Catholic though Plutarch is, however, in his appreciation of virtue, and gently though he scans his brother man--does he not forgive the baseness of Aratus in the sentence: “I write this, however, not with any desire to denounce Aratus, for in many ways he was a true Greek and a great one, but out of pity for the weakness of human nature, which, even in characters so notably disposed towards excellence, cannot produce a nobility that is free from blame”?--in spite of this imaginative understanding and sympathy, he has himself a rigid and almost Puritanical standard of virtue. His ideal is an ideal of temperance--of temperance in the pleasures of the body as well as in the love of money and the love of glory. His Alexander the Great is a figure of mixed passions, but he commends him most warmly on those points on which he was temperate, as when the beautiful wife of Dareius and her companions fell into his hands. “But Alexander, as it would seem,” writes Plutarch, “considering the mastery of himself a more kingly thing than the conquest of his enemies, neither laid hands upon these women, nor did he know any other before marriage, except Bersine.” As for the other women, “displaying in rivalry with their fair looks the beauty of his own sobriety and self-control, he passed them by as though they were lifeless images for display.” Again, when Plutarch writes of the Gracchi, he praises them as men who “scorned wealth and were superior to money,” and, if he loves Tiberius the better of the two, it is because he was the more temperate and austere and could never have been charged, as Caius was, with the innocent extravagance of buying silver dolphins at twelve hundred and fifty drachmas the pound. Agis, the youthful king of Sparta, who (though brought up amid luxury) “at once set his face against pleasures” and attempted to banish luxury from the State by restoring equality of possessions, brings together in his person the virtues that inevitably charm Plutarch. Like so many of the old moralists, Plutarch cries out upon riches and pleasures as the great corrupters, and Agis, the censor of these things, comes into a Sparta ruined by gold and silver as a beautiful young redeemer. He dies, a blessed martyr, and his mother, when she stands over his murdered body, kisses his face and cries: “My son, it was thy too great regard for others, and thy gentleness and humanity, which have brought thee to ruin, and us as well.” But, even here, Plutarch does not surrender himself wholly to Agis. He will not admit that Agis, any more than the Gracchi, was a perfect man. “Agis,” he says, “would seem to have taken hold of things with too little spirit.” He “abandoned and left unfinished the designs which he had deliberately formed and announced owing to a lack of courage due to his youth.” Plutarch’s heroes are men in whom a god dwells at strife with a devil--the devil of sin and imperfection. He loves them in their