontre avec le divin pour interroger la double narration providentielle qui rend concomitants la chute d’Antoine et l’essor d’Octave Auguste. Cet article se concentre sur les deux scènes où apparaît un oracle, au cours desquelles les personnages interrogent leur destin et, par leur transformation spirituelle, remettent en question leur soumission à la fortune grandissante de César. Critical opinion is divided as to how to read references to ancient religion in Shakespeare’s plays. These references may be historically accurate, or serve as proxy for contemporary Christian thinking. This essay will argue that Antony and Cleopatra uses a culturally informed version of ancient religious practice to represent key spiritual concerns in the early Protestant context in which they were first performed. Scenes in which characters come into contact with the ancient figure of the soothsayer reveal how Shakespeare probes the spiritual dimension of Plutarch’s historical narrative. The dramatist uses these encounters with the divine in order to challenge Plutarch’s providential narrative recounting the ruin of Antony and the rise of Augustus Caesar. This essay focuses on the two scenes with a soothsayer in which characters actively interrogate their historical fortunes, undergoing spiritual transformations that call into question their existence in the service of Caesar’s greater fortune.