Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Moralia is a collection of 78 essays and transcribed speeches by Plutarch of Chaeronea, a 1st-century Greek scholar. The collection covers ethics, religion, history, philosophy, and natural science, and has been read and imitated by thinkers including Michel de Montaigne, Renaissance humanists, and Enlightenment philosophers.
Since the Stephanus edition of 1572, the Moralia has traditionally been arranged into 14 books. The oldest surviving manuscript containing all 78 extant treatises dates to shortly after 1302.
Erasmus of Rotterdam served as a proofreader for a Greek edition published by Aldus Manutius in March 1509 and later translated the Moralia into Latin. The complete Latin translation of eight chapters was published in August 1514 in Basel by Johann Froben, who printed five editions of it between 1514 and 1520.
Plutarch lived centuries after the Sparta he describes, and a full millennium separates him from the earliest events he records. Historians Sarah Pomeroy, Stanley Burstein, Walter Donlan, and Jennifer Tolbert Roberts have noted that his sources were influenced by post-decline nostalgia and that he exaggerated Spartan egalitarianism while obscuring historical change.
On the Malice of Herodotus is an essay in which Plutarch attacks the historian Herodotus for systematic bias and misrepresentation. It has been called the first instance in literature of the slashing review. Most scholars now read it as a rhetorical exercise, though the 19th-century historian George Grote took it as a serious critique.
In a letter to his wife consoling her over the death of their two-year-old daughter Timoxena, Plutarch expresses belief in reincarnation. He writes that the soul after death is like a caged bird released, and that a soul spending only a short time in a body quickly recovers its fire and proceeds to higher things.