the end of his book against curiosity, I suppose that he
taught in Rome in the time of Titus and of Domitian: for touching this
point, he maketh mention of a nobleman called Rusticus, who being one
day at his lecture, would not open a letter which was brought him from
the Emperor, nor interrupt Plutarch, but attended to the end of his
declamation, and until all the hearers were gone away; and addeth also,
that Rusticus was afterwards put to death by the commandment of
Domitian. Furthermore, about the beginning of the Life of Demosthenes,
Plutarch saith, that whilst he remained in Italy and at Rome, he had no
leizure to study the Latine tongue; as well for that he was busied at
that time with matters he had in hand, as also to satisfie those that
were his followers to learne philosophie of him."[A]

[Footnote A: North's 'Plutarch,' 1631, p. 1194.]

A list of all Plutarch's writings would be a very long one. Besides the
Lives, which is the work on which his fame chiefly rests, he wrote a
book of 'Table Talk,' which may have suggested to Athenaeus the plan of
his 'Symposium.'

The most remarkable of his minor works is that 'On the Malignity of
Herodotus.' Grote takes this treatise as being intended seriously as an
attack upon the historian, and speaks of the "honourable frankness which
Plutarch calls his malignity." But it is probably merely a rhetorical
exercise, in which Plutarch has endeavoured to see what could be said
against so favourite and well-known a writer.

He was probably known as an author before he went to Rome. Large
capitals have always had a natural attraction for literary genius, as it
is in them alone that it can hope to be appreciated. And if this be the
case at the present day, how much more must it have been so before the
invention of printing, at a time when it was more usual to listen to
books read aloud than to read them oneself? Plutarch journeyed to Rome
just as Herodotus went to Athens, or as he is said to have gone to the
Olympian festival, in search of an intelligent audience of educated men.
Whether his object was merely praise, or whether he was influenced by
ideas of gain, we cannot say. No doubt his lectures were not delivered
gratis, and that they were well attended seems evident from Plutarch's
own notices of them, and from the names which have been preserved of the
eminent men who used to frequent them. Moreover, strange though it may
appear to us, the demand for books seems to have