“I am satisfied that your modesty sought not the empire, which yet you have always studied to deserve by the excellency of your manners; and by so much the more are you esteemed worthy of this honour, by how much you are free from the ambition of desiring it. I therefore congratulate both your virtue and my own good fortune, if at least your future government shall prove answerable to your former merit; otherwise you have involved yourself in dangers, and I shall infallibly be subject to the censures of detracting tongues; because Rome will never support an emperor unworthy of her, and the faults of the scholar will be upbraided to the master. Thus Seneca is reproached, and his fame still suffers, for the vices of Nero. The miscarriages of Quintilian’s scholars have been thrown on him; and even Socrates himself is not free from the imputation of remissness on the account of his pupil, Alcibiades. But you will certainly administer all things as becomes you, if you still continue what you are; if you recede not from yourself, if you begin at home, and lay the foundation of government on the command of your own passions; if you make virtue the scope of all your actions, they will all proceed in harmony and order. I have set before you the force of laws and civil constitutions of your predecessors, which if you imitate and obey, Plutarch is then your guide of living; if otherwise, let this present letter be my testimony against you, that you shall not ruin the Roman empire under the pretence of the counsel and authority of Plutarch.”[7] It may be conjectured, and with some show of probability, from hence, that our author not only collected his materials, but also made a rough draft of many of these parallel Lives at Rome; and that he read them to Trajan for his instruction in government; and so much the rather I believe it, because all historians agree that this emperor, though naturally prudent and inclined to virtue, had more of the soldier than the scholar in his education, before he had the happiness to know Plutarch; for which reason the Roman Lives, and the inspection into ancient laws, might be of necessary use to his direction. And now for the time of our author’s abode in the imperial city: if he came so early as Vespasian, and departed not till Trajan’s death, as is generally thought, he might continue in Italy near forty years. This is more certain, because gathered from himself,—that his Lives were almost the latest of his works; and therefore we may well conclude, that having modelled, but not finished them at Rome, he afterwards resumed the work in his own country; which perfecting in his old age, he dedicated to his friend Senecio still living, as appears by what he has written in the proem to his Lives.