It is curious that one of the few stories of Plutarch that come from outside sources should concern this very tract and the punishment of a slave. Gellius heard it from the philosopher Taurus after one of his classes. Plutarch, Taurus said, had a worthless slave and ordered him a flogging. The man loudly protested he had done no wrong, and at last, under the stimulus of the lash, taunted his master with inconsistency--what about the fine book on controlling Anger? he was angry enough now. {88} "Then Plutarch, slowly and gently" asked what signs of anger he showed in voice or colour or word? "My eyes, I think, are not fierce; nor my face flushed; I am not shouting aloud; there is no foam on my lip, no red in my cheek; I am saying nothing to be ashamed of; nothing to regret; I am not excited nor gesticulating. All these, perhaps you are unaware, are the signs of anger."[48] Then turning to the man who was flogging the slave, he said, "In the meantime, while I and he are debating, _you_ go on with your business."[49] The story is generally accepted, and it is certainly characteristic. The philosopher, feeling his pulse, as it were, to make sure that he is not angry, while his slave is being lashed, is an interesting and suggestive picture, which it is well to remember. How long Plutarch lived we do not know. He refers to events of the year 104 or 105, and in his _Solon_ he speaks of Athens and Plato each having an unfinished masterpiece, so that he cannot have known of the intention of the Emperor Hadrian to finish the temple of Zeus Olympics.[50] All that this need imply is that the _Solon_ was written before 125 A.D. As to his death, it is certainly interesting when we recall how full of dreams and portents his Biographies are, to learn from Artemidorus' great work on the Interpretation of Dreams (written some forty years later) that Plutarch, when ill, dreamed that he was ascending to heaven, supported by Hermes. Next day he was told that this meant great happiness. "Shortly after he died, and this was what his dream and the interpretation meant. For ascent to heaven means destruction to a sick man, and the great happiness is a sign of death."[51] Plutarch might well have accepted this himself. Such was Plutarch's life--the life of a quiet and simple-minded Greek gentleman, spent amid scenes where the past predominated over the present,--_nullum sine nomine saxum_, where Antiquity claimed him for her own by every right that it has ever had upon man. The land of his fathers, the literature, the art, the philosophy, the faith, and the reproduction of the {89} good old life in the pleasant household[52]--everything conspired to make him what he was. We now come to his significance in the story of the conflict of religions in the Roman Empire. [Sidenote: Plutarch not a philosopher]