II. PLUTARCH
BY PROFESSOR W. S. FERGUSON
PLUTARCH 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〖For a volume of selected “Lives,” see Harvard Classics, xii.〗 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.”