Alexander, Caesar – Plutarch or ?

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  • December 25, 2015 at 12:37 pm
    Tristan
    Participant

    Okay, I would like to have Makayla read about Alexander the Great (and then Caesar and Marc Antony when we reach Rome).  She’s a 9th grader, strong reader.  Here is my question – what would you recommend for reading?

    I have heard of reading the biographies of each of these three in Plutarch’s Lives.  I have Great Books of the Western World and it includes Plutarch’s Lives.  Should I use that or is there a better translation that is recommended?

    Also, we’re spending the next month (January) finishing up Ancient Greece and moving into Ancient Rome (February).  I have Augustus Caesar’s World by Genevive Foster but haven’t read it myself yet.  Would that be a good one to use instead for Caesar and Marc Antony?  Or maybe both?  I’m set with all the other kids, they are easy as all eight of them are 5th grade and younger.  But it’s such a jump between that and my first high schooler and I’m just undecided on which resources to use.  Opinions?

    December 25, 2015 at 1:00 pm
    Spreading the Feast
    Participant

    Have you seen the Plutarch study guides on the Ambleside Online website? They contain the text plus some additional pointers and thought. We think they’re absolutely brilliant!

    December 25, 2015 at 7:53 pm
    Tristan
    Participant

    Thank you!  I’ve not looked around on AO’s site but I’ll see if I can find those to check out.

    December 25, 2015 at 8:07 pm
    Tristan
    Participant

    Drat, no guides yet for any of the ones we’re doing.  Oh well.

    December 25, 2015 at 9:29 pm
    sheraz
    Participant

    Tristan – Augustus Caesar’s World only briefly deals with the Julius Caesar/Mark Antony stuff in the beginning of the book since it deals with Julius’ nephew, Augustus. It is a great read – I learned a lot from it, so if it is a choice between them, use the ACW for Roman history. (CM used the Lives more to teach character by showing how we live and that the choices we make affect others for both good and bad. The comparisons are great for this.)

    We are reading through the Caesar and Antony lives now. They are interesting in themselves and you can get them online. (I haven’t done Alexander the Great.) The ones that Anne White uses from AO is the Dryden-Hough translation which is available free online. We have used her guides as well and to be honest, I really don’t think that you will need a guide for these. Since you read the KJV  of the Bible, the language won’t be that different for her, so if you have a dictionary, you should be fine. I actually printed out the 2 Lives on my computer and each was less than 20 pages. If she read a few pages each day, it wouldn’t take that long to do both Lives.

    As a side note – we have TOTALLY enjoyed listening to the Arkangel production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Highly recommend that you listen/read along. SO cool! 😉  Even my littles listened in (not required, though) and seemed to enjoy it. A lot of Shakespeare’s ideas and material came from reading North’s translation of Plutarch.

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