Ammonius asks Plutarch what he, being a Boeotian, has to say for Cadmus, the Phoenician who reputedly settled in Thebes and introduced the alphabet to Greece, placing alpha first because it is the Phoenician name for ox — which, unlike Hesiod, the Phoenicians considered not the second or third, but the first of all necessities.

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.

Plutarch has the ship docking at Cyme in Aeolia, and Diodorus has Themistocles making his way to Asia in an undefined manner.

In it he writes of Isis, describing her as: " a goddess exceptionally wise and a lover of wisdom, to whom, as her name at least seems to indicate, knowledge and understanding are in the highest degree appropriate ..." and that the statue of Athena ( Plutarch says " whom they believe to be Isis ") in Sais carried the inscription " I am all that has been, and is, and shall be, and my robe no mortal has yet uncovered.

Plutarch also states that Set steals and dismembers the corpse only after Isis has retrieved it.

Surely much intervening literature regarding Cydippe the priestess of Hera has been lost, since Plutarch was writing about 300 years after Herodotus first told the story.

Plutarch relates several opinions on the end of C. Marius: one, from Posidonius, holds that Marius contracted pleurisy ; Gaius Piso has it that Marius walked with his friends and discussed all of his accomplishments with them, adding that no intelligent man ought leave himself to Fortune.

By contrast, gynæcocracy, meaning ' rule of women ', has been in use since the 17th century, building on the Greek word found in Aristotle and Plutarch.

Plutarch has recorded the following: " When someone said to him: ' Except for being king you are not at all superior to us ,' Leonidas son of Anaxandridas and brother of Cleomenes replied: ' But were I not better than you, I should not be king.

This has been disputed by Head because Plutarch states they carried spears shorter than the Roman Triarii and by Dally because they could not have carried an unwieldy pike at the same time as a heavy Roman style shield.

Alexander appears to have been quite jealous of Antipater's victory ; according to Plutarch, the king wrote in a letter to his viceroy: " It seems, my friends that while we have been conquering Darius here, there has been a battle of mice in Arcadia ".

Through texts of Publius Ovidius Naso and Plutarch, the myth about the origin of the Rhodope mountains and the Balkan mountain range has reached us: " Rhodopa and Hemus were brother and sister.

According to the political journalist and classicist Garry Wills, although Shakespeare has Porcia die by the method Plutarch repeats, but rejects, " the historical Porcia died of illness ( possibly of plague ) a year before the battle of Philippi "...“ but Valerius Maximus wrote that she killed herself at news of Brutus ’ s death in that battle.

The passage of Plutarch has created much controversy.

It is towards these daemones that we direct purifications and apotropaic rites, all kinds of divination, the art of reading chance utterances, and so on ’… This account differs from that of the early Academy in reaching back to the other, Archaic, view of daemones as souls, and thus anticipates the views of Plutarch and Apuleius in the Principate … It clearly implies that daemones can cause illness to livestock: this traditional dominated view has now reached the intellectuals ”.

It is not explicitly stated by Plutarch, but it has been assumed that the two phalanxes engaged each other during the battle.

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.

Plutarch said that the shrine of Athena, which he identifies with Isis, in Sais carried the inscription " I am all that hath been, and is, and shall be ; and my veil no mortal has hitherto raised.

In this myth she is shown as counselor and guide to King Numa in the establishment of the original framework of laws and rituals of Rome, and in this role she is somehow uniquely in Roman mythology associated with " sacred books "; Numa ( Latin " numen " designates " the expressed will of a deity ") is reputed to have written down the teachings of Egeria in " sacred books " that he made bury with him ; when some chance accident brought them back to light some 400 years later, they were deemed by the Senate inappropriate for disclosure to the people and destroyed by their order ; what made them inappropriate was certainly of " political " nature but apparently has not been handed down by Valerius Antias, the source that Plutarch was using. Dionysius of Halicarnassus hints that they were actually kept as a very close secret by the Pontifices.

The precise level of her relationship to Numa has been described diversely sometimes as Amica, but ordinarily has been qualified with the more respectful coniuncta (" consort "); Plutarch is very evasive as of the actual mode, and hints that Numa himself entertained a level of ambiguïty.

Gaius Stern has identified a relevant, little known passage, Plutarch Moralia 505C, which adds a story not told in Tacitus.

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.

She is described as such in both Livy and Plutarch ; but in Dionysius, Macrobius, and another tradition recorded by Plutarch, she was instead the wife of Hostus Hostilius, a Roman champion at the time of Romulus.

Plutarch in his work De mulierum virtutibus (" On the Virtues of Women ") describes how the tyrant of Cyrene, Nicocrates, was deposed by his wife Aretaphila of Cyrene around the year 50 BC

Cato the Elder said, according to his biographer Plutarch, " that the man who struck his wife or child, laid violent hands on the holiest of holy things.

Plutarch also repeats the story of swallowing charcoal, but disbelieves it: As for Porcia, the wife of Brutus, Nicolaüs the philosopher, as well as Valerius Maximus, relates that she now desired to die, but was opposed by all her friends, who kept strict watch upon her ; whereupon she snatched up live coals from the fire, swallowed them, kept her mouth fast closed, and thus made away with herself.

# That they should not be induced to it by the charms and insinuations of a wife ; for ( says Plutarch ) the wise lawgiver with good reason thought that no difference was to be put between deceit and necessity, flattery and compulsion, since both are equally powerful to persuade a man from reason.

Jacob Hoschander supporting the traditional identification suggested that Vashti may be identical to a wife of Artaxerxes mentioned by Plutarch, named Stateira.

Plutarch also says Spartacus ' wife, a prophetess of the same tribe, was enslaved with him.

Plutarch mentions that the Athenians saw the phantom of King Theseus, the mythical hero of Athens, leading the army in full battle gear in the charge against the Persians, and indeed he was depicted in the mural of the Stoa Poikile fighting for the Athenians, along with the twelve Olympian gods and other heroes.

The order of months in the Roman calendar was January to December since King Numa Pompilius in about 700 BC, according to Plutarch and Macrobius.

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.

Plutarch ( as well as Roman sources ) accorded the first Roman triumph to Romulus, in celebration of his victory over King Acron of the Caeninenses, traditionally coeval with Rome's foundation in 753 BCE: this was held to explain the unique ritual costume of the vir triumphalis.

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 ).

In his writing Plutarch also makes mention of when Alexander's secondary naval commander, Onesicritus, was reading the Amazon passage of his Alexander history to King Lysimachus of Thrace who was on the original expedition, the king smiled at him and said " And where was I, then?

Plutarch, in his On Isis and Osiris, indicates that the King and Queen of Byblos, who, unknowingly, have the body of Osiris in a pillar in their hall, are Melcarthus ( i. e. Melqart ) and Astarte ( though he notes some instead call the Queen Saosis or Nemanūs, which Plutarch interprets as corresponding to the Greek name Athenais ).

According to Plutarch, Hagnothemis was the authority upon which rested the belief that Antipater poisoned Alexander the Great, after he had heard King Antigonus speak of it.

* Agis IV ( 265 BC – 241 BC ), a Spartan king ; Plutarch included a chapter on him in his Parallel Lives

* " The Comparison of Tiberius and Caius Gracchus with Agis and Cleomenes ", by Plutarch, translated by John Dryden

For example, the transitory success of Agis and Cleomenes of ancient Sparta in restoring the constitution of Lycurgus was considered by Plutarch to be counterrevolutionary in a positive sense.

The accusation of Polybius is repeated by Plutarch, but it comes with rather a bad grace from the latter writer, since there can be little doubt that his lives of Agis and Cleomenes are taken almost entirely from Phylarchus, to whom he is likewise indebted for the latter part of his life of Pyrrhus.