 Plutarch was a committed but in some ways revisionist Platonist. His attitude to public life was more Roman than Platonic (befitting the role in public affairs that he played in his own city): the political life was for him unproblematically noble, not inferior to the life of philosophy. Similarly, he revised the strict Platonic dictum that philosophers must rule by allowing that philosophers might rule merely in the sense of advising rulers, not of being rulers themselves. (In fact, this move had some Platonic pedigree in the Statesman’s insistence that the science of statecraft is the same whether known and exercised by an advisor or by an actual ruler (259a).) And he considered philosophy to be more of a character-building study than a source of knowledge of exact or politically relevant knowledge. Where statesmen were educated in philosophy, as for example in the Lives of Pericles, Cicero, Brutus, and Cato Minor, he treats this as valuable mainly because of the virtue—in particular, moderation and self-restraint—which it imparts to them (Van Raalte 2005). The study of philosophy serves as a sort of inoculation against greed and immoderate ambition. But it need not impart any particular substantive knowledge to the statesman (so competing philosophies could all be useful in shaping virtue: Anaxagaorean influence on Pericles, an eclectic mixture of Stoicism, Academic skepticism, and Platonism on Cicero; Stoicism on the younger Cato). Indeed, excessively rigid adherence to a philosophy could be deleterious, making a statesman rigid and inflexible. The younger Cato was defeated when he stood for the consulship because, Plutarch says, he experienced the same thing that happens to fruits that appear “out of season” (Phoc. 3.1). Like such fruits, he was admired, but “the weight and grandeur” of his virtue was “out of all proportion to the immediate times” (asummetron tois kathestōsi kairois, Phoc. 3.2–3). 