nine volumes of his discourse at the table, with the treaty, How a man
may know that he profiteth in vertue. Now for the time, considering what
he saith in the end of his book against curiosity, I suppose that he
taught in Rome in the time of Titus and of Domitian: for touching this
point, he maketh mention of a nobleman called Rusticus, who being one
day at his lecture, would not open a letter which was brought him from
the Emperor, nor interrupt Plutarch, but attended to the end of his
declamation, and until all the hearers were gone away; and addeth also,
that Rusticus was afterwards put to death by the commandment of
Domitian. Furthermore, about the beginning of the Life of Demosthenes,
Plutarch saith, that whilst he remained in Italy and at Rome, he had no
leizure to study the Latine tongue; as well for that he was busied at
that time with matters he had in hand, as also to satisfie those that
were his followers to learne philosophie of him."[A]

[Footnote A: North's 'Plutarch,' 1631, p. 1194.]

A list of all Plutarch's writings would be a very long one. Besides the
Lives, which is the work on which his fame chiefly rests, he wrote a
book of 'Table Talk,' which may have suggested to Athenaeus the plan of
his 'Symposium.'

The most remarkable of his minor works is that 'On the Malignity of
Herodotus.' Grote takes this treatise as being intended seriously as an
attack upon the historian, and speaks of the "honourable frankness which
Plutarch calls his malignity." But it is probably merely a rhetorical
exercise, in which Plutarch has endeavoured to see what could be said
against so favourite and well-known a writer.

He was probably known as an author before he went to Rome. Large