 Plutarch’s political sympathies lay with monarchy. He treated the exemplary Greek or Roman statesman as inherently and ideally a kind of monarchical figure, even when functioning within a democratic or republican environment. “Aristocratic and kingly” was his praise for Pericles’ type of true statesmanship (literally, his “politics” or “policy”, politeia), once he has given up his initial recourse to demagogic methods (Per.14.2). Thus for all his admiration for Greek statesmen of the classical age, and his profound later influence on republican sentiments in Europe, Plutarch preferred monarchy as the best constitution and believed that he was following his master Plato in so doing. As John Dillon puts it, he held “that the accomplished statesman, like a first-rate musician, will be able to make the best of any of the three basic constitutions [monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy] that he is given to work on” (Dillon 1997). To quote Plutarch himself on this point from his fragmentary writing “On Monarchy, Democracy, and Oligarchy”: