Next among the Persica authors in terms of importance and of the extent of his employment by Plutarch is Deinon, one of the most obscure authors from antiquity, and certainly one of the most mysterious writers in the corpus of lost Greek historians. Plutarch's employment of Deinon can be divided into passages in which the ascription is explicit or plausible, and those which are implicit and conjectured. Correspondingly, the present chapter will treat the first type of references, and the next will attempt to substantiate the attribution of sections of Plutarch's text to Deinon. It can be seen that Plutarch uses Deinon mostly in the Artaxerxes (he is mentioned in 1.4, 6.9, 9.4, 10.1, 13.3, 19.2, 6, 22.1), but also refers to his work in the Themistocles (27.1), Alexander (36.4) and De Iside et Osiride (31.363c). This means that Plutarch's employment of Deinon or knowledge of his text was more widespread than his use of Ctesias, and may have even spanned several periods of his writing. As in the study of Ctesias, let us commence with an analysis of Plutarch's passages, and explore what we can learn of Deinon from these sections, proceed to compare them with what can be said of Deinon and his work in general from other sources, and then present some ideas on Plutarch's adaptation of Deinon's work.

PLUTARCH AND DEINON

The references to Deinon in the Artaxerxes, as well as in the other three works of Plutarch mentioned, treat themes related to the Achaemenid monarch. Specifically, Plutarch quotes Deinon for matters of court protocol (especially in the reign of Artaxerxes II) or the behaviour of Artaxerxes III Ochus in Egypt. It would not be far-fetched to claim that Deinon's work appears thus to have had the Great King and matters of court as its focus, and perhaps was chosen by Plutarch for this reason.

In the beginning of the Artaxerxes, Deinon is contrasted with Ctesias on the issue of the monarch's original name (1.4):

Artaxerxes was at first called Arsicas; although Deinon gives the name as Oarses.