Know yourself. Feast. Plato. The feast of the Seven Sages. Plutarch.

Plato's "Feast" is a central work for world culture, interpreting love not only as a natural, but also as a social and creative principle. Many customs of falling in love and love relationships, as well as ideas about the value of a creative personality, go back to the "Feast". Bright and relief images of Socrates' interlocutors, heightened drama, playing with a variety of poetic and prose styles and now make the "Feast" an inexhaustible resource of the "novel" style of thinking. In a sense, The Feast is not just a project of a novel as a literary work, but of a novel as a social institution. The meaning of Plato's complicated dialogue is far from being reduced to the glorification of idealized love, which is involuntarily suggested by outdated translations and interpretations. The text of the Feast is given in the translation by Professor Alexander Markov of the Russian State University of Economics, taking into account the latest philosophical and philological interpretations of Plato's central work.
Plutarch is called in different ways: "ancient humanist" (referring to his slight nostalgia for the past, attention to private life and philosophy of active existence), "educator of Europe" (his "Biographies" were read by great people of many centuries, up to Napoleon, Goethe and Beethoven), "good Plutarch" (provincial, a family man, a sociable person, as we would say). But it is better to call him a teacher of erudites: we all love stories and wise thoughts, anecdotes and paradoxes - and Plutarch teaches us to really love all this, not as an inarticulate fascination with someone else's wit and brilliance of speech, but as a worthy subject of a worthy person.
This edition includes "The Feast of the Seven Sages" and "Sayings of Kings and Generals" translated by M. L. Gasparov and with an introductory article by A. V. Markov.