Very few ancient Greek authors were read in any form in the Latin West during the Middle Ages. Though hugely popular in antiquity – and in Byzantium – Plutarch’s works are no exception to this. When the early Italian Renaissance humanists permanently changed the course of Greek studies in the West, Plutarch became one of the most widely read authors of the period. This chapter will discuss how Plutarch’s name first began to resurface in twelfth-century Latin writers, how he was among the earliest Greek writers to be translated into the modern vernaculars, and how, in a long series of Latin translations, the Parallel Lives became bestsellers in the fifteenth century. The chapter will also discuss how his works influenced Renaissance ideas about ethics and political thought.

Does the concept of natural rights have roots, logical and historical, in the concept of natural law? Our answer is, ‘it depends’. By this, we mean that some conceptions across Western history do not in fact allow for the derivation of natural rights in the subjective sense. In contrast, others are conceived such that natural rights follow logically therefrom. Our premise is that talking about ‘natural law’ in the singular – at least in the period from Roman times to sixteenth-century – represents a distortion of on-the-ground realities.

Chapter 2 is a prelude to the main account of reception but offers some analysis of the first great reference to Plutarch in the post-classical world in John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (c. 1159). Despite the apocryphal nature of John’s Plutarch, the association of Plutarch as tutor to the Emperor Trajan was a trope which provided greater weight to the authority of his writing in the subsequent history of political thought. In the latter part of this chapter, I give a brief synopsis of a few essays (“On Homer” and “On the Education of Children”) which are now deemed apocryphal but which for many early modern scholars formed a legitimate part of Plutarch’s corpus. I discuss how we should consider these texts in the context of a history of Plutarch reception. I also discuss briefly the development of scholarship on Plutarch in early Renaissance Italy.

Tyranny’s lengthy history in European debate lends itself to a linear narrative, and this chapter inserts, into that frame, debates over tyranny from archaic Greece to the contemporary era. Linearity often presents a false picture of continuity, progression and coherence, none of which can be bestowed upon tyranny. Rather, there are controversies and contingencies: the rise and fall of empires, the emergence of the Catholic Church, colonialism, constitutionalism, democracy and individual and collective roles contribute to contemporary tyranny’s complexity. Progressing through a history of Western thought – including its imperialism – highlights how changing attitudes towards governance affected accounts of tyranny. This account reveals how Roman hatred of monarchs, attitudes towards gender, the invention of race, the emergence of contemporary democracy and consequent concerns over majority tyranny demonstrate a consistent concern built into a European tyrannical theory subsequently projected onto the rest of the world.

This chapter explores how classical ideas of the gift were utilised by medieval writers. The chapter focuses on three particularly influential writers from medieval England active across a range of genres: John of Salisbury, William of Malmesbury and Matthew Paris. The chapter shows that these writers were highly familiar with classical ideas of the gift and drew extensively upon them in shaping their own writings.