Plutarch The Historian

As a historian he has been drastically criticized for his romantic turn of mind; indeed, he is usually dismissed with a smile from the historians' domain as a mere storyteller. That is to do him an injustice. He was a first-rate storyteller, but his aim was not to please but to tell the truth, and he had a real power of critical judgment. In his lives of semi-mythical heroes...he is perfectly aware that his sources are "full of suspicion and doubt, being only poets and inventors of fables," and he asks his readers to "receive with indulgence the stories of antiquity." "So very difficult is it," he says, "to find out the truth of anything."

~ Edith Hamilton, Plutarch, Classics Club (1951), xiv.