Then there's Thucydides, with the Athenian general Nicias attempting to dissuade the Greeks from attacking Sicily, but finding he'd only encouraged them by his outline of the challenge they faced. There's Xenophon, not this time remembering Socrates, but instead narrating how he found himself in modern-day Iraq, stranded with a Greek army before the gates of Babylon. Socrates does appear, though, in an extract from Plato, talking to his friends about poetry on the day of his execution. And we read from Josephus, very vividly, about the characteristics of Herod's fortified palace of Masada (in modern Israel).
The extract from Plutarch is part of his account of Brutus, speculating that he was possibly Julius Caesar's illegitimate son, something Shakespeare must have read about when writing his play but doesn't refer to. The great Yale critic Harold Bloom thinks it might be the key to Caesar's words “Et tu, Brute” (Even you, Brutus) when Brutus, along with the other conspirators, stabs him.
From Roman literature itself you have Caesar's own account (detailed, but still slightly ambiguous) of how his army built a bridge over the Rhine, the description from Virgil of the Trojan horse, Livy's account of the rape of the Sabine women, Pliny's description of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79AD, and Ovid's fictional letter from Dido to Aeneas (which must surely have been a model for Alexander Pope's 18th-century English poem Eloisa to Abelard).
Another 18th-century reappearance is brought to mind by Juvenal's third satire on Roman life. Pots falling from windows endanger the passer-by, he writes, which Samuel Johnson, writing in imitation of him 1,600 years later in his poem London, provocatively up-dated to Here falling houses thunder on your head/And here a female atheist talks you dead.
The book ends with St. Jerome, the fourth century creator of the Latin bible known as the Vulgate, invoking the brevity of life in what was by then true Christian fashion, but which had its roots nevertheless in Horace and the other Roman love poets urging their readers to enjoy life's pleasures while they still had the chance.
This little book is a delight to hold and to read. At a mere NT$320, you would, if you're remotely interested in books, be hard-pressed to find anything better anywhere on which to spend your money.
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