Start Plutarch a decade early. Finish with the real thing.
And Marcus Aurelius, and Machiavelli, and Beowulf, and…
🤓 😍 📚
We take the subjects other publishers skip and build each one into a ladder of books, from first picture book to a prep book for the real Parallel Lives.
Ages 0–4
Read to them
Ages 3–7
Read to them + Read together
Ages 6–10
Read together + Read alone
Ages 10–14
Final prep for the original source
Newest release
Ulysses
Classic Literature · Ages 0–10
Ulysses, James Joyce’s whole Dublin day, at three reading levels. The toddler book plants one ordinary day that turns out to be full of wonders. The picture book follows kind Mr. Bloom from breakfast to bedtime as he wanders the city and walks a lost young man home. And the chapter book tells the whole day, and lets a child feel Joyce’s daring idea: that an ordinary person, watched closely and kindly, is a quiet kind of hero.
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Theseus & Romulus
Ages 0–14 · 4 books
Two young men, born centuries and a sea apart, each took a crowd of quarreling strangers and turned them into a city: one built Athens, one built Rome, and both have outlived their founders by three thousand years.
Alexander & Caesar
Ages 0–14 · 4 books
Two of the most successful conquerors who ever lived were driven by the same thing: a hunger to be the greatest, with no point at which either one ever felt he had enough.
Marcus Aurelius
Ages 0–10 · 3 books
The most powerful man in the world kept a private notebook about how to be a better person, and he never meant a single word of it to be read.
Alfred the Great
Ages 0–12 · 4 books
A king who hides in a swamp, burns a stranger’s bread, then rallies a comeback that saves an entire country, and his real secret weapon turns out to be books.
Machiavelli
Ages 0–10 · 3 books
For five hundred years “Machiavellian” has meant sneaky and untrustworthy, but the man behind the word was neither.
Stoicism
Ages 0–10 · 3 books
A toppled block tower on a Tuesday morning is the exact problem Marcus Aurelius was working out in his journal: what do you do when something you cannot control wrecks your day?
Don Quixote
Ages 0–10 · 3 books
The most famous novel in the world, and most people don’t read it until college, if they read it at all.
Beowulf
Ages 0–10 · 3 books
The oldest story in English literature nearly burned in a library fire in 1731, and survived by inches.
New series
Plutarch’s Lives for Kids
The two-thousand-year-old paired lives, built at four reading levels, from first picture book to Plutarch-ready.
Free printable pack
Read Plutarch with your kids
Get the free Plutarch family pack: the 25-pair Parallel Lives wall map, a parent’s guide to starting early, and a four-level sampler of Alexander & Caesar. Plus one email when each new book goes live. No noise.