For this class, we'll be doing a close reading of an excerpt from Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus. Start with the block quote beginning on page 206, "An extraordinary and revolutionary action..."

While reading through the passage, consider the following topics:

• AUTHORITY. Who is writing this passage? What expertise or viewpoint do they have?
• PURPOSE. Why did the author write this? Do you think he had an agenda or a reason for portraying the Spartans a specific way?
• ACCURACY. Based on what you've learned about ancient Sparta, what do you think of the information presented here? Does anything sound incorrect, exaggerated, or biased? If so, why?

Read the following excerpt (from an entry on Plutarch from The Encyclopedia of Ancient History):

"Plutarch distinguished his biographical enterprise from history proper (Alex. 1.1–2). He was not uninterested in the facts of the past, nor was he averse to writing vivid historical narrative. But his biographies also include anecdotes of a highly personal nature, and his focus is often more concentrated on the motivations and responses of his subjects than on the wider historical setting in which they find themselves. This is because his principal concern was a moral one: the presentation and examination of the characters of great men. The guiding principle is Platonic: the apprehension of virtue transcends specific situations, because all virtue is the same virtue. Hence, in the Parallel lives, virtue transcends ethnicity as well as time and place – in only one of his pairings are Plutarch's heroes contemporaries. And the parallelism of Plutarch's Parallel lives helps his readers to extend their attention beyond even the two individual (and differing) subjects in each pairing, in order to contemplate and to grasp the eternal virtues enacted and illustrated (sometimes by way of failure) in their biographies. Toward this end, Plutarch included subjects whose character was not without blemish or complication – this is true, especially of his Coriolanus-Alcibiades and Pyrrhus-Marius – and he justifies the inclusion of his Demetrius-Antony on the grounds that even negative examples can be morally useful. There is little that is surprising in the moralism of Plutarchan biography: mildness, courage, prudence, and other uncontroversial virtues recur. What is distinctive about Plutarch's characterizations are their warmth and sympathy: praise and blame are reserved for the synkrisis."

For more information on reading for content, argument, analysis, and evaluation, consider these guides as well:

The discipline of Classics typically uses Chicago style for citations:

Notes-Bibliography System (Humanities Style)