Moralia, XIII

“This miscellany of essays makes Plutarch the Montaigne or Hazlitt of antiquity. He is best known for his Lives, a series of parallel biographies of heroic exemplification describing the great men of Greece and Rome. But the Moralia are as rich, and even more diverse, containing much to instruct and entertain. Written in Greek during the course of Plutarch’s life—he flourished about 100 CE—they had an enormous influence on western culture until a century or two ago. Some are classics in every sense of the word… This is agreeable and civilised stuff, refreshingly contemporaneous despite having been matured for two thousand years in the casks of literature.”—A.C. Grayling, Financial Times