During the height of the Roman Empire, famous historians such as Polybius, Livy and Plutarch documented the rise of the Roman Republic, and the organization and histories of other nations, while statesmen like Julius Caesar, Cicero and others provided us with examples of the politics of the republic and Rome's empire and wars.

The traditional account of Roman history, which has come down to us through Livy, Plutarch, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and others, is that in Rome's first centuries it was ruled by a succession of seven kings.

Of his written works, none have survived except as fragments embedded in the works of later authors like Cicero, Seneca, Galen, Plutarch, and others.

So too could the first major English author to write in this style, William Painter, who borrowed from, amongst others, Herodotus, Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, Claudius Aelianus, Livy, Tacitus, Giovanni Battista Giraldi, and Bandello himself.

Plutarch, on the other hand, was given to “ tendencies to stereotype, to polarize, and to exaggerate that are inherent in the propaganda surrounding his subjects .” Furthermore, because of the unlikelihood that Shakespeare would have had direct access to Plutarch ’ s Greek Lives and probably read them through a French translation from a Latin translation, his play, then, constructs Romans with an anachronistic Christian sensibility that might have been influenced by St. Augustine ’ s Confessions among others.

In his own era, his writings on almost all the principal divisions of philosophy made Posidonius a renowned international figure throughout the Graeco-Roman world and he was widely cited by writers of his era, including Cicero, Livy, Plutarch, Strabo ( who called Posidonius " the most learned of all philosophers of my time "), Cleomedes, Seneca the Younger, Diodorus Siculus ( who used Posidonius as a source for his Bibliotheca historia Library "), and others.

Several fragments, chiefly anecdotes and strictures of various kinds upon the character of nations and individuals, are preserved by Athenaeus, Plutarch and others.

The form of the Saturnalia is copied from Plato's Symposium and Gellius's Noctes atticae ; the chief authorities ( whose names, however, are not quoted ) are Gellius, Seneca the philosopher, Plutarch ( Quaestiones conviviales ), Athenaeus and the commentaries of Servius and others on Virgil.

Plutarch ( 1st and 2nd centuries ), Thomas Aquinas ( 13th century ), Nicholas Remy ( 16th century ), and Henri Boguet ( 16th and 17th centuries ), among others, disagreed, saying that demons did not know lust or desire and cannot have good feelings like love ; as jealousy would be a consequence of love, they could not be jealous.

In Babylon, he designed the funerary monument to Alexander's general Hephaestion ( died in 324 BC ), which was described by Diodorus Siculus, Arrian, Strabo, Plutarch and others.

The etiological myth explaining how Athens acquired this name through the legendary contest between Poseidon and Athena was described by Herodotus, Apollodorus, Ovid, Plutarch, Pausanias and others.

While others like Plutarch were obviously much more akin to the Greek of their day.

He translated the Life of Otho in the fifth volume of Dryden's Plutarch, and also edited a translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, to which Addison, Pope, and others contributed.

Painter borrows from Herodotus, Boccaccio, Plutarch, Aulus Gellius, Aelian, Livy, Tacitus, Quintus Curtius ; from Giovanni Battista Giraldi, Matteo Bandello, Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, Giovanni Francesco Straparola, Queen Marguerite de Navarre and others.

The phrase may describe Greek efforts to explain others ' beliefs and myths, as when Herodotus describes Egyptian religion in terms of perceived Greek analogues, or when Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch document Roman cults, temples, and practices under the names of equivalent Greek deities.

In 1508 Ringmann made the first translation of Julius Caesar's Commentaries into German with supplemental lives by Suetonius, Plutarch, and others.

According to Plutarch, out of 6, 000 Spartans, only 200 survived, the others preferring honorable death to disgrace.

Posidonius calls him Athenion and makes him a Peripatetic philosopher, whereas others, Pausanias, Appian, and Plutarch, call him Aristion, and Appian calls him an Epicurean philosopher.

Plutarch states it to have been fear of her husband, together with hatred of his cruel and brutal character, and ascribes these feelings principally to the representations of Pelopidas, when she visited him in his prison.

Most of these data have been recorded by Plutarch, Florus, Cicero, Dio ( Dion ) Cassius and Dionysius of Halicarnassus ( L. 2 ).

Plutarch criticised Herodotus in his essay " On The Malignity of Herodotus ", describing Herodotus as " Philobarbaros " ( barbarian-lover ), for not being pro-Greek enough, which suggests that Herodotus might actually have done a reasonable job of being even-handed.

Compare the carved and incised " sacred glyphs " hieroglyphs, which have had a longer history in English, dating from the first Elizabethan translation of Plutarch, who adopted " hieroglyphic " as a Latin adjective.

Some " calumnious fictions " were written about Herodotus in a work titled On the Malice of Herodotus, by Plutarch, a Theban by birth, ( or it might have been a Pseudo-Plutarch, in this case " a great collector of slanders "), including the allegation that the historian was prejudiced against Thebes because the authorities there had denied him permission to set up a school.

Plutarch states that, when questioned by Scipio as to who was the greatest general, Hannibal is said to have replied either Alexander or Pyrrhus, then himself, or, according to another version of the event, Pyrrhus, Scipio, then himself.

Upon crossing the Rubicon, Caesar, according to Plutarch and Suetonius, is supposed to have quoted the Athenian playwright Menander, in Greek, " the die is cast ".

Most information we have on the myths of Osiris is derived from allusions contained in the Pyramid Texts at the end of the Fifth Dynasty, later New Kingdom source documents such as the Shabaka Stone and the Contending of Horus and Seth, and much later, in narrative style from the writings of Greek authors including Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus.

The architects Mnesikles and Callicrates are said to have called the building Hekatompedos (" the hundred footer ") in their lost treatise on Athenian architecture, and, in the 4th century and later, the building was referred to as the Hekatompedos or the Hekatompedon as well as the Parthenon ; the 1st-century AD writer Plutarch referred to the building as the Hekatompedon Parthenon.

Plutarch said the inhabitants of Caria carried the emblem of the rooster on the end of their lances and relates that origin to Artaxerxes, who awarded a Carian who was said to have killed Cyrus the Younger at the battle of Cunaxa in 401 B. C " the privilege of carrying ever after a golden cock upon his spear before the first ranks of the army in all expeditions " and the Carians also wore crested helmets at the time of Herodotus, for which reason " the Persians gave the Carians the name of cocks ".

The knowledge we have of them derives from accounts of later philosophical writers ( especially Aristotle, Plutarch, Diogenes Laërtius, Stobaeus and Simplicius ), and some early theologians, ( especially Clement of Alexandria and Hippolytus of Rome ).

Plutarch indicates that, on account of his mother's background, Themistocles was considered something of an outsider ; furthermore the family appear to have lived in an immigrant district of Athens, Cynosarges, outside the city walls.

Since it was his long-standing advocacy of Athenian naval power which enabled the Allied fleet to fight at all, and it was his stratagem that brought about the Battle of Salamis, it is probably not an exaggeration to say, as Plutarch does, that Themistocles " is thought to have been the man most instrumental in achieving the salvation of Hellas ".

All three chroniclers agree that Themistocles's next move was to contact the Persian king ; in Thucydides, this is by letter, while Plutarch and Diodorus have a face-to-face meeting with the king.

Plutarch provides the most evocative version of this story: But when Egypt revolted with Athenian aid ... and Cimon's mastery of the sea forced the King to resist the efforts of the Hellenes and to hinder their hostile growth ... messages came down to Themistocles saying that the King commanded him to make good his promises by applying himself to the Hellenic problem ; then, neither embittered by anything like anger against his former fellow-citizens, nor lifted up by the great honor and power he was to have in the war, but possibly thinking his task not even approachable, both because Hellas had other great generals at the time, and especially because Cimon was so marvelously successful in his campaigns ; yet most of all out of regard for the reputation of his own achievements and the trophies of those early days ; having decided that his best course was to put a fitting end to his life, he made a sacrifice to the gods, then called his friends together, gave them a farewell clasp of his hand, and, as the current story goes, drank bull's blood, or as some say, took a quick poison, and so died in Magnesia, in the sixty-fifth year of his life ... They say that the King, on learning the cause and the manner of his death, admired the man yet more, and continued to treat his friends and kindred with kindness.

His wife Porcia was reported to have committed suicide upon hearing of her husband's death, although, according to Plutarch ( Brutus 53 para 2 ), there is some dispute as to whether this is the case: Plutarch states that there is a letter in existence that was allegedly written by Brutus mourning the manner of her death.

According to Plutarch, a seer had foreseen that Caesar would be harmed not later than the Ides of March ; and on his way to the Theatre of Pompey ( where he would be assassinated ), Caesar met the seer and joked, " The ides of March have come ", meaning to say that the prophecy had not been fulfilled, to which the seer replied " Aye, Caesar ; but not gone.

Most of these have been recorded by Plutarch ( Lives of Romulus, Numa Pompilius and Camillus ), Florus ( Book I, I ), Cicero ( The Republic VI, 22: Scipio's Dream ), Dio ( Dion ) Cassius and Dionysius of Halicarnassus ( L. 2 ).

Sulla seems to have supported Cinna as a compromise candidate, but clearly did not trust him, as seen from an anecdote from Plutarch.

Plutarch criticised Herodotus in his essay " On The Malignity of Herodotus ", describing Herodotus as " Philobarbaros " ( barbarian-lover ), for not being pro-Greek enough, which suggests that Herodotus might actually have done a reasonable job of being even-handed.

His colleague John Baines, on the other hand, says that temples may have kept written accounts of myths, which later were lost, and that Plutarch could have drawn on such sources to write his narrative.

According to a version of the Ariadne legend noted by Plutarch, Theseus abandoned Ariadne at Amathousa, where she died giving birth to her child and was buried in a sacred tomb.

It should be noted that both Diodorus and Plutarch considered that the charges were false, and made solely for the purposes of destroying Themistocles.

Plutarch noted, " Then the poor, who had been ejected from their land, no longer showed themselves eager for military service, and neglected the bringing up of children, so that soon all Italy was conscious of a dearth of freemen, and was filled with gangs of foreign slaves, by whose aid the rich cultivated their estates, from which they had driven away the free citizens.

" Plutarch also noted that on the battlefield, Nicias was recognized as a fair combatant, fighting as courageously as any other soldier.

3 ; pages 259-260 ) have noted that Plutarch ( in the Moralia, V ) reported that Typhon / Seth in Egyptian and Greek myth was identified as the shadow of the Earth which covers the Moon during lunar eclipses.

The ancient Greek historians Ctesias and Plutarch noted that Cyrus was named from Kuros, the Sun, a concept which has been interpreted as meaning " like the Sun " by noting its relation to the Persian noun for sun, khor, while using-vash as a suffix of likeness.

-translated by Rex Warner, with Introductions and notes by Robin Seager, as Fall of the Roman Republic, Six Lives by Plutarch: Marius, Sulla, Crassus, Pompey, Caesar, Cicero ( Penguin Books, 1958 ; with noted added by Robin Seager, 1972 )

Plutarch noted that the phalangites ( phalanx soldiers ) carried a small shield on their shoulder.