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Plutarch: Mestrius Plutarch
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Mestrius Plutarchus, known as Plutarch, was a Greek author who lived from about A.D. 50 to 125. He wrote many essays on the morals, manners, and customs of the ancient world, in which he tried to promote the traditional moral values of the Greco-Roman culture. Although he never mentions the new religion of Christianity in his works, the spirit of his work is so congenial to Christian ethics that he has been called a representative of "unconscious Christianity" and a "seeker after the unknown God." In his Conjugal Precepts (
Mestrius Plutarch (c.45-c.120) was a Greek historian, biographer, and essayist. Born in the small town of Chaeronea, in the Greek region known as Boeotia, probably during the reign of the Roman Emperor Claudius, Mestrius Plutarch travelled widely in the Mediterranean world, including twice to Rome. He had anumber of influential Roman friends, including Soscius Senecio and Fundanus, both important Senators, to whom some of his later writings were dedicated. He lived most of his life at Chaeronea, he was initiated into the mysteries of the Greek god Apollo. However his duties as the senior of the two priests of Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi (where he was responsible for interpreting the auguries of the Pythia or priestess/oracle) apparently occupied little of his time - he led a most active social and civic life and produced an incredible body of writings, much of which is still extant.
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Mestrius Plutarchus (Greek Μεστρίος Πλούταρχος), usually known in English as Plutarch, was a Greek historian, biographer and essayist, born in Chaironeia, Boeotia in the mid-1st century AD. He is known for his Moralia, a collection of essays on ethical and cultural subjects, and his Parallel Lives, biographies of forty-six prominent Greeks and Romans arranged in pairs, usually followed by a short comparison. The Lives were intended as moral lessons rather than as history,[1] but are nonetheless valuable as historical accounts. Of the Moralia, the 113 Quaestiones Romanae (Roman questions) are particularly valuable as a record of Roman religious practices, marriage and other customs.
In addition to his duties as a priest of the Delphic temple, Plutarch was ... a magistrate in Chaeronea and he represented his home on various missions to foreign countries during his early adult years. His friend Lucius Mestrius Florus, a Roman consul, sponsored Plutarch as a Roman citizen and, according to the 10th Century historian George Syncellus, late in life, the Emperor Hadrian appointed him as procurator of Achaea - a position that entitled him to wear the vestments and ornaments of a consul himself.
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Most of what is known of Plutarch comes from his own work. He was a young man in the time of Nero.[2] His father's name is not known, but his grandfather was called Lamprias,[3] and his great grandfather Nicarchus.[4] He spent some time in Italy, including in Rome where he taught philosophy, but did not master Latin until late in life, when he began to study it seriously.[5] He tells us in the Moralia that he was a priest at Delphi, a fact confirmed by an inscription on the base of a statue of Hadrian there. The inscription ... provides his Roman nomen, Mestrius, indicating he was a Roman citizen, probably enfranchised by the consul Lucius Mestrius Florus.[6] According to the Suda he was himself raised to the consulship by Trajan (emperor 98-117),[7] and had a son called Lamprias who wrote a catalogue of his works.[8] The date of his death is not known.
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