No different conclusion will be reached wherever we look in the great collection of the _Moralia_. Take, for instance, the [Sidenote: _The_ Roman Questions.] _Roman Questions_.[200] It may be said that these are confessedly _in alia materia_, but the objection is hasty. We have seen that Plutarch, in the preface to his _Lives_ of Demosthenes and Cicero, pleads his scanty acquaintance with Latin as an excuse for not attempting one of the most obvious and interesting of things, one, moreover, almost peremptorily demanded of him—that is to say, the literary comparison of the two greatest orators, of two of the greatest prose writers, of Greece and Rome respectively. Yet we see from these _Roman Questions_ that, when the subject really interested him, he could pry into Latin matters, of the obscurest and most out-of-the-way kind, with unwearied labour and curiosity, and with a great deal of acuteness to boot. Not an eccentric rite of Latin religion, not a quaint bit of Latin folk-lore, not a puzzling social custom at Rome, can he meet with and hear of, but he hunts up the history and literature of it, turns it over and over in his mind, has traditional or conjectural explanations of it, treats it with all the affectionate diligence of the critical commentator. And yet he is afraid or indisposed to attempt a literary estimate of the authors of the two _Philippics_. Footnote 200: II. 250-320. The Greek title αἴτια is rather “cause” than “question.” But Philemon Holland’s translation of 1603 (recently reprinted, with an introduction by Mr F. B. Jevons, London, 1892) has naturalised this latter version in English.