The Life of Theseus offers numerous literary quotations, but only some are meant as rhetorical decoration: many function as source and testimony for Theseus’ adventures. Plutarch is careful in making a distinction between poets’ tales and historians’ witnesses: he is always prudent with the accounts of the poets. Nevertheless, in particular in the first part of the Life, his narration is based on myth, as presented in classical tragedies (especially Euripides’) and even in Callimachus’ Ecale.