Plutarch’s method in handling quotations from philosophers who wrote in poetry is more satisfactory. It is only rarely that the thought is put in his own words,[116] or that the quotation consists of less than a full line. Sometimes lines are grouped which do not belong together, as ap. _Moral._ 607 C and 618 B. In some instances the text itself seems to be at fault.[117] In general, however, the poetic form protected such quotations from change, and the poetic form was naturally retained in quotations for the purpose of embellishment. I may add that Plutarch rarely neglects to give the name of the author from whom he quotes. As to the source of these poetic quotations, we cannot doubt that Plutarch sometimes quotes Empedokles from the original. A literary man could hardly fail to be acquainted with his poems, and it is by no means likely that the quotations _Moral._ 607 C, 1111 F, 1113 are taken from an intermediate source. Five of the quotations from Parmenides, on the other hand, were not new to the readers of Plato and Aristotle, and the two remaining ones, together with some of the lines from Empedokles, as I have tried to show elsewhere,[118] were probably drawn from a collection of passages on the moon. There is no evidence that Plutarch knew Parmenides at first hand. Many passages of Empedokles also had become common property in the time of Plutarch, and in some instances Plutarch no doubt found collections of quotations suitable for his purpose, so that we cannot attribute all the single lines quoted from Empedokles to Plutarch’s own study of his poems.