Plutarch wrote Parallel Lives, paired biographies of Greeks and Romans that weigh character, virtue, and vice. This is the life of Aristides of Athens, later set beside Cato the Elder of Rome: two reputations for austerity, and two cities that used the reputation and resented it.

Aristides was called the Just. Athens ostracized him — ten years’ exile by votes scratched on potsherds — because people were tired of hearing him named the one honest man. He wrote his own name for an illiterate who wanted him gone. When Xerxes, king of Persia, invaded, they brought him home. At Plataea in southern Greece he held the Athenian line. After the war he set the first tribute of the Delian League, an alliance of Greek cities, so fairly the allies did not yet hate the word. He died poor; the state buried him and dowered his daughters.