 While the men of affairs in the Roman Senate and imperial court turned often (though not exclusively) to Stoicism, in the Greek centers of philosophy and among provincial Greek men of affairs Platonism remained an important framework for thinking about both ethics and politics, as did a related if somewhat shadowy form of  Pythagoreanism  which can be seen as a continuation of the genre of Hellenistic kingship treatises (Centrone 2000). The most important contributions made to political thought by the Platonist philosopher of the second-century AD, Plutarch (c.46–c.120 CE), are his paired biographical lives of Greek and Roman statesmen, each with a comparison drawing political morals. Together with the histories of Thucydides, Livy and Sallust, these Lives instructed generations of students in the principles and perils of political ethics, and instituted the distinction between statesman and demagogue as we have come to know it today: with figures like the fifth-century BCE Athenian “Aristides the Just” embodying the ideal statesmen, in contrast to the Platonic view of all past and present statesmen as fatally flawed. Plutarch also made important contributions to political philosophy in the many essays collected in his volumes of Moralia.