Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/191

 II. PLUTARCH

LUTARCH was a kindly man, well educated in philosophy and rhetoric. He lived between 46 and 125 A. D. in little, out-of-the-way Bœotian Chæronea. He spent his days lecturing and in friendly correspondence and conversation with many cultivated contemporaries among both Greeks and Romans. He was fortunate in his age. "If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would," says Gibbon, "without hesitation, name that" in which Plutarch wrote. It was the twilight time of antiquity; and in the works of Plutarch are clearly mirrored the charm and languor, the incentive to stroll and loiter, and the dimming of vision, characteristic of the hour before "the sun sank and all the ways were darkened."

PLUTARCH'S SUPERSTITION His versatility is remarkable, and he has ever at hand an apt illustration for every situation; but his fertility tempts him to digress, and his learning is not matched by critical power. An admirable example of his mode of thought as well as an epitome of his natural philosophy appears in the following passage from his "Life of Pericles": "There is a story, that once Pericles had brought to him from a country farm of his, a ram's head with one horn, and that Lampon, the diviner, upon seeing the horn grow strong and solid out of the midst of the forehead, gave it as his judgment, that, there being at that time two potent factions, parties, or interests in the city, the one of Thucydides and the other of Pericles, the government would come about to that one of them in whose ground or estate this token or indication of fate had shown itself. But that Anaxagoras, cleaving the skull in sunder, showed to the bystanders