101 I must confess that that discourse of Plutarch concerning the silence of the oracles is in general of so odd a texture, and so unlike his other productions, that one is at a loss what judgment to form of it. It is written in dialogue, which is a method of composition that Plutarch commonly little affects. The personages he introduces advance very wild, absurd, and contradictory opinions, more like visionary systems or ravings of Plato than the solid sense of Plutarch. There runs also through the whole an air of superstition and credulity which resembles very little the spirit that appears in other philosophical compositions of that author; for it is remarkable that though Plutarch be an historian as superstitious as Herodotus or Livy, yet there is scarcely in all antiquity a philosopher less superstitious, excepting Cicero and Lucian. I must therefore confess that a passage of Plutarch, cited from this discourse, has much less authority with me than if it had been found in most of his other compositions.

102 He was contemporary with Cæsar and Augustus.