Plutarch flourished during the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian at the turn of the first and second centuries, but _The Letter on the Education of a Prince to Trajan_[912] probably is not by him, and the legend that Hadrian was his pupil is a medieval invention. He was born in Boeotia about 46-48 A. D. and was educated in rhetoric and philosophy, science and mathematics, at Athens, where he was a student when Nero visited Greece in 66 A. D. He also made several visits to Rome and resided there for some time. He held various public positions in the province of Achaea and in his small native town of Chaeronea, and had official connections with the Delphic oracle and amphictyony. Artemidorus in the _Oneirocriticon_ states that Plutarch’s death was foreshadowed in a dream.[913] [Sidenote: Superstition in Plutarch’s _Lives_.] With Plutarch’s celebrated _Lives of Illustrious Men_, as with narrative histories in general, we shall not be much concerned, although they of course abound in omens and portents, in bits of pseudo-science which details in his narrative bring to the mind of the biographer, and in cases of divination and magic. Thus theories are advanced to explain why birds dropped dead from mid-air at the shout set up by the Greeks at the Isthmian games when Flamininus proclaimed their freedom. Or we are told how Sulla received from the Chaldeans predictions of his future greatness, how in the dedication to his _Memoirs_ he admonished Lucullus to trust in dreams, and how Lucullus’s mind was deranged by a love philter administered by his freedman in the hope of increasing his master’s affection towards him.[914] Such allusions and incidents abound also of course in Dio Cassius, Tacitus, and other Roman historians. [Sidenote: His _Morals_ or _Essays_.] But we shall be concerned rather with Plutarch’s other writings, which are usually grouped together under the title of _Morals_, or, more appropriately, _Miscellanies and Essays_. Not only is there great variety in their titles, but in any given essay the attention is usually not strictly held to one theme or problem but the discussion diverges to other points. Some are by their very titles and form rambling dialogues, symposiacs, and table-talk, where the conversation lightly flits from one topic to other entirely different ones, never dwelling for long upon any one point and never returning to its starting-point. This dinner-table and drinking-bout type of cultured and semi-learned discourse has other extant ancient examples such as the _Attic Nights_ of Aulus Gellius and the _Deipnosophists_ of Athenaeus, but Plutarch will have to serve as our main illustration of it. His _Essays_ reflect in motley guise and disordered array the fruits of extensive reading and a retentive memory in ancient philosophy, science, history, and literature. [Sidenote: Question of their authenticity.]