Plutarch was born in Chaeronea in Boeotia, studied at Athens, and went to Rome, returning to spend the last decades of his life as a priest at Delphi. His most famous work, the Lives, is intended to illustrate the workings of virtue and vice in the careers of great men, and had considerable influence on Shakespeare and other Renaissance writers. His philosophical writings exhibit the pious transcendentalism of Middle Platonism. Opinions of Plutarch’s capacities as a philosopher differ. He departs from orthodox Platonism by acknowledging a positive force of evil in the world (see Manichaeanism, Zoroastrianism), but also anticipates Plotinus in his concern to find a unified and simple supreme principle at the pinnacle of the hierarchy of reality.