ἱστορίαι Historiai
Plut. Comparison of Demetrius and Antony 2 Comparison of Demetrius and Antony, Plutarch; served verbatim
As regards their resolution to win empire, this was blameless in the case of Demetrius, who sought to subdue and reign as king over men who were accustomed to subjection and kings; but in the case of Antony it was harsh and tyrannical, since he tried to enslave the Roman people when it had just escaped from the sole rule of Caesar. Moreover, as regards the greatest and most brilliant of his achievements, namely, the war against Cassius and Brutus, it was to deprive his country and his fellow citizens of their liberty that the war was waged. But Demetrius, even before he felt the constraints of adversity, kept on liberating Greece and expelling their garrisons from her cities, unlike Antony, whose boast was that he had slain in Macedonia the men who had given liberty to Rome. And besides, as regards their love of giving and the largeness of their gifts, one of the things for which Antony is lauded, Demetrius far surpassed in this, and bestowed more upon his enemies than Antony ever gave to his friends. It is true that for ordering the body of Brutus to be robed and buried Antony won a good name; but Demetrius gave obsequies to all his enemy’s dead, and sent his prisoners back to Ptolemy with money and gifts.

The Greek stands ready in the workroom; the English is served. Both faces will read together.

← Plut. Comparison of Demetrius and Antony 1 contents Plut. Comparison of Demetrius and Antony 3 →

Filed here — the addresses this episode attests; counted by the house’s first pass
Antony — a life Brutus — a candidate entry Caesar — a candidate entry Demetrius — a life Ptolemy — a candidate entry

Comparison of Demetrius and Antony, Plutarch — translated by Bernadotte Perrin, 1914–1926
Perseus Digital Library — Plutarch, Parallel Lives (Perrin translation) · Bernadotte Perrin, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press / William Heinemann, 1914–1926
license: public-domain (US: pre-1930 publication); Perseus digital edition CC BY-SA 4.0, attribution recorded in ops/corpus-staging/SOURCES.md