Our Young Folks' Plutarch

Meet the ancient world's most powerful figures not as statues in a museum, but as living, breathing people with all the ambition, fear, wit, and vulnerability that makes humans human. Rosalie Kaufman has distilled Plutarch's immortal biographies into something a young reader can hold close. Here is Alexander the Great not as an invincible conqueror but as a young man who wept when he realized there were no more worlds to conquer. Here is Julius Caesar navigating political treachery with sharper wit than any sword. Plutarch believed that a man's character reveals itself not in his greatest victories but in his smallest moments - a cutting remark, a quiet mercy, a split-second decision when no one was watching. This is history stripped of dust and dates, brought alive through the particular alchemy of personality. Originally written around 100 AD, these portraits of Greeks and Romans have shaped how the Western world thinks about leadership, virtue, and what it means to live a remarkable life. For any young reader curious about where we came from, this is the ancient world made intimate.