Plutarch's Lives, Volume I by Plutarch
page 21 of 561 (03%)
page 21 of 561 (03%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
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 |
|