By way of completing his education he proceeded to visit Egypt.  The “wisdom of the Egyptians” always seems to have had a fascination for the Greeks, and at this period Alexandria, with its famous library and its memories of the Ptolemies, of Kallimachus and of Theokritus, was an important centre of Greek intellectual activity.  Plutarch’s treatise on Isis and Osiris is generally supposed to be a juvenile work suggested by his Egyptian travels.  In all the Graeco-Egyptian lore he certainly became well skilled, although we have no evidence as to how long he remained in Egypt.  He makes mention indeed of a feast given in his honour by some of his relatives on the occasion of his return home from Alexandria, but we can gather nothing from the passage as to his age at that time.

One anecdote of his early life is as follows:—­“I remember,” he says, “that when I was still a young man, I was sent with another person on a deputation to the Proconsul; my colleague, as it happened, was unable to proceed, and I saw the Proconsul and performed the commission alone.  When I returned I was about to lay down my office and to give a public account of how I had discharged it, when my father rose in the public assembly and enjoined me not to say I went, but we went, nor to say that I said, but we said, throughout my story, giving my colleague his share.”

The most important event in the whole of Plutarch’s pious and peaceful life is undoubtedly his journey to Italy and to Rome; but here again we know little more than that he knew but little Latin when he went thither, and was too busy when there to acquire much knowledge of that tongue.  His occupation at Rome, besides antiquarian researches which were afterwards worked up into his Roman Lives, was the delivery of lectures on philosophical and other subjects, a common practice among the learned Greeks of his day.  Many of these lectures, it is conjectured, were afterwards recast by him into the numerous short treatises on various subjects now included under the general name of Moralia.  Plutarch’s visit to Rome and business there is admirably explained in the following passage of North’s ’Life of Plutarch’:—­“For my part, I think Plutarch was drawn to Rome by meanes of some friends he had there, especially by Sossius Senecio, that had been a Consull, who was of great estimation at that time, and namely under the Empire of Trajan.  And that which maketh me think so, is because of Plutarch’s own words, who saith in the beginning of his first book of his discourse at the table, that he gathered together all his reasons and discourses made here and there, as well in Rome with Senecio, as in Greece with Plutarch and others.  Not being likely that he would have taken the pains to have made so long a voyage, and to have come to such a city where he understood not their vulgar tongue, if he had not been drawn thither by Senecio, and such other men; as also in acknowledgement of the good