turnes and honour he had received by such men, he dedicated diverse of his bookes unto them, and among others, the Lives unto Senecio, and the 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 capitals have always had a natural attraction for literary genius, as it is in them alone that it can hope to be appreciated.  And if this be the case at the present day, how much more must it have been so before the invention of printing, at a time when it was more usual to listen to books read aloud than to read them oneself?  Plutarch journeyed to Rome just as Herodotus went to Athens, or as he is said to have gone to the Olympian festival, in search of an intelligent audience of educated men.  Whether his object was merely praise, or whether he was influenced by ideas of gain, we cannot say.  No doubt his lectures were not delivered gratis, and that they were well attended seems evident from Plutarch’s own notices of them, and from the names which have been preserved of the eminent men who used to frequent them.  Moreover, strange though it may appear to us, the demand for books seems to have been very brisk even though they were entirely written by hand.