Educated in Athens by the Platonic philosopher Ammonius, Plutarch was also influenced by the Peripatetics and Stoics, but he rejected Epicureanism. Traveling throughout Hellas and to Rome as ambassador of his native city, he associated with prominent political and literary figures and proclaimed that Greeks and Romans should be partners in the Roman Empire. In Chaeronea, he maintained a sort of private academy for his friends and pupils, remaining active into old age.

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Plutarch's Moralia and his Parallel Lives, our main biographical source for Greek and Roman military or political leaders, take up twenty-six volumes in the Loeb Classical Library. This makes him the most published Greek author there, excelling even Aristotle's twenty-three volumes and rivaling the Roman Cicero's thirty.

Plutarch's works provide crucial information about ancient sexualities. In the Parallel Lives, he recorded much about the proclivities of the Romans, while three-fourths of his twenty-three Greek heroes had eromenoi (beloved boys) or helped to institutionalize pederasty.

His "Peloppidas," for example, is our best source for Epaminondas, the leader of the Sacred Band of 150 pairs of lovers who so inspired the Greeks. In "Lycurgus," one of our very few sources about Greek lesbianism, Plutarch depicts the Spartan system that produced courageous tyrannicidal couples and also avers that Spartan ladies loved girls.

Plutarch makes Theseus the beloved of the Cretan king Minos and attributes pederastic laws in Athens to Solon. He portrays Themistocles and Aristides, the victors in the Persian wars, as rivals for a beautiful youth and depicts Socrates' favorite Alcibiades as having stolen husbands from women when he was a youth and, as a man, wives from their husbands. According to the Lives, the Hellenistic king Demetrius and Alexander the Great were, like the poets of the Greek Anthology, also promiscuous.

Plutarch's charming dialogue the "Eroticus" is a debate on whether love of women or of youths should be preferred. The author relies heavily on Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium for erotic theory but unlike Plato allows that love of females could be as inspiring as love of boys.

However, like other Greeks, he mostly describes the love of upper-class men for noble youths. One of the speakers in the "Eroticus" proclaims that "it is not gentlemanly or urbane to make love to slave boys: such love is mere copulation, like the love of women."

Plutarch depicts the love of Euripides for Agathon as the archetype of androphile homosexuality, that is, of love between adult males.

In "On the Education of Children," Plutarch expressly condemns the grossly sensual pederasty practiced by Thebans, Elians, and Cretans (including the harpagmos, the ritual kidnapping of the beloved) but praises the more civically oriented and decorous Athenian and Spartan varieties, as had Xenophon and Plato.

In Plutarch's "Gryllus," the chief speaker is a pig that insists that animals conform solely to nature: "to this very day the lusts of animals have encompassed no intercourse of male with male or of female with female. But you have a good deal of this sort of thing among your high and virtuous nobility, to say nothing of the lesser breeds."

This appears to be Plutarch's clever rejoinder to the speaker in Plato's Laws who declares homosexuality to be against nature. Here nature is equated with the behavior of animals; pederasty, with humans, especially the "high and virtuous nobility."

Thus Plutarch attests the millennium-long contribution of paiderasteia to Hellenism but reflects (or deflects) the moralizing criticism of it, whose beginning Michel Foucault aptly traced to the Socratic circle, but whose prevalence during the Imperial period the French scholar vastly overemphasized.

Virtually unknown in the West during the Middle Ages, Plutarch's legacy to Western culture was revived in the Renaissance. Translated into English by Sir Thomas North in the Elizabethan era, his Parallel Lives furnished the material for Shakespeare's Roman plays, while the Moralia were translated by Philemon Holland as The Philosophy (1603). Both translators relied on Jacques Amyot's pathbreaking French translation, which Montaigne also used.

The institution of pederasty (paiderastia) was a conspicuous feature of ancient Greek public and private life, but other forms of male-male sexual relations flourished in the Greco-Roman cosmopolis of the second and third centuries C.E.

Ancient Greece holds a unique place in the heritage of homosexual literature as it was a society that openly celebrated same-sex love in its poetry and prose.

One of the most fascinating men of all times, Alexander the Great was not only a great soldier and conqueror, he was also renowned for his love of Hephaestion.

One of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, Foucault has had an enormous influence on our understanding of the lesbian and gay literary heritage and the cultural forces surrounding it.

Among Greek writers on homosexual themes, Plato is preeminent not only as a major philosopher but also as the greatest master of Greek prose.

As one of the key figures that western civilization has used to define itself, William Shakespeare stands in a complicated, fiercely contested relationship to homosexuality.