But, as he says, he was a citizen of a small town, and he did not wish to make it smaller,[31] and he went back to Chaeronea and obscurity. A city he held to be an organism like a living being,[32] and he never cared for a man on whom the claims of his city sat loosely--as they did on the Stoics.[33] The world was full of Greek philosophers and rhetoricians, lecturing and declaiming, to their great profit and glory, but Plutarch was content to stay at home, to be magistrate and priest. If men laughed to see him inspecting the measurement of tiles and the carrying of cement and stones--"it is not for myself, I say, that I am doing this but for my native-place."[34] This was when he was Telearch--an office once held by Epameinondas, as he liked to remember. Pliny's letters show that this official inspection of municipal building operations by honest and capable men was terribly needed. But Plutarch rose to higher dignities, and as Archon Eponymos he had to preside over feasts and sacrifices.[35] He was also a Boeotarch. The Roman Empire did not leave much political activity even to the free cities, but Plutarch loyally accepted the new era as from God, and found in it many blessings of peace and quiet, and some opportunities still of serving his city. He held a priesthood at Delphi, with some charge over the oracle and a stewardship at the Pythian games. He loved Delphi, and its shrine and antiquities,[36] and made the temple the scene of some of his best dialogues. "The kind Apollo (_ho philos_)," he says, "seems to heal the questions of life, and to resolve them, by the rules he gives to those who ask; but the questions of thought he himself suggests to the philosophic temperament, waking in the soul an appetite that will lead it to truth."[37]