He wrote a number of Moralia—moral essays, essays that offered sage advice for good living—but he came to feel that mere precepts were inadequate for communicating to people the best way to live. We need examples of virtue and vice in action in order to see their outlines clearly, and the lives of the Great wrote their examples of virtue and vice in very large letters that all could clearly read. Thus he emphasized that his lives were biographies, not histories, which did not mean that they were inaccurate but rather than he sought primarily to include evidence of character, which might come
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