Lineages
Every great book stands on older ones. Homer gave Virgil his wanderings and his war; Virgil walked Dante through Hell. Bring any book to the centre: what it draws on is to its left, what draws on it to its right.
Of its time
We don’t know yet if this was inspired by another work, do you?
Its heirs
Shakespeare found his Caesar, Brutus and Antony in Plutarch's Lives, in Thomas North's 1579 translation, and followed it closely, from the soothsayer's warning to the ghost that visits Brutus before Philippi.
The play follows Plutarch's Life of Antony from Rome to Actium and Alexandria. Enobarbus' picture of Cleopatra on her barge on the Cydnus is North's prose of Plutarch, set almost unchanged into verse.
Plutarch's Life of Coriolanus, the proud general who turns on Rome and is turned back by his mother, gave Shakespeare his story and, in Volumnia's plea, many of his words.
Timon the misanthrope appears in passing in Plutarch's Life of Antony, with the epitaph he wrote for himself; Shakespeare built his play from that and from Lucian's dialogue on Timon.
The whole web
Every line in the atlas, by place or by time. Tap a work to bring it to the centre.