In Plutarch's work "The Moralia" (Ancient Greek: Ἠθικά Ethika; loosely translated as "Morals" or "Matters relating to customs and morals") he gives us a description of Spartan customs and diet. However, many historians take this account with a large grain of salt as Plutarch lived a few centuries later than the height of Sparta.

Plutarch (c. AD 45-119), the Greek philosopher, lived at the height of the Roman Empire and is author of one of the largest and collections of writings to have survived from Classical antiquity. His work is traditionally divided into two: the Moralia, which include a vast range of philosophical, scientific, moral and rhetorical works, and the Lives or biographies. Almost fifty such biographies survive, most from his collection of Parallel Lives, in which biographies of Greek and Roman statesmen are arranged in pairs.