Plutarch's Lives, Volume I: Part I

This book was the principal source for Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, and Antony and Cleopatra. It was also one of two books Mary Shelley chose for the blind hermit to use for Frankenstein's monster's education, with the other being the Bible.
Plutarch's Lives remains one of the world's most profoundly influential literary works. Written at the beginning of the second century A.D., it forms a brilliant social history of the ancient world by comparing the "parallel lives" of notorious Greeks and Romans. A moralist of the highest order, Plutarch said that "the virtues of these great men serv[e] me as a sort of looking glass, in which I may see how to adjust and adorn my own life."