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.

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.

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

The myth was fully developed into something like an " official ", chronological version in the Late Republican and early Imperial era ; Roman historians dated the city's foundation to between 758 and 728 BC, and Plutarch reckoned the twins ' birth year as c. 771 BC.

Plutarch, in like manner, tells of the early religion of the Romans, that it was imageless and spiritual.

And the parchment, like the staff, is called scytale, as the thing measured bears the name of the measure .— Plutarch, Lives ( Lysander 19 ), ed.

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

This is a Hellenism, like sylva for classical Latin silva, reinforced by the fact that our two major sources, Plutarch and Appian, wrote in Greek, and call him Σύλλα.

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.

He particularly focuses on Plutarch's use of distancing language like " as they say " and " some say " () which implies that Plutarch was himself unwilling to vouch for the historicity of the Sacred Band.

The works of the latter two, however, survived long enough for later authors like Plutarch, Diodorus, and Polyaenus to base their works on.

The phrase was well-known to later authors ; Aristophanes paraphrases it in The Wasps, and Plutarch, who disliked Herodotus, says the author " would dance away the truth " like Hippocleides.

According to Mommsen, the story of his death, ( for which see Plutarch ) looks like an historical version of the abolition of blood-revenge.

While the Greek Laconophiles like Plutarch had praised the Spartans, they did not extend this admiration to the Dorians as a whole.

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

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.

As Plutarch puts it, a senate " allays and qualifies the fiery genius of the royal office " and gives some stability and safety to the commonwealth, like the ballast in a ship.

Ancient writers like Plutarch, Strabo and, more explicitly, Pliny the Elder and Ptolemy, testified to the real existence of the Canary Islands.

Described sometime as a " mountain nymph " ( Plutarch ), she is usually regarded as a water nymph and somehow her cult also involved some link with childbirth, like the Greek goddess Ilithyia.

He is important as the teacher of Proclus, and, like Plutarch and Proclus, as a commentator on Plato and Aristotle.

Maximus of Tyre ( c. 180 ), like Plutarch, endeavoured to bridge the gulf between a transcendent God and matter by the assumption of numerous daemons as intermediaries.

The Moralia include On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander the Great — an important adjunct to his Life of the great general — On the Worship of Isis and Osiris ( a crucial source of information on Egyptian religious rites ), and On the Malice of Herodotus ( which may, like the orations on Alexander's accomplishments, have been a rhetorical exercise ), in which Plutarch criticizes what he sees as systematic bias in the Father of History's work ; along with more philosophical treatises, such as On the Decline of the Oracles, On the Delays of the Divine Vengeance, On Peace of Mind and lighter fare, such as Odysseus and Gryllus, a humorous dialog between Homer's Odysseus and one of Circe's enchanted pigs.

Plutarch describes Achaean citizens equipped with the thureos as skirmishing at a distance like peltasts but also as having spears for hand-to-hand combat.

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.

Other noteworthy and famous Greek historians include Plutarch ( 2nd century AD ), who wrote several biographies, the Parallel Lives, in which he wanted to assess the morality of its characters by comparing them in pairs, and Polybius ( 3nd century BC ), who developed Thucydides's method further, becoming one of the most objective historians of classical antiquity.

Themistocles can still reasonably be thought of as " the man most instrumental in achieving the salvation of Greece " from the Persian threat, as Plutarch describes him.

When the Persian fleet finally arrived at Artemisium after a significant delay, Eurybiades, who both Herodotus and Plutarch suggest was not the most inspiring commander, wished to sail away without fighting.

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 ".

According to Plutarch, when Demosthenes first addressed himself to the people, he was derided for his strange and uncouth style, " which was cumbered with long sentences and tortured with formal arguments to a most harsh and disagreeable excess ".

In the early 2nd century AD, Plutarch wrote the most complete ancient account of the myth in De Iside et Osiride, an analysis of Egyptian religious beliefs.

After 200 BC at any given time there were two priests of Apollo, who were in charge of the entire sanctuary ; Plutarch, who served as a priest during the late first century and early second century AD, gives us the most information about the organization of the oracle at that time.

However, most commonly, these refer to an observation made by Plutarch, who presided as high priest at Delphi for several years, who stated that her oracular powers appeared to be associated with vapors from the Kerna spring waters that flowed under the temple.

The most important sources for French tragic theatre in the Renaissance were the example of Seneca and the precepts of Horace and Aristotle ( and contemporary commentaries by Julius Caesar Scaliger and Lodovico Castelvetro ), although plots were taken from classical authors such as Plutarch, Suetonius, etc., from the Bible, from contemporary events and from short story collections ( Italian, French and Spanish ).

Additionally, painters, artists and historians of the 19th century portrayed Cleopatra as applying the asp to her breast even though the most reliable source, Plutarch, writes that she was bitten on the arm.

The Greek historian Plutarch describes him as ' one of the most gifted rulers of his time '.

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.

The artistic unity of his work suffered severely from the frequent and lengthy digressions, of which the most important was On the Athenian Demagogues in the 10th book of the Philippica, containing a bitter attack on many of the chief Athenian statesmen, and generally recognized as having been freely used by Plutarch in several of the Lives.

According to Plutarch, their house became an intellectual centre in Athens, attracting the most prominent writers and thinkers, including the philosopher Socrates.

The paradox is most notably recorded by Plutarch in Life of Theseus from the late 1st century.

Plutarch ( 46 – 120 AD ), a native of the village of Chaeronea, is the source of the most substantial surviving account of the Sacred Band.

But this is refuted by Lucullus ' conduct during his administration of Africa province ( c. 77-75 B. C., see above ), the period of his career most conspicuously missing from the Greek biography by Plutarch.

Lucullus is reported by Plutarch to have lost his mind at the end and went intermittently mad as he aged ; Plutarch, however seems to be somewhat ambivalent as to whether the factor behind the apparent madness was what he seems to most lean towards which was the administration of some sort of love potion or if it was at least in part feigned as a political protection against changes in the Roman state, such as the rise of the popular party.

Arrian, Diodorus, and Plutarch all mention the battle, with Arrian providing the most detail.

Plutarch describes her as one of ‘ most nobly born and admirable women of her time ,’ though most other sources are considerably less flattering ( and likely more accurate ).