He loved the way Plutarch assembled his work by stuffing in fistfuls of images, conversations, people, animals and objects of all kinds, rather than by coldly arranging abstractions and arguments. His writing is full of things, Montaigne pointed out. If Plutarch wants to tell us that the trick in living well is to make the best of any situation, he does it by telling the story of a man who threw a stone at his dog, missed, hit his stepmother instead, and exclaimed, ‘Not so bad after all!’ Or, if he wants to show us how we tend to forget the good things in life and obsess only about the bad, he
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