Simonides was adept too at lively compositions suited to dancing ( hyporchema ), for which he is commended by Plutarch.

We are told by Plutarch, that Solon " is much commended for his law concerning wills ; for before his time no man was allowed to make any, but all the wealth of deceased persons belonged to their families ; but he permitted them to bestow it on whom they pleased, esteeming friendship a stronger tie than kindred, and affection than necessity, and thus put every man's estate in the disposal of the possessor ; yet he allowed not all sorts of wills, but required the following conditions in all persons that made them:

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.

It is reported by Plutarch, that the lenient discipline of the troops under Scipio's command, and the exaggerated expense incurred by the general, provoked the protest of Cato ; that Scipio immediately afterwards replied angrily, saying he would give an account of victories, not of money ; that Cato left his place of duty after the dispute with Scipio about his alleged extravagance, and returning to Rome, condemned the uneconomical activities of his general to the senate ; and that, at the joint request of Cato and Fabius, a commission of tribunes was sent to Sicily to examine the behavior of Scipio, who was found not guilty upon the view of his extensive and careful arrangements for the transport of the troops.

In his Life of Marius, Plutarch writes that Marius's return to power was a particularly brutal and bloody one, saying that the consul's " anger increased day by day and thirsted for blood, kept on killing all whom he held in any suspicion whatsoever.

Plutarch, in his treatise, Of the Face appearing in the roundle of the Moone, cites the poet Agesinax as saying of that orb,

So to ease their minds, and free them from any superstitious thoughts or forebodings of evil, Timoleon halted, and concluded an address suitable to the occasion, by saying, that a garland of triumph was here luckily brought them, and had fallen into their hands of its own accord, as an anticipation of victory: the same with which the Corinthians crown the victors in the Isthmian games, accounting chaplets of parsley the sacred wreath proper to their country ; parsley being at that time still the emblem of victory at the Isthmian, as it is now at the Nemean sports ; and it is not so very long ago that the pine first began to be used in its place .” “” ( Plutarch, Life of Timoleon ).</ ref > Victors could also be honored with a statue or an ode.

According to Plutarch, Caesar remarked on that decision saying, " Today the victory had been the enemy's, had there been any one among them to take it.

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.

Plutarch records a laconic saying of the Dorians attributed to Lycurgus.

Among ancient sources, the poet Simonides, another near-contemporary, says the campaign force numbered 200, 000 ; while a later writer, the Roman Cornelius Nepos estimates 200, 000 infantry and 10, 000 cavalry, of which only 100, 000 fought in the battle, while the rest were loaded into the fleet that was rounding Cape Sounion ; Plutarch and Pausanias both independently give 300, 000, as does the Suda dictionary.

" Simonides calls painting silent poetry and poetry painting that speaks "— Plutarch.

Concerning the liberal use of the death penalty in the Draconic code, Plutarch states: " It is said that Drakon himself, when asked why he had fixed the punishment of death for most offences, answered that he considered these lesser crimes to deserve it, and he had no greater punishment for more important ones.

Plutarch tells us that Fabius believed that the disaster at Lake Trasimene was due, in part, to the fact that the gods had become neglected.

Plutarch states that Metilius " boldly applied himself to the people in the behalf of Minucius ", and had Minucius granted powers equivalent to those of Fabius.

By this, Plutarch probably means that as Plebeian Tribune, Metilius had the Plebeian Council, a popular assembly which only Tribunes could preside over, grant Minucius quasi-dictatorial powers.

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 claimed that the army had fought against three million men during the Gallic Wars, of whom one million died, and another million were enslaved.

Plutarch writes that many Romans found the triumph held following Caesar's victory to be in poor taste, as those defeated in the civil war had not been foreigners, but instead fellow Romans.

Whatever conflicts existed between the two men, Antony remained faithful to Caesar but it is worth mentioning that according to Plutarch ( paragraph 13 ) Trebonius, one of the conspirators, had ' sounded him unobtrusively and cautiously ... Antony had understood his drift ... but had given him no encouragement: at the same time he had not reported the conversation to Caesar '.

Both Livy ( in Latin, living in Augustus ' time ) and Plutarch ( in Greek, a century later ), described how Rome had developed its legislation, notably the transition from a kingdom to a republic, by following the example of the Greeks.

Plutarch suggests that the rivalry between the two had more sordid beginnings, when they competed over the love of a boy: "... they were rivals for the affection of the beautiful Stesilaus of Ceos, and were passionate beyond all moderation.

In itself, this did not mean that Themistocles had done anything wrong ; ostracism, in the words of Plutarch, " was not a penalty, but a way of pacifying and alleviating that jealousy which delights to humble the eminent, breathing out its malice into this disfranchisement.

Plutarch reports that, as might be imagined, Artaxerxes was elated that such a dangerous and illustrious foe had come to serve him.

Plutarch mentions an interesting element of Epirote folklore regarding Achilles: In his biography of King Pyrrhus, he claims that Achilles " had a divine status in Epirus and in the local dialect he was called Aspetos " ( meaning unspeakable, unspeakably great, in Homeric Greek ).

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.

As a boy Demosthenes had a speech impediment: Plutarch refers to a weakness in his voice of " a perplexed and indistinct utterance and a shortness of breath, which, by breaking and disjointing his sentences much obscured the sense and meaning of what he spoke.

According to Plutarch, this is the reason the Egyptians had a taboo against eating fish.

A century after Plutarch, Aelian also said that Peistratus had been Solon's eromenos.

In his Life of Antony, Plutarch remarks that " judging by the proofs which she had had before this of the effect of her beauty upon Caius Caesar and Gnaeus the son of Pompey, she had hopes that she would more easily bring Antony to her feet.

A closer look at this intertextual link reveals that Shakespeare used, for instance, Plutarch ’ s assertion that Antony claimed a genealogy that led back to Hercules, and constructed a parallel to Cleopatra by often associating her with Dionysus in his play.

Plutarch was writing over 400 years after Epaminondas's death, and is therefore very much a secondary source, but he often explicitly names his sources, which allows some degree of verification of his statements.

Plutarch later wrote that Agesilaus was a king of the traditional Spartan ideals, often seen wearing his traditional cloak which was threadbare.

Roman historians like Suetonius, Tacitus, Plutarch, and Josephus often spoke of " tyranny " in opposition to " liberty ".

" Other works of Guevara are the Decada de los Césares ( Valladolid, 1539 ), or " Lives of the Ten Roman Emperors ," in imitation of the manner of Plutarch and Suetonius ; and the Epistolas familiares ( Valladolid, 1539 – 1545 ), sometimes called " The Golden Letters ," often printed in Spain, and translated into all the principal languages of Europe.

Hardy wrote quickly, often adapting plays from French, foreign and classical sources ( Ovid, Lucian, Plutarch, Xenophon, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Josephus, Miguel de Cervantes, Jorge de Montemayor, Boccaccio, François de Rosset ).

Plutarch was writing some 600 years after the events in question, and is therefore a secondary source, but he often names his sources, which allows some degree of verification of his statements.

Roman-era historians such as Livy and Plutarch often refer to these early coins as denarii, but modern numismatic references consider these coins as anonymous Roman silver, produced before the standardization of the denarius around 211 B. C.

Plutarch was writing some 600 years after the events in question, and is therefore a secondary source, but he often names his sources, which allows some degree of verification of his statements.

Plutarch is also often associated with the Second Sophistic movement as well, although many historians consider him to have been somewhat aloof from its emphasis on rhetoric, especially in his later work.

Greed is often regarded by the ancient sources, particularly his biographer Plutarch, as his major character fault and also his motive for going to war.

According to Plutarch, agrionia was celebrated at night with only women accompanied by the priests of Dionysus, who often wore black garments.