intro.1
There remains, then, the possibility that the Sayings are in the main the work of Plutarch, written by him in practically their present form, and that some of these were copied into the Lives rather than from the Lives. Plutarch himself tells us, in Moralia 464 f and 457 D,In 457 d if. Plutarch gives some examples of the kind of anecdotes which he is wont to collect, and some of these
are identical with those found in the Sayings of Kings and
Commanders.
that he was in the habit of making collections of notes of this sort, and certainly nothing could be more natural than that the author of the Lives, to say nothing of the Moralia, should get together some of his material in more accessible form, especially in view of the difficulty, in ancient times, of consulting books, which were written and kept in the form of a roll. The arrangement of the Sayings of Kings and Commanders is roughly chronological, with some retrogressions. The Greeks (and Persians) and the Romans are grouped separately. If these sayings were extracted from the Lives by a writer as dullwitted as many would have us believe he was, it might reasonably be expected that he would have jumbled the Greeks and the Romans together as they are alternated, in the Lives, but such is not the case. It will be noted that the names of the Spartans whose sayings are recorded in a similar collection are arranged in alphabetical order for convenience in consultation.
