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Engraving facing the title page of an 18th-century edition of Plutarch's Lives. The Parallel Lives (Ancient Greek: Βίοι Παράλληλοι, Bíoi Parállēloi; Latin: Vītae Parallēlae) is a series of 48 biographies of famous men written in Greek by the Greco-Roman philosopher, historian, and Apollonian priest Plutarch, probably at the beginning of the second century.
Plutarch believed that animals were of higher moral virtue because they could not act against their moral nature, while humans can. [172] The Stoics believed that animals naturally achieved the stoic way of life. [173] Ancient writers had a concept of “animal envy” which is the idea that animals were envious of human skills. [168]
James Boswell quoted Plutarch on writing lives, rather than biographies, in the introduction to his own Life of Samuel Johnson. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the transcendentalists were greatly influenced by the Moralia and in his glowing introduction to the five-volume, 19th-century edition, he called the Lives "a bible for heroes". [49]
Plutarch read widely, and often combined several sources for his Lives, although he mostly followed one source at a time for a particular event or topic. [10] Plutarch cites seven authors in the Life of Caesar: Asinius Pollio was a writer of the first century BC. A soldier who served under Caesar then Octavian, he turned to literature at the ...
Over 1.5 million living animal species have been described—of which around 1 million are insects—but it has been estimated there are over 7 million in total. Animals range in size from 8.5 millionths of a metre to 33.6 metres (110 ft) long and have complex interactions with each other and their environments, forming intricate food webs .
While the first chapter of Book of Genesis describes how God gave human beings dominion over animals, this is tempered throughout the Torah by injunctions to show kindness and to respect animals. Severing a limb from a live animal and eating it was forbidden (Genesis 9:4), cattle were to be rested on Biblical Sabbath (Exodus 20:10; 23:12), a ...
According to Pliny, it was the king of Caucasian Albania who delighted Alexander by giving him a dog which had attacked and beaten both a lion and an elephant. [6] There is also the story of Alexander meeting Sophytes, a ruler of an area probably around Jech Doab in Punjab. [7]
In zoology, megafauna (from Greek μέγας megas "large" and Neo-Latin fauna "animal life") are large animals. The most common thresholds to be a megafauna are weighing over 46 kilograms (100 lb) [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ] (i.e., having a mass comparable to or larger than a human ) or weighing over a tonne , 1,000 kilograms (2,205 lb) [ 2 ] [ 5 ] [ 6 ...