Vides paral·leles

Have you ever wanted to draw similarities between the lives of two people who were not family or even did not know each other? The classical author Plutarch, in the second century AD already did. Plutarch is a Greek by birth and culture and at the same time a citizen of the Roman Empire who had the idea of ??comparing the biography of some prominent Greek figures with that of so many other well-known Romans. Hence the collection of Parallel Lives. The author, he says himself, wants to forge the biography from anecdotes, so that readers can grasp its character. In this selection we offer in full two of the twenty-three pairs of biographies that make up the Parallel Lives that have come down to us: on the one hand, that of Alexander the Great, which is paired with that of Julius Caesar and, on the other hand, Demetrius, the so-called Poliorcetes, or the destroyer of cities, confronted Marc Antoni, the great rival of Octavius ??Augustus. In a very flat way, Professor Antònia Soler brings us closer to the author and opens the door, with this translation, to a world of conquests, intrigues, plans and projects, miseries and glories, passions. love stories (some of which are fatal, such as Cleopatra VII of Egypt) and anecdotes -some well-known and popular, some not so much- with biographies that have educated generations and generations of Europeans in the over the centuries.